“Come away by yourselves to a lonely place, and rest a while.”
There is a question, and a problem, deeply embedded in modern life: why this place and not another? Why Bridgeport and not Phoenixville? Why Philly and not Boston? What is the difference between one place and another?
We all know that there are differences. We like some places better than others. We know some places better than others, and in fact that some places are more knowable than others. An old church is much more memorable than a supermarket. Say what you will about the streets of many cities in the American Northeast—twisty, incomprehensible, names changing every few blocks—but some studies have shown that a given street corner in a city like that is more recognizable than one in a city with streets laid out in a perfect grid.
Places give us all kinds of feelings. The modern world, however, dislikes these feelings. It dislikes the kind of distinctions that make one place better than, or even different from, another. Think of the brutal modern architecture that we sometimes still see, emphasizing uniformity, blandness, function. Even better, think of the way we make maps. In ancient times, through the Middle Ages, maps were made to help you get from one place to another, and they were more often than not itineraries to help you remember and distinguish one thing from another—but they were also made to show the underlying significance of each place. This is why, for example, you see the old maps with sea monsters in the ocean: because the ocean can be a place of danger and the unknown.
Today’s maps are more accurate, more precise. They lay out the world on a grid. Latitude, longitude, north, south, east, west. This is all useful. But it presents a different model of place. What we have in modern maps is not a collection of places, but absolute space—an endless void, spreading out in all directions, that can be filled with anything at all. In the drive to make all things equal, to flatten all distinctions, the world tells us that places have no inherent significance. They are simply points on a map, coordinates in space.
The view of the Bible is quite different, and we don’t need to look very hard to find it. From the beginning, God hallows certain places. The garden of Eden. Mount Sinai. Jerusalem. The Temple. Whenever something good happens in the Old Testament, it seems that the place where it happens gets a special name, perhaps even a monument for remembrance. This is the place where Jacob wrestled with God. This is the place where we crossed the Jordan into the promised land. This is the place where God’s glory rests with his people.
If we look closer, the picture is a little more complicated. The Bible is not, in fact, unreservedly on board with the consecration of place. In the Old Testament, for example, Israel makes a name for itself by denying the sacred places of other people. The God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob is not a local god, like the others; he is not lord of a place—the god of the Nile, or of the Jordan, or of the city of Tyre—no, he is the God, period.
The scriptures begin with creation, emphasizing that this God is no mere local lord; he is the Lord of all things. He is worshiped not at a shrine, at a special place, but everywhere, because he is everywhere, and because every place belongs to him. As much as the prophets emphasize the goodness of the land, they emphasize, maybe even more strongly, the source of that goodness. The frequent Old Testament imagery of shepherds and flocks goes alongside a suspicion of cities and places of man-made permanence—take Babel, for example, or Sodom and Gomorrah—emphasizing that the true identity of God’s people centers less on where they are than on whom they follow. “Judah shall be saved,” Jeremiah tells us, when the true and ultimately just shepherd arrives. In other words, the flock can really settle down into a permanent place only when that place is ruled by the right person.
This universal, catholic faith of the Jews took an even stronger form in the early Church. Jesus Christ is Lord not just of the Jews, not just of Jerusalem, but of the whole earth. This was one reason why the catholic nature of the Church has always been so deeply associated with the city of Rome. Rome was about as far from Jerusalem as one could imagine. It was a city of pagans, of Gentiles. And yet it became the seat of the apostles and the principal church of the world. The early Christians venerated certain places, to be sure: the places where Jesus walked, the places where the martyrs died, the places where miracles happened. But they also insisted that theirs was a universal Lord, a universal gospel, that did not depend on Jerusalem, on Rome, on any holy place—but could be carried to the uttermost parts of the earth and remain the same.
Perhaps you can see how the modern idea of space is related to the Christian concept of universality. In a sense, the modern view toward space, toward place, is a corruption of catholic Christianity. You see, Christians have always affirmed the equality of all places: God can be found anywhere. And yet, at the same time, they have affirmed that, because God can be found anywhere, places matter.
Jesus Christ is the Lord of all space and time. Yet he entered space and time in a very specific place: the womb of the Virgin Mary, which was prepared for him by God as a “meet dwelling place.” He was born and baptized in places with names; he was killed on a hill known as the “place of the skull”; he rose again from the tomb—a place, again, that you can still visit.
He has redeemed people from every place—those far off and those near. But he has done so in a specific place, and that place is his body, his blood. As St. Paul says, “but now in Christ Jesus you who once were far off have been brought near by the blood of Christ. For he is our peace; in his flesh he has made both groups into one and has broken down the dividing wall, that is, the hostility between us.”
Jesus is our home, our house, our body—he is our only dwelling place, our final destination. In him we are home. Apart from him we are homeless. Perhaps that is why Holy Church in her wisdom appoints today’s passage in Mark as an introduction to the feeding of the five thousand and an extended meditation on the “bread of life” discourse in John 6. Sometimes we wander the wilderness a while before remembering where home is.
We are at the end of a great “eucharistic revival” promoted by our bishops. Whether it succeeds or not, I think the goal has been to remind Catholics that the worship of Jesus is actually the most central thing about our faith. I didn’t grow up Catholic, so my experience is hardly universal, but I met a lot of Catholics, growing up, and it wasn’t until I was in my twenties that I ever really met Catholics who seemed interested in Jesus. Oh, they were interested in community service, in making the world a better place, in being instruments of peace and all that. They were wandering the wilderness, trying to make their own bread, build their own heaven. Woe to the bad shepherds who let them imagine there was such a thing as the Catholic faith without Jesus.
Though we are called to display the kingdom of God in this world, the mission of the Church is not simply to make the world a better place. The mission of the Church is to show the world that it is the world, to show that it cannot find its own meaning without God. Our mission is to live in such a way that Jesus can be known where we are, even in this world of suffering and sin
This place, like any real church, is a holy place—not because it has been made perfect, but because Jesus is here. Our true home, the end of our long pilgrimage, is here in sight, just beyond that altar rail. Everything about this holy place is designed to remind us that there is another place, beyond this, to which all places point, and in which all created places are fulfilled and find their meaning.
Come away to a lonely place, and rest a while. Come away to the cross, to the Resurrection, to the glory of the Lord. Come to this altar, one with the heavenly altar, and find your true home.