Is there a place where I am truly present?  Is there even one place that serves as teacher, as constant reminder, in a remotely similar way to the role places and place-names play in the Western Apache community?  After all, Basso beckons his readers to attend to places.  Actually, more than that, Basso challenges ethnographers and anthropologist to focus their attention and study place at least partly because experiences are situated in time and space.

Basso supports this call by offering his own ethnographic work with the Western Apache.  Specifically, in his chapter on “Speaking With Names,” he illustrates how the place-names themselves can evoke instruction and consolation all at once, simply by speaking the names of places.  The place-names invite the hearer to imagine the places, the images, and the narratives attached to the places without explicitly needing to condemn or rebuke the hearer.  This is all founded on a deep connection to the land, place-names that have been given, and narratives that continue to teach those who remember them, long after the actual event.  Place and language are intricately woven together, not just for the individual, but for the community as a whole.

While I am not part of a community that uses place and place-names to instruct and teach wisdom, one place of constant reflection, as I read Basso’s account, is the canopy of trees behind my house.  I step outside the kitchen to my favorite spot on the back deck as soon as the weather allows and take in the canopy as often as possible.  If it is early enough in the morning, light illuminates and dances upon and even changes the trees, telling its daily story with each sunrise.  Sometimes the leaves are rustling and other times they are still.  A woodpecker is particularly fond of one of the trees and spends its day pecking away as soon as it is warm enough for its return.

I have grown fond of the canopy in all of its expressions.  The bare branches seem to offer just as much insight and company as the vibrant colors of fall, not to mention the budding leaves of spring.  Sometimes I journal or read with the canopy’s company and other times I just sit and take it in.  The canopy teaches me lessons of letting go, lying fallow, and allowing new life to emerge even from what looks and feels like death.  The canopy reminds me that I am part of a living place that is much more than human.  The canopy is a place of steadiness and nurture when I am reeling or when I seem to have lost my way.

The canopy has been my companion as I fell in love underneath it, and as I tried to make sense of the love I found.  A bird has “taken liberties” from this canopy leaving me with a bit of a mess on my shirt, and I’ve been known to sit under an umbrella to avoid other showers (these a bit more welcome, at least.)  My partner and I have invited people into our lives around the table under the canopy.  Sometimes guests notice this great assortment of trees and other times they do not.  Either way, I feel like they are nurtured by it.

If there is any location in which my selfhood is intertwined with placehood (14) that is true under this canopy.  As I read Basso, I found myself asking, what story would these branches evoke?  What would it look like to have a community that learned from and held me accountable to the story of this place?  And yet, I am protected from the world as I sit under this canopy with a tall wooden privacy fence marking off the boundary of the property line.  This is far from a community place holding a narrative that all learn from and evoke as teacher and guide for living.  Perhaps it could be.  Perhaps the story from this canopy has more to offer than what is contained in private on this back deck.

In my own research, I have grown frustrated and impatient at times with the lack of religious voices offering support for different expressions of gender and more specifically for same-sex marriage in the Proposition 8 debate.  While I understand the challenges, I am troubled nonetheless.  And then I recall the canopy that has been my own teacher, under which I am still sitting on the back deck protected from the world around me.  It has been a long slow journey to accept self, accept love, and accept the support that loved ones have offered.  Might I at least share what I have learned?  While impatience and frustration have been helpful as they unsettle me and press me forward, I’m reminded often when I sit under this canopy that this journey has taken time.  How might I offer grace, while prodding and pressing to claim religious language in the same-sex marriage debate?

Basso’s work with the Western Apache challenges me to attend to place in ways that press beyond my prior conceptions.  Specifically, I am challenged to begin with myself and examine places in my own life in addition to determining how I might heed Basso’s plea for ethnographic attention to place in my own research.

Beldon Lane begins his preface describing wounds that never heal.  He writes, “Some wounds – we are grateful to confess—never heal.  They grow with us, festering and prodding, reminding us often that the wound is what grants the storyteller his (or her) narrative power” (ix).  Journeying further into Lane’s work, Landscapes of the Sacred, we sense his wrestling as he pursues the intersections between disciplines, while rejecting constructed boundaries between religion and culture, as Meredith describes.  I would argue that his interdisciplinary approach challenges the boundary between religious studies and theological studies as well.  While Lane teaches theological studies, he does not treat religious studies as threatening to theological discourse.  Instead, he uses the perspectives and theories housed within religious studies scholarship to challenge and examine sacred experiences, particularly the geographical and social placement of those experiences, while at the same time, acknowledging the personal and intrinsic value of those experiences.  He takes up a variety of lenses with which to analyze experiences and places, most particularly experiential, cultural and phenomenological ones, and he actively seeks dialogue with scholars from various disciplines.

Lane is not detached from his subject of study.  He is deeply invested and embedded in it. He often uses his own stories and experiences as his subject.  He continues to make use of his Christian theological heritage, though he is keenly aware of the limits of that lens.  Using Ricouer’s hermeneutic circle that Lane refers to multiple times in the book, Lane is not satisfied with a hermeneutic of suspicion.  Instead, he presses towards the second naiveté where wonder is privileged within theoretical discourse (bibliography).  By engaging this space between wonder and suspicion and weaving in the tools of storytelling and poetry, Lane offers a new way of approaching sacred places challenging previous tensions namely, between religion and culture, that have often been collapsed or abandoned.

As I consider the engagement of diverse religious communities making common cause in the same-sex marriage debate in California, perhaps Lane’s example should be followed, working from a place that is seemingly in-between disciplines.  Like Lane, I arrived at the intersection of religious pluralism and same-sex marriage out of my own passion and wounds.  Much has been written about religion and sexuality as well as religious pluralism in America.  Perhaps a place in-between disciplines needs to be discovered within the intersections among religion, politics, theological studies, pluralism, queer theory and congregational studies.  Perhaps, ignoring this in-between place leaves much important work undone.

What I have discovered is that the religious communities opposed to same-sex marriage  worked diligently to build collaborations, alliances and coalitions.  They overcame previous divides to work together on something they felt was important: protecting the family.  Unfortunately, no corresponding multi-religious coalition existed on the other side.  In fact, religious voices in favor of same-sex marriage were not prominent in the debate.  Apparently the decision was intentional.  The leaders in favor of same-sex marriage did not wish to engage religious debates.   Activists argued that the rift between religious communities and the LGBTQ community was vast enough already, and any discourse about religion among those advocating for same-sex marriage would have been misunderstood by both communities.

Now that I understand the unfolding of events in the same-sex marriage debate in California, the rationale is clear enough. I find it unsettling nonetheless.  I sense a growing need within myself to carve out an in-between place, to press into a scholarly place where religious pluralism, queer theory, and theological and congregational studies can co-mingle and engage in dialogue with one another.  And perhaps developing scholarship is not enough; direct engagement will also be a part of the journey, which seemingly was one of Lane’s primary points.

Lane shared many spiritual experiences of places that had become sacred to him.  I felt them pressing his scholarship forward even as he saw, understood, and wrestled with place as cultural fact, place as contested space, place as a phenomenological reality, and place “a hundred different ways“ (255).  Though the approach felt cluttered at times, his essays in-between the chapters often offered insights, new ways of seeing, that shed new light on my understanding of sacred place.  I am thankful that he stood his ground, that he continued to wrestle with his wounds, and that he risked placing himself inside his own research as he pressed to understand the Landscapes of the Sacred.  Perhaps his example is one to follow in what appears to be the great divide between religion and sexual minorities.