Incline Our Hearts

The Holiness of Place

God often speaks through what, from a human point of view, looks like coincidence. And so, this week, we have the coming together of the 60th anniversary celebration of St. Crispin’s, and the death of the beloved writer, farmer, and activist Wendell Berry. Berry was not a particularly conventional Christian, but had a lot to say about the holiness of God’s creation, and the importance of place (especially, in his case, rural Kentucky).

St. Crispin’s is important to our diocese not just because it is a beautiful part of God’s creation, but because it is a holy place, soaked in prayer, to which we return continually. So many of our Oklahoma Episcopalians have had transformative experiences at St. Crispin’s summer camp, and many return to St. Crispin’s as adults for diocesan events like Convention, Vestry Academy, Iona, and other trainings, or for congregational retreats or other events. Now we have parents, once campers themselves, bringing their own children to St. Crispin’s.

In a culture that often rewards moving, especially for work, we need stable places that feel like home. Places with a history that we know and are part of. St. Crispin’s is a home like that for many of us: a place to encounter God, and to remember who we are. In his most famous poem, “The Peace of Wild Things,” Berry says it well:

When despair for the world grows in me
and I wake in the night at the least sound
in fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be,
I go and lie down where the wood drake
rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.
I come into the peace of wild things
who do not tax their lives with forethought
of grief. I come into the presence of still water.
And I feel above me the day-blind stars
waiting with their light. For a time
I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.