In the Place to Come

Photo by Sincerely Media on Unsplash

In my last post of 2020, I hinted that changes are afoot and now it has finally arrived.

Readers might already know I have accepted an appointment to be the dean of studies at Vianney College, the seminary of the Catholic diocese of Wagga Wagga. For our non-Australian readers, there is a real place called “Wagga Wagga”, which in the the local indigenous Wiradjuri language means “the place of many crows”.

While I am always excited when I am on the cusp of a new job, this new job is coupled with a move to a rural location. It means being far from the madding, yet lovingly familiar, crowds of Sydney, from which I will find it difficult to part, as I said in my interview with The Catholic Weekly last week.

This shift is wholesale, and the gravity of it came when I attended mass to celebrate Australia Day. As I came to give thanks for being in the national space that has come to be my home, I also felt the pull of the city that has been my home for virtually the last decade. I realised how, as Graham Ward wrote in Cities of God, cities are places where my desires are germinated, nurtured, activated and, to some extent, fulfilled. As beings constituted by desire, our sense of who we are is shaped by our continued habitation of a place: the place exerts an erotic pull, while we become anchored in a place, giving a visceral experience of Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s maxim that “the world and I are within one another”.

Postmordernity and its concomitant hypermobility sunders this symbiosis. As I move to a new place, I wish to take the old place with me in order to keep my identity intact. Only I cannot take a place with me, and part of the apprehension is not so much a sense of the unknown as the sense of being marooned, cut off from what has and which have formed me into who I am. Because what is to come is not yet actual, there is no foundation to anchor one’s desires and one’s identity in the place to come.

In the face of this shift I found that I have four choices.

The first choice is to look to the new place with a nostalgic eye turned back to the place left behind. I remember doing that when I first arrived in Sydney, and remember being chronically dissatisfied. What I learned is that what I long for nostalgically can be as much an non-place, an illusion with no foundation in reality. In looking back towards a mirage I, in a manner not too dissimilar to Lot’s wife (Gen 19:26), became dessicated.

The second choice is to go down the Nietzschean path of embracing pure contingency, that is, resign oneself to the notion that I must forge a new identity as I live in a new place. This choice implies that, given the constant flux of my circumstances and resultant places I live in, I have no stable identity, and must accept the need for constant re-engineering of who I am in the face of the constant shifts in my career. In this choice, I am ultimately told to accept that at heart, I am no one other than raw material for circumstances to work on.

The third choice is the flip-side to the Nietzschean path, which is to presume that my identity bears no relation to a place but is ultimately related to assertion of will. I presume that who I am must be exerted wherever I happen to be, almost in defiance of the place I happen to be in. This choice calls me to pretend that my will is not connected to a place, that it is sovereign, but only so because it is solitary. This choice calls me to ignore Merleau-Ponty’s insight about the formative role of place. However, because my identity in this instance is founded by nothing other than my will, I am also called to presume (as in the second choice), that there is no real identity beneath the raw assertion. Worse still, I could without my knowledge undergo a disintegration of my identity, as I publicly assert who I am without realising that the new place could be changing me in subtle material ways.

The final choice is the Christian one, which is characterised by what an essay by Aaron Riches and Creston Davis call an ongoing “fidelity to the Event”. This choice builds on the notion of Christ as an Event, which I touched upon at the beginning of the year. An Event is not a once off, but an ongoing moment that overcodes every moment I experience. This encompasses not only times and people, but places as well. Even if the place that I am in is not stable, the fact that every place has been overcoded by the Event means that every change is paradoxically an entrenching of the greater stability of the Word of God, who speaks into every time and place. This stability is therefore not static, but is expressed in new ways in every change of circumstance.

In the coming days, the temptation to adopt any one of these choices and shift between them is strong. However, it is in the stability of the presence of Christ that I hope to hold onto as I move into my new post.

Pray for me.

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