Sacred Places

Philosophy is concerned with life’s big questions: who are we, where are we, what time is it, what is wrong with the world, how can the world be fixed, and why are we here?

When asking these big questions, we quickly will see that the concept of place has an impact on each and is a core part of reality as we know it. We will find that place is so fundamental a concept that we can easily live life without thinking deeply about it, just as we don’t often think about breathing or the law of gravity. We simply assume these realities and intrinsically expect them to be part of our experience.

One of my main purposes in this book is to open our eyes to the centrality of place in our lives and reality as we know it.

I will list five basic areas of life that all of us as human beings should be able to relate to on some level. These aspects of life show that place is a vital, central theme not only of our existence and a flourishing life but also of God’s creation and redemptive purposes as revealed in his written word, the Bible.

These five areas will give us a brief introduction to the importance, centrality, and impact of place.

Who we are

We are hardwired for place. It is literally a part of our makeup as human beings. God is our creator, and he has a place of his own—a home called heaven. We will explore its implications for us as his creatures later, but for now, it suffices to say that as our creator has a place, so do we creatures have a need and longing for place. Without anyone teaching us, we form attachments to our home, family, community, and people group, and all this is centered on our need for placement in this life.

We, as physical, sentient creatures, need to be anchored in the here and now; we are bound by time and space. Thus, we are naturally drawn to the reality and necessity of place as a default position of our physical existence.

Physics reinforces the reality that we are beings that need a locale, a fixed area at any one time. We are not some ethereal gas or liquid; we are, in fact, highly complex beings. Each of us possesses our own body, which is bound by the simplest laws or limitations of the physical universe. Put simply, we can only be in one place at a time.

We are not disembodied spirits; we are spiritual beings housed in physical bodies. Our bodies are so crucial to our lives that if our spirit separates from our bodies, we experience death. So even our spirit has a place, the body, and even after death it longs for a new body, which we will receive at the resurrection.

aul mentions the reality of our state in 2 Corinthians 5:1–4:

For we know that if the tent that is our Earthly home is destroyed, we have a building from God, a house not made with hands, eternal in the heavens. For in this tent we groan, longing to put on our heavenly dwelling, if indeed by putting it on we may not be found naked. For while we are still in this tent, we groan, being burdened - not that we would be unclothed, but that we would be further clothed, so that what is mortal may be swallowed up by life.

One of the most staggering realities found in God’s Word is the way in which he chooses to create humankind. God created humankind’s place—the earth—first and then created the first man from that material: the dust of the place.

This gives humans a vital connection to the place they were created to dwell in and rule over. We will look at this foundational truth in more detail later in this book.

Why we fight

Fight for territory is a common reason that humans go to war. We seek to expand the places that our nation, people, or movement can lay claim to. It has been claimed that most wars are motivated by religion, when in fact all wars are a striving for the expansion or protection of place as perceived by a people group.

As we look back over history, we can catalog the expansion efforts of the major conflicts from the most ancient civilization in Mesopotamia (Babylon) and Egypt, to the great empire-building land grabs of the Greeks and Romans, to the imperial expansion of China and European states.

Most recent in our collective memory will be the war for land waged by Germany in World War I and II and the defense of land by the United Kingdom and its allies on both sides of the Atlantic. Even when we look at supposed religious or ideological wars like the one waged in Northern Ireland or in the Land of Israel and across the Middle East, the ultimate driving factor remains the expansion or retention of territory, of land, of space, ultimately of a place for a people. We will address this again in more detail when we conduct our case study on that most hotly contested place, the Land of Israel, in a later chapter.

Our desire to fight for our place is not only on the grand scale of international or civil war, it is even played out on our streets with rival gangs battling over “turf.” Place gives a sense of belonging, among many other things. It is, therefore, the prize in the battles that the disenfranchised, displaced youth in our inner cities wage among themselves. We will revisit this in more detail later on when we look at the social implications of place for our world today and our undeniable call to be place makers.