“As humans, we roam the entire world. We even venture into space. The whole planet is ours, but the whole planet is not our home. Instead, home is the ground we measure with our own two feet. And home is the place that measures us. Home is that place that names us and the place we, in turn, name. It feeds us, body and soul, and if we are living well, we feed it too. Home is the place we cultivate with our love.”
Christie Purifoy
It was early May, and I was sitting in my workshop surrounded by unpacked boxes of things that I had cleaned out of my office at the church a few weeks before. The face of my spiritual director was illuminated on the screen before me as we waded through an ongoing discussion on vocation and what it meant for me to pursue God’s will through my work. On one hand I had confidence that the decision to step away from the comfort and security of paid vocational ministry was a faithful response. But on the other hand, I still struggled with a lingering fear that the only legitimate way to align the use of my gifts, energy, and master’s degree in Christian formation, with the work of God, was to do so within the walls of the institutional church.
That fear had been stoked by a comment an older congregant had made as I stepped down from the pulpit after delivering my final sermon. “That was great.” He said, nodding to himself, as he looked down at his feet. Then he raised his head and looked me square in the eyes and continued, “it’s a shame that you will no longer be using your gifts from the pulpit.” It wasn’t the first time that I had heard this. I had heard it in conversations throughout my discernment process, in comments made after announcing my departure, and I had heard it in an endless reel that had played in my head for years.
“What if he’s right?” I asked after retelling the story, “I know you’re not going to answer that. But seriously. What am I doing? And what if I am getting this all wrong?”
My spiritual director did not immediately respond. Which is a good litmus test for those who serve the Body of Christ in this particular way. A good director never answers your questions for you, if anything they just ask another question. So, we sat for a moment in shared silence, with my questions still lingering in the space between us, as I sifted through my interior a little bit more.
Then I looked up, scanning the workshop around me, until my gaze landed on a notepad where I had been sketching out plans for the work that lay ahead. Plans for books that I was writing. Plans for the farm that I was building. Plans for events that I intended to host in this place. Plans that centered on the theme of God’s beauty and the hope that I might create conduits for others to experience it themselves.
“But what is a sermon, really?” I continued, after a while. “What is its purpose? And what is a pulpit or even a sanctuary for that matter? Because what I keep landing on in prayer is this idea that if I cultivate something beautiful here, it will be the most honest and compelling sermon that I could ever give.” Still no response. But a nod and a head tilt, which seemed affirming, so I continued, “But can cultivating something, simply because it’s beautiful, really be considered a ministry? Is there a vocation of beauty making? Just asking that sounds kind of ridiculous.”
“Why don’t you think there could be?” - Text book direction response.
“I don’t know. It just seems kind of frivolous. What with all of the homelessness, poverty, violence, illness, war, death. Beauty just seems like a luxury that we can’t afford right now... And yet, God is so beautiful. And God makes such beautiful things.”
After saying that I paused for a moment. It was the kind of pause that teems with energy that is yet to be fully acknowledged and received. It’s there, and you can feel the invitation of it, but it’s not just dropped in your lap. Instead, it’s the sort of energy that presents itself like a choice to be pursued. As I considered the invitation to follow it my eyes landed on a book that was sticking out of the top of one of my unpacked boxes Roots and Sky, by Christie Purifoy.
People had been telling me to read Christie Purifoy for years. I had heard about her from friends, acquaintances, and even an acquisitions editor who had pointed out our shared appreciation for place. But I had never gotten around to reading either of her memoirs. Because memoir seemed like a luxury in and of itself. A treat that I would indulge myself in when the Advent devotional was complete, when the degree was finished, when the sermon was written, when the spring beds were prepared, when the seeds were started, and the mess was finally cleared out of my kitchen sink. Maybe then, I would have time to read, and maybe even write, a good story again. Until then it seemed as if my time was best spent in commentaries, academic texts, and researching new material for studies and small groups.
When I considered that book and the reasons that had kept me from reading it, along with those questions that still churned inside of me about the legitimacy of one kind of ministry over another, I realized that the invitation The Spirit was extending was to explore the luxurious side of God. To lean into it in such a way that might help me to learn more about the resistance I had towards it. And the most obvious way that I could think of to do that was by spending the weekend indulging in a book simply because it was beautiful. So, that’s exactly what I decided to do.
I read Roots and Sky in two days and then I read Placemaker in two more. And it was as if all of those people who had pointed me towards Christie’s work had been conspiring with God to introduce me to someone whose words and witness would provide courage and direction as I found my own way on this road called faithfulness. We were both lovers of place who had both been displaced. While I was 1600 miles from my home in Boston, Christie had moved several times after leaving her home in Texas, and had now settled at Maplehurst, an old farmhouse in Pennsylvania. We both struggled with years of infertility. We are both introverts who feel simultaneously called, and yet resistant to hospitality. While I had left the comfort and validation of the institutional church, Christie had left the same behind in academia. And we both also love to write stories. But what struck me as most interesting was how Christie was responding to a call to cultivate a beautiful place, despite having to wrestle her way through the tension between the practical and the beautiful herself.
Of this she came to conclude,
“The rushing world has convinced us that beauty is something extra,
not the thing itself.”
Christie Purifoy, Placemaker
Through her own stories, her own work bearing witness to beauty, and her own efforts to make room for others to experience that beauty themselves, Christie helped me to see God, rather than laziness, in what I had once deemed frivolous. Which then helped me to acknowledge the authenticity of my actual call. She became an ally against the mechanized approach to living that we are all subjected to in this world. The influence that, if left unchallenged, will turn us all into machines, a threat that seems greater now than ever. What beauty, story, and rest, all remind us of is that we are not machines. We are co-creators who have been made in the image of a God who sees us as so much more than contributors to endless cycles of production and consumption. We are co-missioned by a God who delights in making beautiful things, and who reveals Himself through the beauty of what He has made. Like bumble bees, peach trees, and the birds. God who beckons us to pause and engage in Sabbath, beauty making, growing gardens, and submerging ourselves in good and honest stories, because in these things we discover truth about God and ourselves.
Beauty is not extra. Beauty is an antidote to the cycles that will rob us of life, drain us of power, and produce a hyphenated witness of the glory and goodness of God to the watching world. And that revelation of God’s glory, that incarnation of God’s goodness and beauty, is really the essence of ministry.
Beauty doesn’t deny the troubles of the world. Beauty doesn’t exist somewhere apart from the brokenness. Beauty doesn’t disregard the plight of even the smallest and most unsubstantial seeming things. Beauty provides a framework for the overarching story in which God is redeeming His Garden, restoring all of creation, and making things new again.
And as we discussed in my last essay, part of our formation involves paying attention to the right things, and filling our minds with images and insights that aim us towards the telos, or eschatological dot on the map where God’s will is once again being done on earth as it is in heaven. One way that we do that is by steeping ourselves in the story of Scripture. Another part is by steeping ourselves in God’s beauty. Which is why I am now suggesting, as many once did for me, that you check out the work of Christie Purifoy.
Her latest book, Seedtime and Harvest came into the world this week. It’s the third in a series of artfully curated collections of photography and essays that make you feel as if you are sitting alongside her, asking questions, pursuing invitations, and unearthing answers in the company of a wise and tenderhearted friend. Her writing is elegant, poetic, and honest. Her voice rings with authenticity and care for her reader. So, find some time to read along. Call it a luxury if it feels like that at first. But I think you will find in time and in reading, and perhaps even through tending a garden of some sort of your own, that it’s not extra, it’s the thing itself.
She writes in her introduction,
“A longing for Eden – for paradise – is buried deep in every human heart. Some are more aware of paradise lost than others. For these, the weedy and overgrown vegetable beds in a corner of the backyard are not the sign of failure they first appear to be. Rather, they suggest that someone has listened to her heart. Someone has sought a good and right connection with the natural world.”
There is so much packed into this one little phrase. I hope you soak in all of it as I did this past weekend. You will be grateful that you did.