The Wisdom of Stability

You’ll have to forgive the irony, but I read the totality of Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove’s new book The Wisdom of Stability: Rooting Faith in a Mobile Culture while whizzing by train stations and subway stops through New Jersey and New York City.  The picture someone could have taken of me walking through New York Penn Station and up past the busiest pedestrian area in the city, 34th street near Macy’s and the Empire State Building, while holding The Wisdom of Stability would be worth its weight in irony.

Putting my peculiar backdrops and settings for this book aside, Wilson-Hartgrove (W-H) has written a positive, hopeful and optimistic book about a subject that is easier to critique than work with: mobility.  W-H paints a realistic picture of stability that does not look to an idealized past of one horse towns where no one ventures outside the county lines and people are buried in the graveyard’s of churches they are baptized in.  This is not the type of Luddite thinking on stability that celebrates the hobbits admonition that the farthest they’d ever been from the center of the Shire is Farmer Maggot’s fields. Neither does he disparage the irruption of mobile technology unleashing on the world and the ash cloud of multitasking that has followed in its wake. Instead, W-H explores the stability that comes with a rooting in community.

Wilson-Hartgrove weaves real stories from his community life into an exploration of how stability can be the most wise spiritual choice a person can make.  Our Christian culture has bought into the “moving can fix all our problems” mentality.  We have countless pastors who uproot their lives every three years because that is what our Christian “wisdom” has suggested is the best pastoral mode.  W-H suggests that the wise thing to do is stay put in our communities and be the “parish pastor,” caring and nurturing for the people in our communities over a long period of time.

The author’s tone and style in this book is very indebted to Kathleen Norris, author of Acedia and Me (my review here), who wrote the foreword to the book.  Like Acedia and Me, The Wisdom of Stability ends with an appendix of wisdom from the Scriptures and the church fathers and mothers up to contemporary saints concerning stability.  The wisdom W-H espouses in his book, a wisdom of stability in a complicated, fast moving and mobile world, can be summed up in the final lines of a poem by Pierre Teilhard de Chardin (found in the appendix): “Above all, trust in the slow work of God, / our loving vine-dresser.”

The Wisdom of Stability: Rooting Faith in a Mobile Culture
Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove
Paraclete Press
$10.19 (Amazon)