Of Roots and Adventures

I have lived in Ohio, Michigan, Georgia (twice), Pennsylvania, Alabama (also twice), England, and Idaho. I left home to go to college, left another home to attend seminary, and lugged seven children out of the country for my doctorate. When our kids were young, I told them to spread out, so I’d have places to stay (for free!) when I travel. It worked. With our house empty of children, my wife and I have celebrated the past three Christmases with our kids and grandkids in Savannah, Chattanooga, and Los Angeles. Last autumn, with a trip to Brazil, I achieved a life goal of teaching on six of the seven continents. 

All that to say, I have the makings of your paradigmatic rootless cosmopolitan, over-educated, placeless, and disconnected. That’s not the way my life feels, though. I spent the first eighteen years of my life in Ohio, settled in the Inland Northwest for another fifteen years, and, all told, have lived in Alabama for nearly twenty years and counting. I have family and close friends in all these places, and more besides. I don’t sense any particular class affinity with global wanderers; my friends are neighbors, kin, fellow church members. It’s not that I have no home, but that I have several, and they are genuine homes, where I spend time with people I know intimately, by whom I am also known. Life isn’t rootless. It’s multiply rooted. I suspect many who appear rootless would say the same.

In his widely discussed Against the Machine, Paul Kingsnorth targets modern rootlessness. Drawing from Simone Weil, he insists that cultures endure when they’re “tied down,” anchored to things “more solid, timeless, and lasting than . . . the personal desires of the individuals who inhabit them”—cultural traditions and ceremonies, along with the natural environment. “To be rooted is perhaps the most important and least recognized need of the human soul,” Weil says, and she defines rootedness as “real, active and natural participation in the life of a community which preserves in living shape certain particular treasures of the past and certain particular expectations for the future.” 

Kingsnorth and Weil are both motivated by theological considerations, but Christianity has always had a complicated relation with place, roots, and settledness. Adam is formed from earth, and Yahweh sows Israel in a land to which, in exile, they long to return. Yet biblical history starts with Yahweh’s call to Abraham to leave his homeland, kin, and father for the unknown land Yahweh promises to show him. The gospel announces the Lord’s daring journey from heaven into a broken world of flesh. Paul, himself an incessant traveler, doesn’t exhort his readers to root themselves in place, but to plant themselves in love (Eph. 3:17), or, to say the same thing, in Christ (Col. 2:7). Paul moves from place to place, but at each stop he finds brothers and sisters and homes ready to welcome him for a night or a few months. He’s not conventionally rooted, but neither does he drift: Wherever he goes, Paul remains a branch on the vine that is Jesus, a citizen of a heavenly city.

Kingsnorth misses most of this, I think, because he conceives the original human condition as a “state of questless ease.” Not so. Before the Fall, downstream from Eden, Genesis tells us, was the land of Havilah, with its deposits of good gold, bdellium, and onyx (Gen. 2:11–12). That looks very much like a divine incitement to a quest: Had the Creator wanted Adam to stay put, he should have deposited the gold in the garden. 

Human beings are suspended between longing for rest and an equally strong longing for risky quests. Kingsnorth says moderns are in the grip of what Spengler calls the “Faustian Idea,” the insatiable drive to expand, conquer, invent, explore, the restless incapacity to pause to say, “Stay! You are so fair!” Sabbath-free living is indeed inhuman, but it distorts a deeply human motivation. Roots are, as Weil says, a basic human need, but so is adventure or, as Weil herself calls it, risk, which, she argues, should be “a permanent presence . . . in all aspects of social life,” lest life run aground on boredom and fear.

Rootedness is as old as Adam, but so is adventuring. If something is new in modernity, it’s not the drive to explore but something else. Once upon a time, only soldiers attached to an ambitious conqueror, a handful of itinerant craftsmen, and merchant-adventurers capitalized by kings had the opportunity to traverse the oceans to see the wonders of the world. Nowadays, thousands of quite ordinary, quite thoroughly rooted folk embark each day on Caribbean cruises or intercontinental flights. What’s new isn’t adventure, but its democratization.