Accepting the cost
10.1 As a PSW, how do I answer the question: ‘where are you staying?’
In early work in this research, and in earlier drafts of this chapter, I focused on exile as a significant theme both in the Bible and in my own story. I entitled my first paper for this research How shall we sing the Lord’s song in a strange land? On being a minister in secular employment (Gage, 2013). I find Psalm 13738 evokes memories of
dislocation for me, and the cry from the heart which formed the title of that paper is one I have wrestled with, particularly in the early years after my ordination. I have come to see, however, that the resonance is not about exile, but about strange lands and finding that God is present there. I found Christopher Rowland’s description of Babylon as both the place of exile, but also symbolic of the challenge of “being confronted by an alien set of values, cultural and political dislocation, and the necessity of negotiating a way of existing in that situation” (Bennett and Rowland, 2016, p. 96), helpful in enabling me to make some sense of why the theme of exile still resonates for me, and why I still feel it needs a place here. That was
strengthened when I read Stringfellow’s (1973, pp. 156-157) claim that Revelation 21.2-6a is the answer to Psalm 137.4.
When my children were small, my then-husband’s job took us to Arizona for almost six months, returning for a short visit home during the Christmas break. I arrived knowing no one but my own immediate family, needing to make many adjustments to life in a very different culture. It was indeed a strange land: something as simple as going shopping proved challenging (admittedly with a baby in a push-chair) until I realised that American cities are constructed on the premise that everyone drives everywhere, and because no one walks, there is no need for pavements (sidewalks) or pedestrian routes. Key to settling in, so that the strange gradually became familiar, were relationships: there was the young mother I met in the line for the immunisation clinic39; there was the principal of the pre-school in which I enrolled my middle two
38 Although I struggle with the violence of the final verses, with the reference to dashing babies against the rock, understanding Babylon as the place of violence and death provides a frame of reference in which it can be understood (cf. section 6.4). 39 If my eldest daughter was to go to school, she needed the precise immunisation schedule required in Arizona. Part of the cultural adjustment I had yet to make was realising that having health insurance meant that I could simply have taken her to see a pediatrician, rather than waiting in line for the free, public clinic.
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children; and there were people from a nearby church who heard that there was a new family in the neighbourhood and called round to visit us.
As I think about that time, however, what is uppermost in my mind is the desert: nothing in my previous experience had prepared me for its impact. We spent most weekends driving vast distances across the Arizona deserts to go to places like the Grand Canyon, the Painted Desert and the Petrified Forest. We went up into Utah to see the ‘badlands’ and into New Mexico, California and Nevada. The first time we went to the Grand Canyon, soon after our arrival, we left Phoenix in hot sunshine, the children in shorts and T-shirts. By the time we reached Flagstaff, less than three hours later but some 1800m higher, it was snowing and we had to stop to buy warm jumpers and trousers. Everything in Arizona was on a completely different scale from home: the colours, the extremes of temperature, the vast emptiness of the desert, the distances between one town and the next. It was also more hostile than home: no sooner had we arrived in our rented home, than the man who sprayed everywhere to ensure that we were not troubled by poisonous spiders and scorpions arrived with his equipment, warning me to keep the mesh screens closed on windows and doors, and not to hang my laundry outside to dry, because I would bring it in full of insects, some of them better avoided.
The church we settled in was not the large First Baptist Church that we tried first, but a small neighbourhood southern Baptist congregation. Week by week, we went to Sunday School classes for an hour, and then into worship for an hour. We heard altar call after altar call, and listened to many personal testimonies (often repeated a week or two later). Theologically, we came from a very different tradition; yet the welcome was sincere, and the hospitality felt limitless.
It was a formative time in my life, a time when I realised how big the world is, and how much there is to experience. It was a time when I realised that familial and societal restrictions on what the mother of small children could/should (not) do were not sacrosanct, and that not only was I perfectly capable of making my way in a new and very different environment, but I could make a success of it. It was a time when I indulged my desire to see more and to experience more, to test out all kinds of limits, taking my family with me, willing or otherwise. I fell in love with the desert extremes, with the colours, the landscapes, the amazing variety of plants squeezing life out of a hostile environment.
I also led us into potential disaster. We took our family-sized (but small by American standards) car, with ordinary tyres, up into a mountainous area where the roads were closed other than to four-wheel drive vehicles. The landscape was empty and
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phenomenally beautiful: drifting virgin snow blowing across yellowy-green grass tussocks as far as the eye could see, and blue, blue skies. And then the car skidded, leaving the road, and landing up in the bushes, close to a sheer drop. My husband tried to reverse it back onto the road, without success. I was terrified that he would end up sliding over the edge. We were saved when a passing truck stopped, and the driver brought out his hauling ropes and pulled the car back to safety.
I am still attracted to empty places, and I still prefer to locate myself at the edges of the communities of which I am a part. A few years ago, leading worship for a small rural congregation, I preached a sermon based on the song A Horse With No Name40,
in which the line “I’ve been through the desert on a horse with no name” occurs several times. That sermon no longer exists on my computer, and I do not remember what my point was, other than that “In the desert you can remember your name”. For me, being “outside the camp” (cf. Hebrews 13.13-14) is the place where I feel free, where I feel my soul expanding, where, because I know my name, I meet the God who calls me by that name41, the place where God abides with me, and I can know
God’s presence without all the distraction with which I am generally surrounded.