There exists in our modern world a peculiar paradox, which, like all proper paradoxes, contains within it a profound truth. It is this: that in an age of unprecedented mobility, when man can traverse continents in hours and switch careers as easily as he changes his gender, the most radical act has become the simple art of remaining still. This is not the stillness of death or stagnation, but rather the vigorous stillness of a tree, which, while appearing motionless to the casual observer, is engaged in the constant and miraculous work of transforming sunlight and soil into life. The modern world, with all its marvelous innovations, has performed a distressing yet marvelously successful sleight of hand. It has convinced us that progress necessarily means movement, that success demands constant relocation, and that wisdom is only ever found by endlessly seeking new horizons. This is, I submit, wonderfully backwards, like suggesting that the best way to read a book is to continuously shuffle its pages, or that a garden grows better if it is repeatedly transplanted. 

Saint Benedict, that great Patriarch of the West and architect and father of Western monasticism and Europe herself, understood that profound truth when he laid down in his Rule that keystone vow of stability. In his Rule he warns, and properly attacks those monks—the worst kind of monks to our Holy Father—who “always wandering and never stable” seek God through constant movement. They in their foolishness seek God in the roaring wind and the earthquake and roaring fire of movement. But that most sage Custodian of the West bound his sons to a place, understanding that the deepest and most useful of journeys are those that require no physical movement. As he legislates in his Rule, “Let the monastery be, if possible, so constructed that all necessary things, such as water, mill, garden, bakery, and various crafts may be exercised within the monastery, so that there shall be no need for monks to wander outside, because it is not at all profitable for their souls.” Why should we poor laity not follow as far as we can this most prudent law? Shall we put before the salvation of our souls the allure of the world in far away and greener pastures?

Our friend Wendell Berry, our sage of Kentucky who has done more than perhaps any other to illuminate the virtue of place, understood this with the kind of clarity that comes only from decades of faithful attention to a single patch of earth. He echoes that ancient wisdom when he writes that “the past is our definition. We may strive, with good reason, to escape what is bad in it, but we will escape it only by adding something better.” This addition of “something better” requires, paradoxically, the courage and fortitude to stay still long enough to understand what needs changing, not, just as Chesterton said, to knock down a wall before we know why it is there. And how else to know why it is there but to see the land and the community and learn why it was there.  He knew, as our ancestors knew, that there is something fundamentally human about putting down roots, about knowing and being known by a particular community, about watching the seasons change over the same fields year after year until the very landscape becomes a kind of calendar written in hills and trees. Yet Berry continues to build from this insight when he writes, “A properly scaled economic life would enable use to realize that the great problems of our time…must be met by people not by machines, and by people not in armies but in communities and households” and if I may be so bold to add not through bureaucracies. This cannot happen if we are constantly moving, if our communities are merely temporary assemblages of individuals passing through, they cannot be a highway of people passing through, but a true garden of life.

Yet what do our great teachers of the Church tell us? St Thomas Aquinas, our common teacher and doctor, provides us with a philosophical framework to expand and flesh out this virtue of stability. In his exposition of the nature of fortitude, he notes that the greater courage lies not in dramatic action but in patient endurance, in longanimitas that is long suffering. “Endurance is more perfect than aggression […] and more difficult. For it is more difficult to endure dangers for a long time than to be moved to aggress them.” For just as certainly as we live in the City of Man and not the City of God, our cities remain wedded to the prince of darkness; but it is not this city or that city that is wedded and ruled to the city of man. It is not even that cities are according to their natures cesspools of vice that must be avoided, for the country is no better. For the exact reason that it is not the cities or the countries that are cesspools of vice, but rather humanity itself is pulling down what ought to be an image of that Heavenly Jerusalem that St. John saw descending out of heaven as a bride coming to her groom. There is no refuge, no Benedict Option of fleeing the vice of the world, since no matter where we flee, we bring the stain of sin with us.

Yet then what is to be done? His Holiness, Pope Pius VI, of happy memory, understood well the danger of attempting to abstract ourselves from communities. He warned—during the horrors and injustices of the French Revolution—against ignoring the City of Man we must try and save. In his brief “Quod Aliquantum’” from A.D. 1791,  he warned against the temptation to think of ourselves as abstract, individualized citizens rather than a necessary member of a community with concrete and real obligations and relationships. St. Augustine, a thousand years before, provides an even more striking and beautiful explanation when he wrote of the two loves that build the two cities of God and of Man. The earthly city is built by love of self to the contempt and hatred of God, given form through restless movement and endless acquisition. The heavenly city of God is built by love of God to the hatred of self, and is given form by the sacred stability, by a willingness to be one, to love what is at hand, to love what God has in His eternal goodness placed before us. What a challenge to be given us in this age now! What a glorious undertaking God calls us to, to love our broken places and our broken neighbors that we may—as with our spouses and friends—“help them get to heaven.”

But why, you might ask, should this matter particularly to the laity? After all, isn’t it precisely the gift of our modern age that we need not be bound by geography? That we can seek opportunity and novelty wherever it might be found? Yet as with many freedoms offered us by our modern age, we must be careful, for there is a trap hidden behind the sheep’s clothing, a subtle confusion between freedom and rootlessness. Consider the paradox of the monastery wall. To the modern mind, it appears as a constraint, a disastrous and unacceptable limitation on freedom. Yet to the monk who lives within it, it becomes the very condition of his freedom – the boundary that makes depth possible. The layperson’s stability, while different in form, has a similar substance and is identical in purpose. It is not a prison but a garden wall, marking out the space where love can grow, where as Chesterton wrote we can play without fear of the cliffs, for it allows us a holy boldness, almost a holy insanity. This brings us once more to a paradox, that true stability is not the enemy of change but its prerequisite. The man who is always moving never truly changes; he simply exchanges one surface for another. He is never changed by any wind, he is a rock carried in his own pocket, safe but not ascending nor helping others to ascend. It is only by resting that we can dig through the earth to find the life-giving stream. As Berry puts it with characteristic candor: “The soil is the great connector of lives, the source of destination of all […] without proper care for it we can have no community, because without proper care for it we can have no life.” And just as one cannot care for one’s wife without knowing her and being with her, so too if you are not married to your place, how will you know what is needed by her so that she may grow in “stature and wisdom before God and man?”

In my adventures through our city, I have observed that the most interesting shops are without exception those that have stood in the same spot for generations. They have not remained unchanged – indeed, they have had to adapt constantly to survive – but they have done so from a position of stability. They have grown like trees, expanding in rings of experience while remaining rooted in the same soil. Berry understood this when he wrote of the “vocation of place.” A vocation, properly understood, is not merely a job but a calling, a summons to a particular work in a particular place. The modern world has largely forgotten this, treating places as interchangeable containers for human activity rather than as distinct and irreplaceable contexts for true human living.

But let us be clear: this is not an argument for universal rural life or a wholesale rejection of mobility. Rather, it is a plea for the recognition that stability – whether in a city apartment or a country farm – is not a mere economic choice but a spiritual discipline, one that we the laity especially need in our fractured age. For how can we build up Holy Mother Church, and specifically our parish, if we are constantly moving and constantly having to begin again in knowing the place? Our parish is the method by which we attain the beatitude of heaven, it is our central locus of life. We must know her inside and out, to know the seasons when the fathers need more help taking care of the ground, to know when we need to close the windows of the church to avoid the yells of children playing outside, to know when our church moves so that we may move with her and most importantly move with her closer in unity with The Truth.

Think of how we speak of “settling down” as if it were a kind of defeat, a resignation to lesser things. This is precisely backward. To settle is not to sink but to commit, not to resign but to engage. It is to say to a place and a community: “Here I will learn the lessons that only time and attention can teach. Here I will learn to love what is not immediately lovable, to find interest in what appears ordinary, to discover depth in what seems shallow.” The great mistake of our age has been to confuse mobility with freedom and restlessness with growth. We have created a world where the ability to leave is valued above the courage to stay, where the new is automatically preferred to the known, where “expanding horizons” is always assumed to mean moving rather than deepening. But consider: the person who has lived in the same neighborhood for thirty years knows things that no tourist can ever discover. They know which gardens bloom first in spring, which neighbors need checking on during heat waves, which local politics really matter. This is not boring knowledge – it is vital knowledge, the kind that builds resilient communities and sustainable lives.

And here we arrive at perhaps the most important point: stability is not merely an individual virtue but a social one. When people stay put, they invest in their communities not just with their money but with their lives. They develop what Berry calls “membership” – a belonging that goes beyond mere residence to encompass responsibility and love. The laity, living in the world as they do, have a particular calling to this kind of stability. While the clergy may be called to serve wherever they are sent, the laity have the opportunity – indeed, the vocation – to become deep experts in particular places, to be the living memory and conscience of their communities.

I shall not say that no one should ever move or that all movement is wrong. Rather, it is to suggest that stability should be our default, wandering the exception that requires justification. We should treat our places as we treat our marriages – not as temporary arrangements to be abandoned when convenient, but as commitments that shape our identity and demand our fidelity, as true obligations that bind us with ropes are not easily escaped. In our time, such stability might seem like a kind of madness. The market demands mobility, careers demand flexibility, and our culture celebrates the perpetual traveler, the global citizen, the person who is from everywhere and therefore from nowhere. But it is more tragic that having seen the beauty of God throughout the world we have nowhere that is ours, no place is as familiar to us as the face of our love. But perhaps this is precisely why stability has become so radical and so necessary.

The stable person, the one who has accepted that fundamental call of humankind to bring forth abundance from the land, who lays down deep roots into a particular place and community, becomes an anchor in our rushing world. They become, in Berry’s wonderful phrase, “placed persons,” people whose identity is inextricably linked to particulars not generalities, and who are richer for it. This stability manifests itself in countless small ways: in knowing the best season to plant tomatoes in this particular climate, in understanding the unwritten rules of local courtesy, in remembering the history that official histories forget. They reveal themselves in the ability to see beauty in the routine, to find adventure in the familiar, to discover that the ordinary, when attended to with love and patience, reveals itself as extraordinary.

For the laity, this stability becomes a form of witness. In a world that worships mobility and novelty, the person who stays put, who tends the same garden year after year, who knows their neighbors’ stories, who participates in the slow work of community-building, they bear witness to a different set of values. They testify to the possibility of finding infinity in limitation, of discovering the universal in the particular, of finding the transcendent in the immanent.

And here we return to our paradox: that in an age of universal mobility, the most radical act has become staying put. But now we can see that this is not really a paradox at all, rather a profound truth about human nature. We are not meant to be perpetual wanderers but pilgrims who, having found our place, dig wells from which others may drink and lay down strong roots that others may lean on. The challenge for the laity in our time is not to see how far we can range but how deep we can go. Not how many places we can visit but how well we can know and love one place. Not how many connections we can make but how many relationships we can nurture to maturity. This is not an easy calling. It requires an insanity, a kind of courage that our age neither recognizes nor celebrates – the courage to be still, to be known not by many but known well by few, to be local in a global world. But it is, I would argue, the true vocation of our time. For in a world that is increasingly virtual and rootless, increasingly lost and despondent, the person who has learned the art of stability becomes a sign of contradiction and a source of hope. 

Let us then celebrate this stability not as a constraint but as a liberation, not as a resignation but as a revolution. Let us recognize that in choosing to stay put, in committing to our place and our community, we are not limiting our horizons but rather discovering the infinite depths that can only be found through faithful attention to the particular. For in the end, as Chesterton might say, the most fantastic journey is not to exotic lands but to the place we already are, seen with eyes that have been taught to recognize the miracle of the ordinary, the adventure of staying put, the radical act of being still.