On Making the World Holy

or, rather, recognizing the preexisting holiness within it

It’s been five months since we packed up two cars with far-too-many-belongings, a bunch of plants, a confused dog and drove west across vast deserts, through deep canyons, and scraggly brush. We spent our first night in California in an airbnb just outside of Joshua Tree National Park, woke with the sun to enjoy locally ground beans beneath a cotton candy sky. 

I’ve written about home as the place we find ourselves—wherever that may be. But these past months, I’ve felt unsettled like a stranger in a town just passing through on my way to a truer home, a home I can plunge deep roots for longer than three years at a time. We’d only been here a few weeks when we started talking about where we might want to settle down, a conversation that once stressed my wanderlust soul. But now I feel a pull towards some semblance of commitment to a place.

I want to paint walls without asking my landlord for permission, plant wildflowers and tomatoes, hang shelves, know my neighbors without a 12 month time stamp, live within driving distance of my parents and in-laws.

It may be years yet before we’re settled for more than a few years at a time someplace that’s definitely not San Diego (no offense to this beautiful city). And that’s ok. Right now, I’m holding hope that one day I’ll paint walls without permission. One day I’ll garden. One day, I’ll know my neighbors for longer than a single lease allows. And I will appreciate the “permanence” because I’ve known so much impermanence. I would not be the person or writer I am without it, without this steady pilgrimage of body and spirit.

Eight years ago, my husband and I left our North Carolina homeland and ventured south, and then west. And west again. In these eight years, we’ve been pulled apart piece by piece. Our theologies have been disrupted. Our senses of familiarity replaced by unfamiliar neighborhoods and grocery stores and highways.

I’m reminded of what Anna tells Asher in My Name is Asher Lev: “If you want to make the world holy, stay in Brooklyn.” Anna intuits that Brooklyn and Asher’s family home are distractions from the artist within. Asher’s sense of duty as an orthodox Jew is in constant conflict with his curiosity and artistic self. In Brooklyn, he feels holy because Brooklyn is familiar. He studies the Torah, attends synagogue, parrots his parents religion. But he is not content. Because wonder for a world beyond his own tugs at his soul.

…

We find ourselves in this liminal space, desiring familiarity while recognizing the significance of pilgrimage and disruption for our own spiritual formation. Before moving to Colorado, we rarely hiked. By the time we moved, we’d hiked all over the state. I wrote a few months ago that moving west was a rebirth for the both of us. Our time in Colorado renewed our sense of awe for the natural world. We discovered a sanctuary amongst the aspens, found healing in the snowmelt, renewal atop mountain peaks. I wept while driving west across hundreds of miles of desert, leaving the precious Rockies behind. Colorado wasn’t my first home. But it became a home. In time, it became a sort of Brooklyn, a holy, and safe place with people we loved and still call beloved friends (perhaps this is even more special because it happened in spite of a worldwide pandemic).

It’s not my job to make the world holy. The world is already holy, teeming with worthiness from its inception. My job is to marvel at it, to behold it, to wonder at it’s glory and magnitude. And while I long for home, I still find home in the places my being dwells. Because I am at home within myself. I am a holy vessel occupying holy space. 

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