Keeping Place: Reflections on the Meaning of Home QUOTES

1 " Bethel reveals that God is present in every liminal place, lending his anchoring weight to our weightless lives. Our in-between places--between jobs, between cities, between houses--can easily feel like a bookmark, as if their only job was separating past from future. But these places are indeed part of the story, even when we have failed to give them a name... A nameless place can be the site of tentatively taking our first step toward trust; it's at Bethel that we can begin believing in a God, who journeys with us. "

― Jen Pollock Michel , Keeping Place: Reflections on the Meaning of Home

2 " The biblical narrative begins and ends at home. From the Garden of Eden to the New Jerusalem we are hardwired for place and for permanence, for rest and refuge, for presence and protection. We long for home because welcome was our first gift of grace and it will be our last. The settings of our first home and our last home will testify to the nature of the embodied story God is writing in human history. Because God's story begins in a garden and ends in a city, place isn't incidental to Christian hope, just as our bodies aren't incidental to salvation. God will resurrect our bodies, and he will -- finally -- bring us home. "

― Jen Pollock Michel , Keeping Place: Reflections on the Meaning of Home

3 " Stability, as commitment to place, and enclosure, as commitment to people, aim to prove that demons are not easily left behind. Home, on this earth, is no perfect place, and one of our greatest acts of faithful courage might be abiding the weariness of imperfect company, both that of ourselves and others. "

― Jen Pollock Michel , Keeping Place: Reflections on the Meaning of Home

4 " They recognize the temptation that we individually and churches corporately face to live “above” our places, remaining essentially disconnected from the desires and disappointments of our closest neighbors. They write, “We think there is a deep connection between Adam and Eve’s calling to care for a specific place, and God’s instruction not to eat from the tree of knowledge. After all, grasping Godlike knowledge at the expense of relationship is a way of attempting to transcend your boundaries. It is a way of avoiding both your limitations and your responsibilities.”15 "

― Jen Pollock Michel , Keeping Place: Reflections on the Meaning of Home

5 " They recognize the temptation that we individually and churches corporately face to live "above" our places, remaining essentially disconnected from the desires and disappointments of our closest neighbors. They write, "We think there is a deep connection between Adam and Eve's calling to care for a specific place, and God's instruction not to eat from the tree of knowledge. After all, grasping Godlike knowledge at the expense of relationship is a way of attempting to transcend your boundaries. It is a way of avoiding both your limitations and your responsibilities[...]" We cannot hurry the church's work of faithful presence, which is rooted in a particular place and committed to blessing a particular group of people. If Jesus has loved the world, the church must love its city. "

― Jen Pollock Michel , Keeping Place: Reflections on the Meaning of Home

6 " Stability is good advice, but sometimes, like Jacob, we end up with a life that, in the rearview mirror, looks much more erratic than we might [have] originally intended. The greatest consolation for the geographically displaced is.. Jesus... He left home and its happiness with abandon, even delight. "

― Jen Pollock Michel , Keeping Place: Reflections on the Meaning of Home

7 " O, God, Bless this food we are about to receive. Give bread to those who are hungry And make we who have bread To hunger for justice. 12 "

― Jen Pollock Michel , Keeping Place: Reflections on the Meaning of Home

8 " The Lord is always about the housekeeping: in our families, in our churches, in our cities, and in the world. This doesn’t relieve us of our responsibilities to humbly share in his burdens of mercy and justice, but it does permit us to rest, practicing sabbath as protection from the clamor of our own desires and our megalomania. We do not have the whole world in our hands. "

― Jen Pollock Michel , Keeping Place: Reflections on the Meaning of Home

9 " For centuries the church, while affirming Genesis 2 and the goodness of marriage, conceded the distractions of domestic life. One medieval solution proposed to divide the “housekeeping” among the people of God. Married people would tend to “earth” while monks and nuns, who renounced marriage, would do the work of heaven, praying “for the world, in the world’s stead.”7 During the Reformation, theologians like John Calvin and Martin Luther abolished what had become a sacrosanct division between celibates and married. By developing the concept of vocation, they taught that domestic obligation could be rendered as service to God, just as prayer and fasting were forms of worship: “Everyone [was] now expected to live all their lives coram Deo; before the face of God.”8 At the most fundamental level, vocation became a Christological category—a way of baptizing the housekeeping as sacred duty performed to God in the service of one’s neighbor. "

― Jen Pollock Michel , Keeping Place: Reflections on the Meaning of Home

10 " no one leaves home unless home is the mouth of a shark you only run for the border when you see the whole city running as well.9 "

― Jen Pollock Michel , Keeping Place: Reflections on the Meaning of Home

11 " The biblical narrative begins and ends at home. From the Garden of Eden to the New Jerusalem we are hardwired for place and for permanence, for rest and refuge, for presence and protection. We long for home because welcome was our first gift of grace and it will be our last. The settings of our first home and our last home testify to the nature of the embodied story God is writing in human history. Because God’s story begins in a garden and ends in a city, place isn’t incidental to Christian hope, just as bodies aren’t incidental to salvation. God will resurrect our bodies, and he will—finally—bring us home. As Craig Bartholomew, author of Where Mortals Dwell, concludes, “One of the glories of being human and creaturely is to be implaced.”10 The “fortune” of home, as Homer puts it, is the witness of Genesis and of Revelation. God will never leave any of his children to homelessness. "

― Jen Pollock Michel , Keeping Place: Reflections on the Meaning of Home

12 " Their stability was an obedient commitment to whatever was daily and whomever was closest; in devotion to God, they kept up the practice of embodied, localized love. "

― Jen Pollock Michel , Keeping Place: Reflections on the Meaning of Home

13 " The promises in baptism indicate a very different theology of the family, which recognizes that ‘families work well when we do not expect them to give us all we need.’”14 But whether we baptize our infants or not, the principle is the same: our active participation in the church—and our willingness to see it as home—relieves some of the onerous burdens of childrearing, often made heaviest by our sense of limitation. We can’t parent alone. And we aren’t meant to. We have friends—better, brothers and sisters, aunts and uncles—to help carry some of the worry and weight of the family housekeeping. And as I’ve learned from recent research, the most important predictor of whether children from Christian families keep their faith into adulthood is the number of multigenerational connections they enjoy at church. Teenagers may not need a youth group populated by hundreds of peers, but they do need other Christian adults in their church to take an interest in them and communicate that they belong. "

― Jen Pollock Michel , Keeping Place: Reflections on the Meaning of Home

14 " God's work is not nearly as glamorous as our self-glorifying ambitions. In fact, it is as unassuming and quietly aspiring as the commitment to forgive and to help. "

― Jen Pollock Michel , Keeping Place: Reflections on the Meaning of Home

15 " In truth, the social rule that mothers should stay at home with their children had seldom been applied to poor women[...] And from the time there were factories in American cities, there were women, many of them mothers, working in the assembly lines." Without economic means, a woman has never enjoyed the luxury of deciding whether or not (or how little or much) she will work. To be 'at home,' as a woman, is an exercise of material privilege. And this begs us to let the Bible -- and not our privilege -- speak. "

― Jen Pollock Michel , Keeping Place: Reflections on the Meaning of Home

16 " Leadership over God's people, which functions as God's household, does not require business savvy but moral probity and relationship skill. An elder, or overseer, must be hospitable and gentle, traits most would traditionally consider as feminine qualities. He must not cede parenting responsibility to his wife but rather must be directly involved in the rearing of his children, "keeping his children submissive" (v. 4). Interesting, it is his domestic abilities, in addition to his moral qualities, which are his qualifying grounds for ministry. "

― Jen Pollock Michel , Keeping Place: Reflections on the Meaning of Home

17 " They depend on daily efforts and ordinary gestures, neither is once and done. Each requires a kind of liturgy, or routine, as an anchoring weight against the hosts of disordered desires that greet us in the morning before we've put a foot to the floor: selfish ambition, acedia, megalomania, greed. The liturgies of housework and practices like daily prayer ground us in a proper estimation of ourselves -- we are creatures, not the Creator. Our quotidian routines return us to our bodies of dusk, forging humility on the anvil of repetitive motion. We can't abandon the housekeeping, either the laundry or the liturgy[...] "

― Jen Pollock Michel , Keeping Place: Reflections on the Meaning of Home

18 " Instead, it is, as writes Marilynne Robinson in her essay "When I was a Child," "a regime of small kindnesses, which taken together, make the world salubrious, savory, and warm. I think of [these] acts of comfort... as precisely sacramental." Housekeeping points toward the thin places of daily life; where work, however monotonous and menial, becomes worship, witnessing to God's kingdom coming and his will being done, on earth as it is in heaven. In this sense, the effort to pour cereal and rinse clean one's bowl (even the bowl of one's neighbor) can be a spiritual practice, preparing us for greater exertion, more heroic love. "

― Jen Pollock Michel , Keeping Place: Reflections on the Meaning of Home

19 " To feast on the one body and blood given for the sustenance of the world and then forget the world's hungry is anathema to the gospel. "

― Jen Pollock Michel , Keeping Place: Reflections on the Meaning of Home

20 " Every day struck with tsunami force, and only by running full speed did I think I could outwit the daily violence[...] But to run is eventually to run out of breath. Soon I realized that life was not ever going to slow for me -- that I would have to slow for it. Slowing, in fact, would be my only hope of living life, not simply surviving it. And so, in one of the most improbably seasons of my life, I started practicing sabbath, nudged toward the discipline of rest by Gordon Macdonald's book Ordering Your Private World. "If my private world is in order," writes MacDonald, "it will be because I have chosen to press Sabbath peace into the rush and routine of my daily life in order to find the rest God prescribed for himself and all of humanity." As the mother of three young children, I gave up, for one day of the week, the rush to get ahead. The alternative felt like death. "

― Jen Pollock Michel , Keeping Place: Reflections on the Meaning of Home