It is difficult to conceive of a single, isolated human in a state of shalom. An important aspect of shalom—which I understand to mean perfection, wholeness, health, and fullness—is belonging.  Being rooted in and connected to a community in all its particularity of people, place, and things is a necessary ingredient for a sustained sense of well-being.

A word that comes to mind to describe the experience of shalom is “embedded.”  We are embedded, first of all, in God and embraced by the Divine; we are also sustained and nurtured within our relationships to family, friends, and community. There is more, though; often overlooked is the importance of place in our sense of well-being.  The hills, woodlands, and ecosystems of our home territories are not merely a backdrop for our human activities but are a necessary part of our lives.  Not to belong to a place is to be homeless in the same sense that a refugee who has been forced to leave his or her ancestral land is homeless.  In the past century the world has witnessed massive movements of people who have been displaced from their familiar places because of war, economic instability, natural disasters, and ethnic hatred.  People today are also on the move because the global corporate culture requires it.  Increasingly, {quotes align=right}a sense of belonging to a particular place is disappearing from the human experience.{/quotes}  I knew a man who was born, raised, lived, and died in the same house in the same small town.  What used to be a way of life, at least in rural communities, is now a quaint remnant of an earlier time, and people like him are rare indeed.  Modernity and “progress” have taken their toll on the human spirit by divorcing us from the places we love and alienating us from the natural world.

When we know our place in the world, we say, “I belong.”  We understand that our life depends on and is nourished by a series of ever expanding habitats.  Starting with the womb, the prototype of embededness, our consciousness grows to see that our place includes a backyard, a neighborhood, a bioregion (such as the Hudson Valley or the Green Mountains), an Earth, a cosmos.  Sadly, many urban people have lost touch with what lies beyond their immediate human-centered surroundings, losing any sense (or at least any deep sense) of connection with Nature and their home in the universe.  Their awareness of being in place is limited to the city, town, suburb, or nation—the artificial political entities of “civilization.”  Their sense of place often doesn’t include the Earth or even the bioregion in which they live. They are like gnomes who wander the Earth with their faces turned to the ground, never thinking to look up to the sky.  A favorite T-shirt of mine has a picture of the Milky Way with an arrow pointing to a tiny dot near its outer edge; the caption reads: “You are here.”

Recognizing that home is for us a wider and richer concept than we urbanized Western humans currently imagine is a prerequisite for our growing into a more spiritually aware and compassionate version of ourselves.  Our well-being depends upon our recovering a full sense of our participation in the Earth’s story, and our recognition that it is our story, too.  We need to claim Earth as my place, a home whose precincts are precious and sacred.   This is not to seek a new identity, but to become what we already are, Earth creatures whom God has made, and to celebrate the faith traditions we already have, even though they might be half forgotten.

In her book Resurgence of the Real Charlene Spretnak writes:

Our great spiritual traditions, speaking in thousands of languages, have set their sacred stories of ultimate mystery within the grand epic of orbiting planets, changing seasons, eclipses, moon tides, and meteor showers.  In the midst of all this action, in the unspeakable beauty of the Garden Planet, the story of every person unfolds, nestled within the embedding stories of family, clan, community, bioregion, nation, continent, planet and cosmos.

As the ecotheologian Thomas Berry says, “We will neither love nor save what we do not experience as sacred.”

Recognizing the sacred dimension of the places in our lives is a recovery task that communities of faith could take more seriously than they currently do.  {quotes}If the purpose of religion is to bring us into greater intimacy with the source of our lives and of all life, then reconnecting with creation and recognizing our place in the Earth community are necessary conditions of our well being.{/quotes}  As the naturalist Barry Lopez observed, a bear taken out of its habitat and put in a zoo is still a form of mammalian life, but it is not a bear. I would add that modern humanity, distorted by its role as homo economicus, is no longer fully human. This is our burden and our grief.

In Mary Oliver’s poem “Wild Geese” the birds bring a message of hope:

Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting—
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.

Shalom.