Our landscape affects us more than we may realize

‘Tell me the landscape in which you live, and I will tell you who you are.”

This provocative invitation is from Jose Ortega y Gasset, the highly regarded 20th-centruy Spanish philosopher. I don’t know the context in which he wrote it, but it is a feather that tickles both my imagination and soul.

I was recently reminded of the quote when I received the same e-mail joke twice in the space of one week. The condensed version tells of a man who travels around the country to write a book about various churches he visits.

Beginning in Boston, he found a church that had a golden phone near the front door. A sign says “$10,000 a minute.” He finds the pastor, who explains the phone is a direct line to God, so that is the cost of talking with God.

As he traveled westward, he found many churches with a similar golden phone and the same sign.

Finally he came to the Pacific Northwest and wound up in Sandpoint (OK, use your own community). The church he visited also had a golden phone, but the sign read “Calls: 25 cents.”

He sought out the pastor and asked: “Why did all the other church phones cost $10,000 a minute to speak with God, and yours costs only 25 cents?”

The pastor simply smiled and said, “Well, you’re in the Northwest now – God’s country – so it’s a local call.”

(There is a motel just south of Sandpoint whose marquee says, “Welcome to God’s country hot tub.” Thus, I wonder: Does God have a city hot tub somewhere?)

Summertime is tourist-meeting time in “God’s country.” So many of the visitors I’ve met this summer speak first of the natural beauty that surrounds us – mountains and lakes. The welcoming friendliness of our people is quickly mentioned, too.

So it’s a given that we live in a beautiful part of the country.

What impact does that fact have on our spirituality?

What might our landscape tell Jose Ortega y Gasset about who we are?

This summer, I’ve been rereading Kathleen Norris’ intriguing reflections on spiritual geography titled “Dakota.” It is about how living in South Dakota has helped shape her spirituality.

She invites us to “wrestle the meaning of your life out of the landscape.”

She asks: What can geography teach us about our spirituality? Norris offers some poetic, stirring answers to this and other questions as she reflects on the harshness and desolation of “desert spirituality” in South Dakota.

What might you write about living in the Inland Northwest? You may be in a city, deep in the woods, on a lakeshore, or in view of spectacular mountain scenery.

Wherever we might live, the land has its own way in insinuating itself into the depth of our souls.

Fortunately, we also have an increasing awareness of humanity’s negative impact on the environment.

There is good reason for being contrite about the prodigal (wasteful) way we treat the water, air and land of which we are a part.

Your concern may be strictly local, or it may have a global dimension. Whichever, our egocentric ways almost ensure we think first about how our habits impact nature. Only secondarily do we consider nature’s effect on us.

We rarely think of the place where we live as shaping our spirits in profound ways. But that is where we do well to begin our reflections.

Look at where you live with new eyes of humble gratitude.

The spirit of God always makes itself known to us through the place in which we live.

We may miss God’s visitation, or take it for granted. But that’s our issue, not God’s.

The place in which we live can reconnect us with the divine, both within us and beyond us. No wonder a “call to God” is a local call.