Rootless

I read an article in a local newsletter lamenting the state of the church. In it, the author reflected on the church of his youth, where he learned not only the Confiteor in Latin but also what it means to have community. The lament: the church of his youth was gone— so rare it is to find an actual, committed churchgoer these days. 

Not that there isn’t reason for it. Women have been restricted in the church from the outset. Yes, they may have been allowed to attend mass, but they’ve never been allowed to hold higher roles (at least in the Catholic Church). Men who commit their lives to the church are not allowed to marry, despite the church’s supposed positive stance on family values. 

These disconnects, among other defects, are the reason why people have strayed from the church. The teachings no longer feel like the balm needed. There’s something missing.

And there is, there always has been. 

It’s more than the treatment of women, or the reduction of them to either saints or sinners in the Bible.

It’s a disconnect from Source itself. 

The book of Genesis says “And God said, “Let Us make man in Our image, after Our likeness; and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth.”

Scholars have debated over the meaning of “dominion over,” translated from the Hebrew radah, suggesting that “govern,” “stewardship,” or “care for” may have been closer to the original meaning.

This would have been more in line with the ancients who came before the church. For all the problems they had, a lack of place and community were not one of them. They understood the seasons, watched for their subtle changes. They knew which plants would heal them, what to look out for. 

They didn’t live in isolated houses, but knew their neighbors— quite literally, they couldn’t live without them.

This doesn’t mean you need to knock on your neighbor’s door and become their bestie. It means cultivating our own sense of community— whatever that looks like— and a great starting point is to identify our sense of place: noticing where we live and the subtle shifts that happen there. 

Some of my favorites are: going for long walks, watching the sunrise (its horizontal point changes based on the time of year), or simply working or reading outside. All of this can be done solo or with friends. I do both, depending on the day.

Our sense of rootlessness is a sign of shifting times, and we get to decide where it is we’d like to put roots down. It’s an invitation to find the ground again, literally and metaphorically. 

What the church offered—community, ritual, a sense of belonging—we can find again. Not in buildings or doctrine, but in the earth beneath our feet and the people who share it with us.