Spaciousness

Salvation is a Way, not a destination.

~ me

Today I began reading one of my stumbled-upon library books: Maps and Memory in Early Modern England by Rhonda Lemke Sanford. (Most of the quotes to follow come from p11-12, which is as far as I've got.)

As Lemke Sanford explains, theories of place distinguish it from space: place is essentially location, and its nature "excludes the possibility of two things being in the same location". The metaphor of unidimensional place is common in Christianity: think of the metaphors we hear, the path of salvation, the road to heaven (or hell), the bridge between us and God, etc. To be saved, go from this place to that place, and follow the same road as everyone else in exactly the same manner. Never allow for the possibility of two things being simultaneously true.

Space, on the other hand, is "a practiced place", one that is "produced in the mind and by the interaction of social forces". It is inevitably subjective as it depends on one's experience. Even if we do follow the same road, we travel it differently. Lemke Sanford quotes de Certeau who draws helpful parallels with our experience with words.

In relation to place, space is like the word when it is spoken, that is, when it is caught in the ambiguity of an actualization, transformed into a term dependent upon many different conventions, situated as the act of a present (or of a time), and modified by the transformations caused by successive contexts...it has [no] stability.

Language is always a unique event (which, by the way, is one reason why it makes very little sense to ever say 'the Bible says...') and how much more so for faith and spirituality. A good metaphor for faith is that it is more like poetry than mathematics and in a similar way this metaphor of space/place is equally effective. It seems to me that we think of faith as place when we should rightly think of it as space. Space is interconnected, lived; just as space "gives meaning to place" so faith gives multidimensional meaning to creeds and beliefs, grounds it, lets it breathe and also, of course, makes it both disturbingly fluid and impossibly complicated. Nevertheless our maps of the place of our faith are distinctive and equally true.

If we need to believe that all other people should travel the same road as us in exactly the same way, and that their maps should look exactly like as ours in every detail, we are letting our horizontal view dominate our perspective. We are also kidding ourselves. More than that, we dishonour the God-given uniqueness that each of us carries, for the sake of easing our own insecurities. We forget the selectiveness of maps in general, and our own map in particular.

Even folks who are routinely suspicious of written text equate maps with fact...[whereas] the process of mapmaking requires cartographers to limit content in order to create a readable map and so allows them to manipulate their audience with the information they choose to include.

Mark Monmonier, quoted in Lemke Sanford

How much poorer life is like this. How many times have we been walking with someone, to have them point out something we hadn't seen, or to show us a trail we hadn't been down before? Walking in a community of faith should serve exactly this purpose: to enjoy a wider perspective, not to yank each other back into following our own footsteps, following our own gaze, studying our assigned map so intently we miss the world around us. Walking together or alone, we do not need to live in fear of our edge-dwelling dragons making us doubt in the truth and substance of our own path, the trustworthiness of our Guide to keep us and bless us, wherever we wander.
 

We poore Country-men doe not thinke it good to have our Lands plotted out, and me thinks indeede it is to very small purpose: for is not the field it selfe a goodly Map for the Lord to looke upon, better then a painted paper?

John Norden The Surveiors Dialogue 1618, quoted in Lemke Sanford

I'm just skirting the boundaries of this field of thinking, but I know there's more to discover in this terrain.

Not all those who wander are lost.

J.R.R. Tolkien

 Psalter World Map, c.1265