Changing Places in a Pandemic

I almost didn’t write a new blog post this week. The blog promises a new post every Tuesday except on holiday weeks. There are no major holidays that I’m aware of (except that Pi Day just happened), but I’m moving to Chicago this week. Moving across the country is pretty much a holiday.

I haven’t moved often as an adult. I moved for college, and then I moved to Pittsburgh for grad school. I’ve hopped around Pittsburgh a bit, but my wife and I have been in the same apartment for the past seven years. It has been nice to not have to move.

We’re too old to be asking friends to carry all our furniture in exchange for pizza. Thankfully, my new employer is helping us hire professionals to move us three states to the left. But even without the financial or physical burden, there is still the psychological toll of a move.

This is a place with family and friends. A place we know. Home.

If you’ve made a big move, you know (better than I do, probably) what I’m talking about. You gain an adventurous fresh start, with new faces and places and memories. You lose the familiar, the comfortable, the known. I’m sure there’s plenty to say about all this, but today I can only offer a brief reflection on theology of place and reality of pandemic.

Some theological tension

One of the tensions I felt starting Harbor while finishing up seminary occurred because my seminary (in line with most other mainline Protestant seminaries, I think) seemed to be obsessed with neighborhood. We had classes devoted to studying the local world, including neighborhood history, religious communities, architecture, politics, gathering places, etc. The idea is that the immediate context of a church—its physical, historical, embodied context—is vital to the life of the church and our role as faith leaders.

All of this resonates with me when I picture a traditional church. Many of the errors of my previous church, I think, stemmed from an indifference to the particularities of local contexts.

But what does all this embodied, contextual ministry mean for faces on a Zoom screen? Or… wait for it… FOR AVATARS IN THE METAVERSE?

Jokes aside, questions of embodiment and physical context strike at much more than online church. They affect all digital connections and communities. At times, I’ve felt I must defend the idea of online church, given some people’s fixation on the all-important neighborhood context. But embodiment and context are still incredibly important for Harbor—they just must be understood and experienced differently.

We each have our own context, and we also share a broader context of Zoom, Facebook, and 21st century post-evangelicalism. We must both attend to our shared online/cultural contexts and strive to connect our online connections to our bodies, neighborhoods, families, and society.

Enter pandemic

Back to my move. Three years ago, a move to Chicago would have been pretty gutting. There would have been a sundering from the people and places I think of as home. But the pandemic has changed things. It’s sort of sad, but it’s also real. I have not been going to these “home” places in the past two years. I have not been seeing or hugging these “home” people. I have been in my apartment, on my computer, forging virtual connections that transcend space and place.

And so, while I’m still a bit excited and scared and curious and sad and happy, this move doesn’t mean now what it would have meant then. I can (slowly, safely) learn new places and meet new people in my new home, while still maintaining—in ways that are more accessible and familiar than ever before—my friendships with loved ones in Pittsburgh.

In years past, this kind of move would have also meant separating from a church family. Needing to start all over with new fellow travelers on the road of faith. But Harbor has changed that. My participation in this community will be unaffected by our move. This fact, while incredibly helpful, is a little unsettling, because it reveals the non-localized nature of church and of human connection.

Unsettling or not, this is the world in which we now live.