The Way of Wholeness

Hiking up my dorm’s stairs last Sunday evening after several days at home, I sighed. “I feel kind of…”

“Homeless?” filled in my roommate. We laughed off the odd, half-honest idea a moment later, shifting the bags of Pennsylvania-winter clothes we lugged.

Yet perhaps she had a point: a sense of placelessness plagues us. October break reminds college students of their impermanence on campus and at home. Students shuffle habitually to and from places not quite one’s own: school, hometown, eventual unfamiliar “place” of employment.

Marks of such shuffling linger, too, on our culture’s proverbial shoes, spotted but undoubtedly brand-name as they are. In a culture that prizes placelessness, Jeffrey Bilbro, essayist, Wendell Berry expert, and Grove City College professor, contends for localism. Bilbro claimed that modern universities, composed of “migratory” professors, increasingly “uproot students from their local communities.” Homes and hometowns, too, represent not “temporary signposts of our eternal home” but “disposable, extracted resources.” Media, meanwhile, steals allegiances from “embodied communities,” causing emptiness to take the place of place.  

Placeless professors, students, and people abound, perforce, in a society fixated on profit, progress, and prestige, for such pursuits disintegrate roots of any kind. Such pursuits detract from what Berry terms the necessary “sense of belonging to others and to our place.” A disintegrating education, Berry recognizes, only deepens the disintegration natural to a fallen world. Fredrik DeBoer’s notion that “the creeping corporatism of the American university” fragments the academy and those around it parallels, despite DeBoer’s ideological divergence, Berry’s and Bilbro’s sentiments. University Incorporated offers customers not “roots” but a printed pair of new shoes with which to wander without meaning.

Colleges ought not produce shuffling shoes but cultivate placed people. DeBoer imagines that students might accomplish some cultivation through creating “human – as opposed to corporate – campus politics.” Berry judges us lost: “so-called education is leading us nowhere.” Bilbro, however, holds out hope in the “possibility of universities doing the kind of educating for place that local places need.”

Though Berry himself turned his back on the actualized capacity of the American university, Bilbro sustains belief in Berry’s ideal vision of an education that leads “out of our lonely suffering” and into “knowledge of wholeness and of holiness.” Bilbro agrees with Berry “that the prospects are dim, but, as Berry himself would say, one of the obligations of being a people who hope… is that you look for reasons to hope. You try to do good work in spite of grim conditions.” A world wherein the secular academy rejects wholeness and holiness for fragmentation and corruption needs such work despite grimness.

Education must be viewed as a prelude to place (“place,” of course, pertaining to homes both earthly and heavenly). Small, private colleges like Grove City, grounded in a local community and unifying values, can foster such rootedness, Bilbro claims: educators ought to “encourage our students to, as Berry would say, either go back where you’re from or go someplace and stick there.” Instead of inducing students who roam in search of profit, education ought to render students who understand the value of roots in communities both human and divine. 

Both Bilbro’s and Berry’s notions of placed people reverberate in Front Porch Republic, an online and print publication, of which Bilbro is Editor-in-Chief. FPR, according to Bilbro, parallels the porch, a “liminal public-private space” to encounter and dialogue with neighbors. FPR represents such encounters through essays and reviews underlined by the belief in “place, limits, and liberty” (per the site’s tagline), for “true freedom depends on accepting one’s limits and arises from life rooted in place.”

Spaces like FPR and GCC extend the pursuit of “wholeness and of holiness” as a possibility. Yet in college and culture, cultivating placed people seems naïve, for that “homeless” sentiment returns: can we ever be truly “placed,” or does fallen nature preclude rootedness? What good are sanctuaries like FPR and GCC if our world shuffles on regardless? And are such spaces even to be considered sanctuaries untouched by the world’s “lonely suffering?”

Bilbro addressed such questions with Berry’s ideas of complicity and hope. Berry acknowledges, through his autobiographical character Andy Catlett, whose right hand is lost to an agricultural incident, complicity in modern shuffling and suffering, signaling that, according to Bilbro, “none of us is pure; none of us is undamaged.” We are all implicated, guilty of practicing disintegration.  

Bilbro echoes, nonetheless, Berry’s conviction of hope amongst disintegration – hope is both a “gift from God, not something that we earn” and “practicable now” through everyday labors of love. For Berry, expressed by Bilbro, hope holds a final “eschatological vision of wholeness” yet looks for “local, imminent opportunities to do good work.”

We will taste wholeness; we will, one day, know fully, even as we have been fully known. For now, our part lies in cultivating redemptive, rooted communities from college campuses to porches and beyond.   

The views and opinions expressed in this piece are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the values and beliefs of Cogitare Magazine, nor of Grove City College.