I live on the edge of what’s left of a massive glacier that began melting ten thousand years ago. The glacier was four thousand feet thick when the meltdown began. It is now a mountain lake, named after an Indian tribe, the Flatheads.
Our Montana home is built on a low cliff of Precambrian rock overlooking this lake. A path curves down fifty feet or so to a boat dock where we launch our canoe and kayaks, swim in the summer, and skate in the winter. Seven miles across the lake to the east, the Mission Range of the Rocky Mountains begins its gradual rise, which in thirty miles spears the horizon with ten-thousand-foot alpine peaks on which a few remnants of the last glacial age stubbornly maintain a precarious existence.
My father bought the lakeshore property in 1946. The War had ended. His meat market was prospering. He wanted to mark this new beginning of peace and prosperity by building a cabin. I helped him. Mostly I carried boards.
We began building in the spring of 1948. I was sixteen. Two or three days a week, I walked after school to his market, picked up a list of supplies he had prepared, drove his red GMC half-ton truck to the O’Neil Lumber Yard, and loaded up. Then I drove across town to our home and picked up my mother, who would have a picnic supper prepared. My ten-year-old sister and four-year-old brother completed the work crew. Then back to the market to get my father and drive the fourteen miles to our building site. When it became too dark to work, we would build a fire on the lakeshore and eat. By October the cabin was built, complete with an outhouse. My father boasted to his friends that we even had running water: “Eugene runs down to the lake with a bucket, and runs back up the hill with the water.” My mother named it Koinonia House.
None of us knew it at the time, but it wasn’t long before we all recognized that it had become sacred ground, a place of hospitality and healing. My parents were generous people. It wasn’t long before people who had been displaced or fallen on hard times were living there. Missionaries suffering from fatigue and illness recovered their health. A fifty-year-old stonemason, the wind knocked out of him by the death of his wife from cancer, started breathing again. After he left, we discovered he had built us a fireplace. An out-of-work bachelor lived there one winter, cut lodgepole pines, and made us a fence. Year in, year out, like so many autumn leaves, stories accumulated: stories of recuperation, of healing, of restored faith, of renewed hope.
A hundred years before we arrived, several Indian tribes—Kootenai, Salish, Kalispell, Flathead—had set up camps in this area. There is some evidence, left behind by early trappers in this valley, that a meadow two hundred yards or so back in the hills west of our cabin had been a medicine site for the Kootenais, a place of visions and healings.
A number of legends out of the Christian Middle Ages preserve stories of sacred sites where, for instance, the Holy Grail had been kept or the ark of the covenant had been buried and still retained holy energies—holy ground, ground soaked in the sacred where conditions were propitious for cultivating the presence of God. I don’t know what to make of these stories, but in my adolescence I sometimes wondered if something like that could be going on in this place. I sometimes wonder still.
What I do know is that for sixty-five years now this place has provided a protected space and time to become who I am. It has been a centering and deepening place of prayer and meditation, reflection and understanding, conversation and reading. Here I savored experiences and meetings, making them my own, attentive as they arranged themselves within me, becoming me, and I all the while becoming, without my knowing it, a pastor.
A year or two after the completion of the cabin—I was about seventeen—I began intentionally coming to what I had already started thinking of as sacred ground for parts of a day, sometimes for overnight, seeking out the solitary, embracing the quiet, listening, listening, listening. Father, Son, Holy Spirit. I was not always alone. In those early years my parents and siblings were often present. Later, while in college, I would bring friends here on Christmas and spring breaks. And since marriage, my wife and three children and six grandchildren share the pilgrimage as we come and go from this place, this holy place.
I have often had occasion while walking these hills or kayaking this lake to reflect on how important place is in living the Christian faith. As I let the biblical revelation form my imagination, geography—this specifically Montana, Flathead Valley geography—became as important in orienting me in “the land of the living” as theology and the Bible did. I was becoming aware that every detail in the life of salvation that I was becoming familiar with in the scriptures took shape in named places that, with a good map, I can still locate: Ur and Haran, Bethel and Peniel, Sinai and Shiloh, Anathoth and Jerusalem, Nazareth and Bethlehem, Bethany and Emmaus. I was also learning that every detail in my life of salvation was taking place on and in a named place: Stanwood and Kalispell to begin with, later extended to include Seattle and New York City, White Plains and Baltimore, Bel Air and Pittsburgh, Vancouver and Lakeside. Soil and stone, latitude and longitude, lakes and mountains, towns and cities keep a life of faith grounded, rooted, in place. But wherever I went, I always ended up here. This was the geography of my imagination: the sighting of a pygmy owl in feathered silence pouncing on a field mouse on Blacktail Mountain, the emergence through spring snow of the first avalanche lilies in Jack’s Meadow, surprising a grizzly bear, the iconic beast of these mountains, on the Garden Wall trail. Holy ground, sacred space.
I grew up in a church environment that tended to be dismissive of “this world” in favor of “spiritual things.” By buying this lakefront property and building this cabin, my father provided me and, as it turned out, many others, with a rooting and grounding, a sense of thisness and hereness, for the faith that was maturing in me. He provided a shrine, a sacred place where “on earth as it is in heaven” could be prayed and practiced. I wouldn’t have been able to articulate all this at the time, but in retrospect I recognize that a strong conviction was forming within me that the life of faith cannot be lived in general or by abstractions. All the great realities that we can’t touch or see take form on ground that we can touch and see.
Several years later I came across a book by the Scottish pastor, George Adam Smith: The Historical Geography of the Holy Land. He had spent several months on horseback and mule crisscrossing Palestine in the late nineteenth century, describing what seemed to me, from his detailed reporting, every square foot of that land. His vivid writing put my feet on the ground where Abraham walked, the fields on which David did battle, the garden in which Jesus prayed. There were large, fold-out maps that I studied in detail. I lived in Smith’s book. I think I must have spent as many months reading and rereading what he wrote as he did writing it. After those few months my imagination was furnished with a formidable geographical bulwark against disembodied truths, heaven disconnected from earth. It became every bit as significant to me as any text on theology I was to read. That book confirmed for me the emerging perceptions of “on earth as it is in heaven,” a ladder, so to speak. With Jacob, I knelt on this holy ground, confessing with him that “God was in this place, but I knew it not.”
This place and home on the shore of what’s left of the glacier have provided the very conditions that North American culture has failed to provide, conditions in which I have been able to realize and live into the many dimensions that go into forming the vocation of pastor. If I need an adjective to identify the conditions, I think sacred would do just fine: sacred space—uncrowded and quiet; sacred canopy—the big sky “telling the glory of God” sacred ground—rocks and hills, mountains and meadows marked by the footsteps of my grandparents and parents, my children and grandchildren, praying and climbing, strolling and wandering—sojourners all—on our way to what the writer of Hebrews names “a better country.”
I was acquiring a sacred imagination strong enough to reject and resist the relentlessly secularized and ghettoized one-dimensional caricature that assigned American pastors to jobs in a workplace that markets religion. When I looked around me and observed churches in competition with one another for their share in the religious market, hiring pastors to provide religious goods and services for a culture of God consumers, I wanted nothing to do with it. I couldn’t see that either God or place—holy God, sacred place—was a significant consideration in forming a pastoral identity in America.
But all the while, this mountain lake, these sacred waters that brought together all the elements of sacred place and sky, was doing its work in me:
Huge cloud fists assault
The blue exposed bare midriff of sky;
The firmament doubles up in pain.
Lightnings rip and thunders shout,
Mother nature’s children quarrel.
And then, as suddenly as it began,
It’s over. Noah’s heirs, perceptions
Cleansed, look out on a disarmed world
At ease and ozone fragrant. Still waters.
What barometric shift
Rearranged these ferocities
Into a peace-pulsating rainbow
Sign? My enemy turns his other
Cheek; I drop my guard. A mirror
Lake reflects the filtered colors;
Breeze-stirred pine trees quietly sing.
I start with place: this two acres of holy ground perched high and dry on the edge of what’s left of the melted glacier. Place gathers stories, relationships, memories. This two acres of sacred landscape in the mountains of Montana has provided the material conditions for preserving a continuity of story in the course of living in eighteen residences located variously in five states and two countries. It has provided a stable location in space and time to give prayerful, meditative, discerning attention to the ways in which my life is being written into the comprehensive salvation story. It is the holy ground from which choke-cherry blossoms scent the spring air and giant ponderosa pines keep sentinel watch in the forest. It opens out on an immense glacier-cut horizon against which the invisibilities of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit form a believing imagination where the “inside is larger than the outside.”
This is where the bulk of the formative work in my pastoral vocation either began, was clarified, or came to a fullness. Schools were useful as background but were never the main thing. Teachers and professors were significant but not at the center. Friends and books made their mark but only as voices in a larger conversation. This place is the holy ground—my Midian burning bush, my Horeb cave, my Patmos island—that has kept me grounded and to which I have repeatedly returned. I have lived sixty years of my adult life in cities and suburbs in other places, but most of those years I returned for at least a month, sometimes more, once for twelve months—an entire sabbatical year—to clarify and deepen my pastoral vocation on this sacred ground. And even when I was not here physically, the internalized space grounded me. And it is from this place that I am now writing my witness.