History—A River of Desire Bringing Force to Our Vision
New things are started every day. Whether it’s learning a new language, practicing a new skill, starting a new company, whatever it may be, there is always a season for new beginnings. But have you ever asked yourself why people are so interested in newness? It takes an incredible amount of energy and will to really get a new ball rolling. And as I’m sure you know, sometimes we start rolling balls we don’t have the energy to keep in motion.
Starting something new requires vision. It requires the ability to see into the future, even if that vision is only one step ahead. You start a new job because you have a vision for life with more money or more free time. You may start playing the guitar because you envision life as the creative person at the party, perhaps. But beneath it all why even do it? Because for a thing to last, and really work, your vision must have force behind it. And that takes a lot of effort. So why start something at all? I think you know. It’s because you want to.
Desire is what makes the world churn. Our Creator’s desire for his own glory, your desire for the good life, it’s desire that arouses new beginnings and fresh starts. Deep in the center of your heart, your gut, you yearn, you long, and so you begin again.
This is true for me. I am in a season of fresh starts and new beginnings. I am planting a church. Deep down I long to see a new church made up of people who have had their lives freshly changed by the born again work of the Holy Spirit. I long for that. I envision what that community could look like. But then I notice something else that is present in the season of new beginnings—problems—dragons that must be put down.
As one pastor puts it, “mission exists because worship doesn’t.” New ministries are started, like church plants, overseas missionary teams, or groups that seek to end sex trafficking, all because problems exist. I’m planting a church in Clinton because there are souls in this place that have no hope and will die, left to rot separated from the love of God. That’s a big dragon of a problem—one that God has a vested interest in vanquishing.
I’m also restoring a big old victorian style home. I have a vision for our home and my desire for that vision to become a reality brings force to what I do. But like spiritual work of church planting, the physical work of restoration and redemption is filled with problems. Actually it’s all problems. If there were no problems I would have no work to do. But as it stands now, I have problems for days.
But there is a problem with starting new things to address old problems, interestingly enough. And most of the time its people like me who are the purveyors of new problems. That is, when starting something new, we tend to throw ourselves at the task of solving the problem with all the force of our desire that we can muster, oftentimes, with complete disregard for those who have come before us. It is called youthfulness. And as a thirty-something-year-old millennial, I’ve committed the sin of generational arrogance a time or two. But I know some youthful old folks too. Pride really isn’t committed to one age group.
What’s made me think of all this lately is learning more about the history of my house. The public library in Clinton has digitized copies of old local newspapers. This allows me access to their database and type in keywords that the program will find in old newspaper articles. And so I did that. I searched the last name of the oldest previous owner of my house. What I found was pretty amazing.
Because the old newspapers around the turn of the century published articles about the social lives of private citizens (think social media pre internet), I was able to find a lot of articles that featured gatherings at my house. Most of the articles surrounded the social life of Mrs. Leedham and her family. It seems that the Leedhams were a prominent and affluent family in Clinton around the turn of the century, which was Clinton’s gilded age. Her husband was Frank Leedham, the county auditor around the early 1900’s. The newspaper articles told of Mrs. Leedham hosting groups like the literary society for catered lunches. There were articles about parties that were expected to have many in attendance. But what interested me the most was the articles about her involvement in Grace Episcopal Church.
Mrs. Leedham played hostess to many church gatherings over many years. She seemed to be a socialite, providing community glue to this area. Her desire must have fueled a vision for using her home as a place of relationship, of conviviality, of joy. This is a desire I share. This is why I am deeply interested in the history of this place. Because when I hosted our first church gathering in this house, I stepped into a river of collective desire, bringing great force to my vision of seeing this house be a place of community building once again.
This has become deeply metaphorical for me. And there is a huge problem looming over it. What happens when there is no memory of the past. What happens when the cultural cycle breaks. What happens when our vision is no longer reinforced by the great churning river of local memory—the stories of the dead.
When the stories of the dead are preserved they are passed down through tradition. And as many others often point out, breaking from the knowledge of our tradition is foolish. G.K. Chesterton put it this way:
“Tradition means giving votes to the most obscure of all classes, our ancestors. It is the democracy of the dead. Tradition refuses to submit to the small and arrogant oligarchy of those who merely happen to be walking about.”
Our imagination suffers when we break from tradition. And imagination is critical to possessing a vision for a flourishing life. Because imagination is the ability to see possibilities that are really latent in a place. Seeing the possibility of a place leads to cultivating them into fruition. But to see rightly we need the glasses of our ancestors. Not because they were perfect, but because the better we understand what shaped their desire, what compelled their vision, and the work they did, the better we will work as we start new things. For example, we won’t want to reinvent the wheel if the wheel was already invented. Local memory aids in the formation of a vision for local flourishing.
But local memory is often discarded. The most tangible illustration of this that I can think of is Springdale cemetery in Clinton. Clinton has several cemeteries, but Springdale cemetery stands out to me in it’s storied history and its present decay. This cemetery is where the founders are buried—the lumber barons and wealthy intelligentsia that resided in Clinton once upon a time. These families had enormous tombstones made from expensive stone, hulking mausoleum house their corpses, and choice ground reserved for the presentation and preservation of their family name. This ground and its sextons were entrusted to preserving their memory and story. And as the Christians who died among them would have said, “Here lies one who is asleep, but will rise on the day He appears.” Their monuments marked a vision for the eternal new beginning.
But now much of the stones are eroded, especially the less prominent men, women, and children buried there. The passage of time has not been kind to these gravesites. Erosion has thrown solid stone tumbling down hillsides. Wind and rain have obscured the names of the dead, and with it the memory of their personhood. What was once the site of someone's mother or father, son or daughter, is now nothing more than a pile of rubble marking the spot of decaying bones.
The problem is really no one person’s fault; which makes it that much more heartbreaking. Over the years the cemetery became insolvent. It basically ran out of money. And so it went into receivership. This essentially means the state received ownership of the real estate and is now its caretaker. It subcontracts out basic grounds keeping, but the preservation of individual graves is a responsibility for each individual family. But many of those families are no longer members of the community. And so the cemetery sits in a state of slow decay, in absentee ownership, slowly being swallowed by the hillside, returning its bones to the dust from whence they came.
The metaphor extends into other structures of this town built by men. Mortar blows out from between the bricks of abandoned downtown buildings. Once great structures of skill and creativity have been reduced to parking lots. Even my house has been neglected, forgotten, forsaken, giving the forces of ruin a foothold. But there are men and women in this place attempting to stalemate the decay.
There is an expression that is fitting to all this talk of vision and desire. ‘Instead of telling people to build the boats, give them a vision for the sea.’ That applies to Clinton now more than ever. There are many people attempting to stalemate the forces of ruin in this town by simply building boats. Many buy old houses and fix them. Some pick up trash on the side of the road. Some buy old downtown buildings and fill them with antique shops. But without a vision informed by the stories and traditions of the past, our visions will have no force; our new things will not last.
But if we step into the river of the past, into the river of collective desire, we can see with a visionary force that has the strength to change the world, to reverse the curse of decay. To do that we must preserve and tell the story of the past, bringing it to bare on the present. There is power in this river.
As a Christian, this looks like stepping into the Jesus story. It looks like devoting myself to the apostles teaching and to the prayers. What a foolish thing it was for me to think that by abandoning the ancient practices of bread and cup, water and wine, word and sacrament, I could actually do better than my ancestors at addressing the problem of sin in the world. I realize now that real vision is developed at the intersection of story—story of the dead, the living, and God’s. These three tributaries flow into a massive river that can bring real force to our new endeavors. This is because a true vision of force, a vision of the sea, is animated by the Ancient of Days.