Wisdom of Stability: Rooting Faith in a Mobile Culture

[ This review originally appeared in THE ENGLEWOOD REVIEW OF BOOKS - 30 April 2010 ] Transience is a major curse of our age. From those who are always on the move to avoid their creditors to the upwardly mobile who are always seeking greener pastures, it seems that everyone is on the move. In our urban neighborhood, it is a fairly common practice for renters to move into a new place, paying the first month's rent, and then forego paying the second month's rent, and then at the end of the second month when their account is 30 days past due, the eviction process is started and the renter then has 30 days until they are evicted. Thus, crafty renters can get three months worth of housing for the price of one month, and force themselves into a cycle of moving every three months (or more if they are able to scrape together more than a single month's rent). These habits have larger cultural implications; I have heard of a public school in our neighborhood that has turnover rates as high as 95% from one year to the next (i.e., only 5 % of the students who started in a grade one year were still at the school a year later). Lest I get too critical, it occurred to me recently that I myself have, in the last 15 years (since the summer before my senior year of college), lived at a staggering twelve addresses in four different states! Thankfully, I have been fortunate to live in the same house for the last six years, and have no intention of moving any time soon, and am slowly learning here about the historic Christian practice of stability. Given the great mobility of American culture, it is not surprising that stability is virtually unknown in our churches today. In the historically Black Walltown neighborhood of Durham, North Carolina, Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove and the Rutba House community have been growing roots over the last decade in that place and re-learning the practice of stability. Hartgrove has reflected on these experiences and on the Christian tradition of stability in his excellent new book, The Wisdom of Stability: Rooting Faith in a Mobile Culture. This new volume features a foreword by Kathleen Norris, who herself has reflected eloquently on stability in her most recent book Acedia and Me (which was our 2008 Book of the Year). The book also features narrative "Front Porch" reflections interspersed between the chapters, in which Wilson-Hartgrove captures vignettes from his own life that cut to the heart of the "craft" of stability. Wilson-Hartgrove launches into the book with the bold assertion that "I hope to reprogram your default setting. As participants in a mobile culture, our default is to move. ...But I am convinced that we lose something essential to our existence as creatures if we do no recognize our fundamental need for stability" (5). In spite of the overwhelming changes in society around us, Wilson-Hartgrove observes, we have deep longings for something solid to which we can cling. And yet, we as individuals c

To say that we live a "hyper-mobile" culture may be a bit of an understatement these days. Just today, I was eating lunch with my family at the local Japanese restaurant following our church's worship service and there were three teenagers sitting together in a booth near us. As I walked by their table, I noticed that the three of them were sharing the same physical space (they were sitting together in the booth), but they were not interacting with one another at all. Instead, two of them had their cell phones under the table, "texting" someone, while the third had her cell phone up to her ear, talking to yet another person. With access to their whole network of "friends" at their fingertips, these three teenagers were essentially trading the friends sitting within touching distance for the virtual connection achieved via LCD screen. In an ever-shrinking world, characterized by instant communication to almost anywhere on the globe, how are we actually doing at building community? With families constantly on the go, kids that aspire to grow up and move up the social ladder, and a constant barrage of information overloading our senses, are we reverting to a nomadic existence once again? Likewise, how do we define stability in today's context? Often, we refer to people who are "stable" as those with a good education, steady employment, financial abundance, and a traditional family. Could it be that, in this very definition, we are undermining the possibility of true community by placing such high value in those things which promote self-reliance and independence from those with whom God is calling us to share community and interdependence? It is questions like these that Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove tackles in his latest book, The Wisdom of Stability: Rooting Faith in a Mobile Culture. Many young evangelicals today are finding life-giving wisdom in ancient traditions, passed down throughout the centuries of Christian life and practice. Wilson-Hartgrove is one of these, culling the gifts of the Desert Mothers and Fathers for our contemporary time in this book. Wilson-Hartgrove is among a growing number of young Evangelicals, living in intentional communities that seek to embody this ancient way of life in new, urban contexts. Drawing from the vow of stability described in the Rule of St. Benedict (which Wilson-Hartgrove's own "new monastic" community follows in adapted form), this book challenges the commodification of community seen in 21st Century culture. Identifying the innate human desire to connect with other people, "social networking" has become a phenomenon through websites like MySpace, Facebook, Twitter, etc. Cell phone companies capitalize on the desire to constantly be in "contact" with one's network through phone calls, text messaging, and access to these online communities. As Wilson-Hartgrove notes, "The great advantage of a Facebook friendship, of course, is that it is so easy. I get to choose who I want to "friend" an

At long last the instability that saturates our society and faith communities is addressed. We don't like the pastor - change churches. We don't like what our denomination stands for, move to another one. Don't like our spouse - find a different person. The author's wisdom is far beyond his years and as a monastic, I am encouraged by the message he has sent us in this fine book.

The Wisdom of Stability is the latest book by Jonathon Wilson-Hartgrove. Kathleen Norris paints a wonderful landscape in the book's forward, showing us the contrast between our ever-chaotic need to improve, be relevant, and be appreciated and the less frenetic gift of being rooted in place, in relationships, and in God. It is a gift that is given, long before we know we need what it holds inside. This sets the stage for the power of Jonathon Wilson-Hartgrove's wrestlings and wanderings in the interior notions and exterior realities of staying in one place and processing "what is" happening right now. You have got to love when an author exhibits such playful candor at the outset of a book. Wilson-Hartgrove let's us know right away that he is on a mission to reset our internal default. He wants to help us to consider the value and nourishment that comes from staying put. Sending roots down in the loam of God's love and faithfulness challenges us to move beyond moving beyond. His challenge is bold and fresh, giving the heart something to keen about and the spirit a chance to soar in place. Wilson-Hartgrove swerves in and out of stories about our homes in a comforting rhythm and a settled prose that is familiar and sacred at the same time. He reminds us that nesting in our houses, our relationships, our earth, our finances and all of life is something gracious that is pitted against the progressive call to change and upgrade lest we shrivel up and die. Constant change feels anything but gracious. We are a culture that is tired of always moving. Wilson-Hartgrove reminds us that there is an interior life that drives the desires and yearnings we have. This interior landscape can only be truly known when we stop long enough to make love to the life it affords us; when we settle into a romance with mundanaity. This stillness proves not only a strong foundation for life, but a worthy place to live. Once there, we have found a center. And yet, our stability can morph into stagnation. We strive against stability because we fear the treasures of sameness. Would we ever know awe if we did not see how changing comes full circle to changelessness. We learn something by noting the rebirth of the snowdrops in the field by our house - year after year. Jonathon teaches us to look and listen for the gifts of a stationary life - inside and out. This freshness will bathe us in a renewal that becomes a momentum of the heart - a growing sense of expansion. Digging deep can teach us the true freedom beyond the illusions of change: the detachment of apatheia. We can never be set free from attachment to place until we root down deep enough within to the source of life that nourishes us to rise above one place and be in God in all places at once. Staying put can enable us to understand and relinquish the hold that space can have on our psyches and on our hearts. Longing for motionlessness reveals that our only stillness is in God, not simply in our

The Wisdom of Stability is thick with story and packed with real-life practical application. It's grounded in the ancient practice of stability, embodied and legitimized by monastic and cloistered communities that lived the value of staying put. At the same time, Jonathan avoids a formulaic tendency to reduce stability to merely staying put in a specific location, and he re-narrates a fuller vision of stability as an orientation--one grounded in faith, vocation and community. The book is well thought through and brilliantly organized. Jonathan's reflections meander through the complexities of rooting in a time and cultural context that seems to avoid making commitments. It's confessional, inquisitive and beautifully honest. The book is an invitation into a conversation that we must find the courage to engage. I've appreciated this book more than any other I've read this year. The Wisdom of Stability couldn't be more timely.