Finding Home

Some fragmented thoughts on some questions you sent me, placemaking, the weirdness of church, beans in their own broth, and creating cosmos

Mar 10, 2022

Thursday, March 10
Grand Rapids, Michigan

Greetings, gentle reader.

We returned to Grand Rapids a couple of weeks ago, after two days of driving from Massachusetts. Our house renovation is not done. You know how it goes: supply-chain issues, pandemic, blah blah blah. But we have a working toilet and a shower, and beyond that, it seems churlish to complain, especially given all that’s going on in this world.

A few weeks ago, I asked if you had any questions. The first one I received seems apt, since we have just returned to Michigan.

“I’m curious about your placemaking,” writes Nurya Parish, who has lived in West Michigan for two decades. “It hasn't always been the easiest place to live as a committed Christian who thinks beyond standard, current practices of faithfulness. How have you found it, what do you appreciate about it, what do you say no to, what do you rejoice in?”

Have you ever instantly felt at home somewhere? It’s a genuine question, because I haven’t. I don’t know what that’s like. Wherever I’ve ever lived, creating home has taken effort and intentionality. The upside: I don’t take the sense of home for granted, nor do I assume it will just magically appear. And I wonder whether those of us who don’t easily fit in anywhere, who have struggled to find belonging, might have developed some skills that can help us to make home wherever we go.

People have frequently asked, often with some skepticism or surprise, why we stayed in Grand Rapids even after my stint at Central Reformed Church finished. The short answer: We like it. We like our little house, and especially the beautiful light that streaks in the living-room windows in the morning and the gorgeous glow that comes through the sliding-glass door in the evening. We like the spectacular summer evenings, when the day’s heat has relented and we can sit on the porch with a glass of good Michigan wine. We like being a few blocks from a big community garden. We like being walking distance from the farmers’ market. We like the small airport; we can be home 35 minutes after the plane’s wheels touch the tarmac, and Tristan has observed that, in New York, you’re lucky if you’ve even reached the gate by that point. We like Grand Rapids’s walkability and its parks and the affordability.

We also like the life that we’ve created in Grand Rapids. If I understand the question correctly, that’s where “placemaking” comes in. The word speaks to agency. It acknowledges that we have a hand in shaping our context. For instance, we’re redoing some things in our house to craft the space we want it to be, because architecture matters. We’re investing in our kitchen, since that’s such an important locus of hospitality and happiness for us. We’re looking at wallpapers from England, Scotland, and Sweden, which evoke happy memories of past adventures.

One wallpaper we’re considering. It’s called “Paradiset,” and you don’t have to know Swedish to decipher what that means. It’s by the designer Josef Frank, who was known for his exuberant patterns, many inspired by nature.

Our particular interpretation of placemaking shows up in other choices too: We choose to go pick blueberries and strawberries, to make jam, to drive out to Lake Michigan for a hike, to eat asparagus from the farmers’ market until we’re sick of it, to delight in the coffee at Madcap (my favorite) and Stovetop (Tristan’s), to indulge Fozzie’s near-constant desire to go say hi to his friend Molly down the block, to take walks even in inclement weather, to plant bok choy in the little backyard plot, to invite our friends to share our table. We choose not to frequent the bakery that underbakes their pastries or to shop at the establishment that came out fiercely against mask mandates or to allow ugly mugs to infiltrate our kitchen cabinets. We choose to stay in a place with a relatively low cost of living, because it frees up some money for things like travel. All these things contribute to our version of placemaking—to the creation of our home.

I should also note two things that have worked to our advantage: 1. We’re really homebodies, so the social constraints of the pandemic have not been all that severe for us. 2. We didn’t arrive in Grand Rapids with much expectation. Sure, I’d heard a lot about West Michigan’s stereotypical conservatism. But what we’ve encountered has been much more diverse; we didn’t expect, for instance, that we’d see so many rainbow flags flying outside homes in our neighborhood. We have allowed ourselves to be surprised by reality. And while we miss the quality and the range of the restaurants in New York, we’ve delighted in the abundance of our farmers’ market and we eat pretty well at home.

The particular connection between placemaking and faithfulness is intriguing. I’ll just say this: I don’t know that there’s any place this side of heaven where it’s easy to live as a committed Christian. I haven’t found that to be any easier or harder in Grand Rapids than it is in London or New York City or Princeton, the three other places I’ve spent significant time during my adult life. In a world that is hard, love is hard. Perhaps it shouldn’t be easy to live as a committed Christian anywhere. I worry that if I ever find it too easy, it might signal my complacency. Wherever we are, the call to love God and love our neighbors as ourselves remains so challenging to answer—and I still struggle to cultivate a sense of home that isn’t just about my own comfort but also about the welfare of my neighbors.

I recently heard a talk given by the eminent Hong Kong-born scholar Kwok Pui-lan, who teaches at Emory. She reflected on moving to Atlanta not long ago—a city where she had no roots and few friends. Where some of us might see belonging as something pre-assembled and received or home as essentially an off-the-shelf product that you purchase, I was struck by the aplomb with which she said (I’m paraphrasing, because I’m working from memory here): “I just create my own belonging wherever I go.” I aspire to that rootedness in something greater than geography or circumstance. What I heard in her statement wasn’t blitheness or naïveté; it was a steadiness borne of her conviction that she is loved, and that love is her home.

“Do you drive when you travel with Fozzie or do you fly and take him on the plane?” Kari Sabo asks. “And is he a good traveler dog?”

How exactly does one define “good”? I answer this question carefully, because I’ve learned that there are a lot of Fozzie stans out there. When we first started thinking about getting a dog, I told Tristan I wanted one who would fit under the seat in front of me. Fozzie does! He weighs about 18 pounds. But we’ve not yet taken him on an airplane. Given the pandemic, most of our travel since Fozzie came to live with us in April 2020 has been road-tripping. He’s not the most easygoing dog; sometimes, animals mirror their humans, don’t they? But slowly, both he and we have learned. He’s always better when he has his bed on the backseat, he has gotten used to napping on the long drives, and we keep a ready supply of his favorite treats on hand.

“Are we there yet?” This is Fozz, a few hundred miles into our drive, somewhere in upstate New York.

“How do you cope with the inherent... weirdness of attending church?” asks Lisa Strader. She says she grew up in the church, took some time away, and then after returning, has had repeated realizations: “I keep getting struck by how strange it is, how oddly organized, how it's not very conducive to real connection or deep conversation. Have you felt this as well? How do you push past it and find real community?”

Church is weird. Perhaps its strangeness is a needed counterpoint to the comfort we so constantly seek in the rest of our lives, and perhaps it’s not something to be coped with so much as examined with curiosity. I love the odd jumble of tradition and innovation as well as the particularity of each congregation, and when I put my journalist’s hat on, I find that I can ask, without unnecessary judgment, “Why is it exactly that they do what they do?” It’s helpful too when I remember that the space, whether online or off, inevitably fills not just with diverse humans but also the clutter of all the emotional, spiritual, and psychological baggage that they bring with them.

I do think it would be a gift to many of us to reflect, at least occasionally, on the “why” of what we do what we do in church. (“Because that’s the way we’ve always done it” is definitely the wrong answer.) I’m always grateful for the reminder that gathering is essential to church—that the communal experience of coming before God distinguishes the experience from, say, a nice walk in the woods. I’m always glad when pastors and liturgists explain elements of worship too; in congregations that use the Apostles Creed, for instance, I think it’s helpful for both newcomers and old-timers alike to hear why we recite what we recite, in concert across time and place with those who have come before. I’m also eternally grateful to those who design worship that fosters real connection as well as deep conversation with God. The work of crafting real community flows out of that divine connection and conversation—and that work has to be done by each of us. It’s not a consumer product we purchase with our offerings.

Here’s something I wondered as I thought through this question: Do we sometimes put too much pressure on an hourlong worship service to meet all the spiritual and emotional needs that get neglected during the rest of our week? Maybe the rich conversation with another parishioner has to happen another time. Maybe there’s some seed of gratitude planted during worship that blossoms into connection with another human afterward, because it compels you to text someone an encouraging word or to ask someone a genuine question.

One reader emailed to ask what, if anything, I’ve done to work on a theology of the kitchen, which I mentioned months ago. I suspect this will be something I explore for quite some time to come. I promise a fuller update soon. More and more, though, I’m convinced that, as beautiful as the articulations of theologies of farm and table have been, we’re missing something by underemphasizing what comes in between farm and table. The kitchen is such a vital space of preparation and transformation, and we can learn something by being more attentive to these processes.

What I’m Cooking: Right now, I don’t have a working kitchen so I’m not cooking anything. But before we left Cape Cod, our friends Dan and Ami came up from Brooklyn to stay for a few days. I’d saved the beans I grew last season for a special occasion, and this was it. I found Carla Music’s recipe for beans served in their own broth, from Bon Appetit. Fair warning: It’s my kind of recipe, which is to say it’s not really much of a recipe, because there aren’t measurements or even timings. It is not difficult, but it is also not quick and it will rely on you to trust your senses. Her recipe is for butter beans; I cooked the mix of dried beans that I had. Where she calls for fat, I used rendered bacon grease and good olive oil. Late in the process, I added kale, and then, just before serving, some roasted potatoes as well as some of the chopped-up bacon left over from rendering the fat. And because this was our main dish for the evening, I pan-roasted some halibut and placed it on top.

What I’m Reading: Last month, the writer Lyz Lenz published a thoughtful essay on what happens when young people “read books they aren’t supposed to read.” Sometimes, she says, adults try to protect children from things. In the name of love, they shelter kids, and they even ban books. This bit really got me: “Love is freedom; it’s not entrapment. That’s also something it took me too long to learn. Something I read in a book, just two years ago, and cried when I read it. How I wish I had known all of this before.”

I love Min Jin Lee’s writing. Pachinko captured my heart. I’d put it in my Top 10 of all time, and I still think about it and its characters regularly. Mike Luo of the New Yorker interviewed her a few weeks ago, and there were so many thoughtful provocations in this conversation that moved me and compelled me. She talks about belonging and identity. She discusses her faith. She shares about how she does what she does as a writer: “Every day is chaos, right? How do I create cosmos? How do I get you to change your mind? That’s going to require you to feel something.”

If you missed it last week, one of my Lenten disciplines is to send out notes of encouragement. If someone in your life—not you, but someone you know and care for—could use a few words of reassurance from a random stranger (me), either reply to this email if you got this week’s newsletter via email or write me at makebelievefarmer@gmail.com with their name, postal address, and a line or two (without breaking confidences, please) about what’s going on with them. I’ll get a postcard out in the coming weeks.

As always, I’m glad to hear if my words have stirred anything up in you.

Notes of a Make-Believe Farmer

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