Should We Stay or Should We Go?
What Perelandra has to offer to Hannah Coulter
Since starting this magazine, we have shared thoughts on the value of living a rooted life in the same community for your whole life. Ellie shared thoughts on what community actually is and how Wendell Berry views being a part of a local community as a human necessity. Likewise I shared an article praising the great benefits and joys of staying in your hometown instead of moving on to bigger and better places. These articles come out solidly in favor of small town, multi-generational living, and in general those are things that probably don’t get praised and valued enough today. However, there is more than one side to every story, and today I’d like to share with you another viewpoint on the question of place, community, and home.
In an article titled Hannah Coulter, the Green Lady, and Me, Emily Wenneborg writes about her experiences living what Wendell Berry would call an unrooted life. “Through choices not my own, by the time I was ten years old I had lived in three countries on three continents. For me, like many people today, questions about whether to remain or leave are beside the point. There was no family farm in the first place. The first time I truly felt at home in a particular place wasn’t in childhood, but during graduate school.” Reading Hannah Coulter brought her appreciation for those who live and farm in one place their whole life, but she warns against making this into a false and idolized Christian virtue.
I am currently rereading C. S. Lewis’ novel, Perelandra, and Emily Wenneborg uses this story as a helpful contrast to the idea that the right option is always to stay rooted and local. Perelandra, another name for the planet Venus, is an Edenic paradise in which the forbidden fruit is not an apple but remaining on the Fixed Land. Instead, the Green Lady and the King are to live their lives on the many floating islands that populate the rest of planet. This puts them at the mercy of the sea, and leads them to being separated before the start of the novel when two of these islands drift apart. Instead of building a permanent residence with the illusion of control, they are asked to live by faith, confidently trusting that whatever wave God sends their way is going to be the best one.
Perelandra offers much to think about in regards to living a Christian life of faith. Ransom, a man from our world sent to the aid of Perelandra, cannot wrap his mind around a faith and a life entirely at the mercy of the waves. He asks the Green Lady:
“And have you no fear that it will ever be hard to turn your heart from the thing you wanted to the thing Maleldil sends?”
“I see,” said the Lady presently. “The wave you plunge into may be very swift and great. You may need all your force to swim into it. You mean, He might send me a good like that?” (…)
“But are you happy without the King? Do you not want the King?”
“Want him?” she said. “How could there be anything I did not want?”
Without the fall into sin, there truly is nothing that happens to the Green Lady that she should not and does not want. For those of us in this fallen world however, it quite often happens that we are plunged into waves we do not want. But we also are promised by God that He works everything for our good, and thus we ought to trust Him just as much as the Green Lady does, and that means also that we ought to worry less about maintaining our own illusions of control. Emily Wenneborg writes in her article: “Lewis strongly suggests that acquiring a settled habitation may in fact arise from a desire to amass wealth and control, to have a place to hoard material possessions and use them at will,” and “Here, refusing to settle in a single place reflects faithfulness to God’s will regarding property and possessions.”
While these two novels seem to offer contrasting opinions on place and rootedness, they are not distinctly at odds. Rather, Perelandra offers a way of looking at the world that can be incorporated wherever you live. Whether you are blessed to live on a family farm that has been yours for generations, or whether, like Emily, you have moved all over the world and called many places home, we can care for the place God has given us and the people who are there, while keeping a posture of faith that, whatever wave God sends us, and whether He asks us to stay put or to go, He sends us good.
You can, and should, read the whole article comparing these two books, at Plough Magazine.
We are officially open for submissions! If you are a writer, artist, or musician, and have a piece you think would be a good fit here, you can email it to us at mirabiledictumag@gmail.com View our guidelines on our submissions page.