Essay

Culture

Re-enchanting

11 April 2023

7 min read

A place on Earth

Pondering the power of a place, Elizabeth Wainwright believes it roots us and asks us to play our part here and beyond.

Elizabeth Wainwright

Elizabeth Wainwright is a writer, coach and walking guide. She's a former district councillor and has a background in international development.

A ploughed field of red soil is in the foreground, sloping down into a valley with a track and green fields beyond

Red Devon soil near South Hams.

Tony Atkin, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

“Different places on the face of the earth have different vibrations, different polarity with different stars. Call it what you like, but the spirit of place is a great reality.”

DH Lawrence

I hoped it would be a David and Goliath story – big national developers, small local community, the community wins, the developers leave town. Instead, the application for almost 300 uninspired and loveless houses passed despite concerns over affordability, wildlife enhancement, and lack of green infrastructure. As an elected District Councillor, I spoke my concerns alongside residents. Some improvements were made, but the story is now a familiar one: the planning committee recognised the concerns, but felt their hands were tied – if they refused permission, the wealthy developer would appeal, and probably win, and our District Council would have to pay costs from its ever-dwindling budget.

Developers are invested financially in a place, but not relationally or ecologically. The land becomes a blank canvas; the otters, oaks and fertile soils are an inconvenience which can be replaced with some token tree planting and bat boxes afterwards, in the name of ‘development’ (a slippery idea that is often interpreted as profit rather than value). The layers of the place – of farming and memory, of community and care and stories through seasons – are invisible to distant developers, but not to those who have eyes to see.

I have been trying to see the layers in these Devon lands where the soils are red, and where the farmers are still “buried deep in their valleys, in undateable cob-walled farms…connected by the inexplicable, Devonshire high-banked, deep-cut lanes…” as poet Ted Hughes observed. Unearthing the layers of a place can lead to topophilia – a bond we feel with its emotion, memory, geography, heritage. I’ve felt pulled instantly to places before – Scottish islands, Zambian savannahs (the pull to Zambia eventually led me to live and work there, and now I feel folded into its red soils just as I am into the red soils of Devon). But I think topophilia is different, more gradual, a slow intertwining of roots as a place becomes known to us. Whether instant pull or slow-burning topophilia, I’ve been thinking about place, and why it matters.

When the global is often more glamorous than the quiet hush of the deeply rooted local, knowledge of and respect for place feels rebellious but vital.

God’s first words to humans were to Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden near the Tree of Life: “Where are you?” They were hiding, ashamed of their nakedness. He could not find them. Where are you? In an increasingly remote and rootless age, with access to everyone and everything 24/7 yet loneliness still on the rise, perhaps this question is one to consider anew. When borderless corporations can be more influential than governments, and when the global is often more glamorous than the quiet hush of the deeply rooted local, knowledge of and respect for place feels rebellious but vital. Kentucky farmer and author Wendell Berry knows this:

“…one cannot live in the world; that is, one cannot become, in the easy, generalizing sense with which the phrase is commonly used, a "world citizen." There can be no such thing as a "global village." No matter how much one may love the world as a whole, one can live fully in it only by living responsibly in some small part of it. Where we live and who we live there with define the terms of our relationship to the world and to humanity.”

I have long admired Berry’s writing, and his choice to care for a patch of Kentucky land. His is no bucolic rural idyll – his, for decades, has been a cry for re-rooting and for neighbourliness, because “it all turns on affection” and because that is how the world is made and remade; through imperfect places and the encounters in them. We are situated in a landscape, and it is through this particularity that we engage with creation. We exist at the scale of human relationship, in this place, amongst these people, in this time. The grass may seem greener elsewhere, but the grass here is green nonetheless – and greener still when I stare at it, and get curious about it, and get to know the many years and hands that have tended it, and take part in tending it myself.

The cornerstone of the Christian story is that Jesus came into the world as a human. And humans exist in place. In the short documentary Godspeed, Alan Torrance – a giant, kilted, red-haired Scottish man – shared that the reason he came to believe in Jesus as an adult was not because of theology or preaching, but because of the scale of the map in the back of a Bible. The map depicted the area where Jesus lived – the north edge of the sea of Galilee. It was the same scale as the place Alan lived in Scotland. He knew that relationship and community mattered (“we’re not rich folk, but to me you’re poor if you cannot offer hospitality”) – he knew that Jesus would have been found out if he were a fraud. God didn’t just come into the world; he came into a place built on relationships. It wasn’t theology that changed Alan’s mind about Jesus, it was a map of a particular place.

Nature writing… a genre that explores the natural world, often through authors’ relationship to particular places, and often touching on the numinous and unseen.

In the Bible and I think in life, God – or some sense of the divine – is often encountered not only in a particular place, but in the natural world there – a garden, a burning bush, a desert wilderness. Throughout the Bible from Genesis on, we are called in different ways to care for the natural world, to treat it as a gift, to treat it as if God might be found there. But it is often the secular world that most passionately calls us to reconnect, to care, to pay attention to the natural world. I’ve seen this in campaigns, in popular media, and in ‘nature writing’ which takes a prominent place in bookshops; it’s a genre that explores the natural world, often through authors’ relationship to particular places, and often touching on the numinous and unseen. The Bible could easily be classified as nature writing, or place writing, or poetry – writing of wonder that might re-enchant us in a tired age – but instead it is restricted to the religion or theology shelves, and its wild rooted transcendence goes unheard by people of faith and no faith.

That rooted transcendence that I see in the Bible is something I see in the places I know too. The root of the world ‘parish’ links to both ‘neighbour’ and ‘soujourner’ – ideas that speak simultaneously of being here and reaching beyond. My parish in Devon asks me to listen, to know, to be known – to be a neighbour. But it also asks me to use the nourishment of these deepening roots to reach, to not cling too tightly to ideas of ownership, to face the world and offer love. Berry says,

“I take literally the statement in the Gospel of John that God loves the world. I believe that the world was created and approved by love, that it subsists, coheres, and endures by love, and that, insofar as it is redeemable, it can be redeemed only by love. I believe that divine love, incarnate and indwelling in the world, summons the world always toward wholeness…"

I think knowing our place is important today – because it roots us, and asks us to play our part in the ongoing incarnation of love.

The wholeness and healing of the world depends on love incarnate and indwelling. Love is not a theology, or a card on Valentine’s day, or any of the other packages it gets squashed into. Love created the world, and has the power to keep doing so if we let it. Love dwells incarnate in a place, in the people and encounters in that place – it can be messy and confronting as well as life-giving and transforming. We draw from and add to its deep well, and by doing so, heal the world starting right where we are. That’s why I think knowing our place is important today – because it roots us, and asks us to play our part in the ongoing incarnation of love, and so in the ongoing becoming of the world.

My discovering the world has included travelling and working throughout it – but now the discovery comes through a small imperfect parish in a district in Devon that is shining and struggling all at once, where stories run deep. My husband and I and our soon-to-arrive baby are beginning to hear them. I feel layers of emotion, history, and memory here; I am trying to invest in its hope and reality, to be present in its here-ness and now-ness. I will always love visiting new places and feel a pull to other places. But in this place, when I look and listen and know and be known, I find love indwelling and incarnate. It’s in the hedges, the neighbours, the birds that sit and sing about things we can’t hear, the communities that come together to resist placeless loveless development. It’s in the foodbank, the fields, the relationships that can start off challenging but which soften and deepen over time and despite difference. At a time when I think God is asking us again “where are you?” how good to be able to answer, here, in this imperfect place, where love dwells.

Review

Culture

Music

Politics

25 July 2025

6 min read

As the congregation gathers Bruce Springsteen leans hard into hope

Chords of confrontation and communion

Elizabeth Wainwright

Elizabeth Wainwright is a writer, coach and walking guide. She's a former district councillor and has a background in international development.

Bruce Springsteen crouches down and holds a hand out to a sea of outstretched hands

Springsteen plays Manchester.

Brucespringsteen.net.

I finally got to experience a Bruce Springsteen concert recently. Which is to say, for three hours, I touched a land of hope and dreams.

We walked along a canal to get to the arena – my husband, my father-in-law, and me –Manchester shimmered with the arrival of summer, and light bounced off red brick and still water. We neared the arena and the air felt dense with anticipation. T Between us we carried heartbreaks, elections, hopes, failures, and a collective return to music that had accompanied and clarified it all. We were drawn by loyalty and nostalgia and joy, but also I sensed by a hope that Bruce would meet the moment — the frayed, furious, anxious now — with something that mattered.

We found our seats and gripped our drinks as the lights dimmed. Thousands of people stopped individual conversations, and hushed, and then joined voices into a deep and reverent chant. “Bruuuuuuuce”. To my right, the glow of a screen, the woman holding it sending a text – “yes babe, 1pm, lovely” – and it seemed incongruent and true. In the tension before the release, in the dark before the light, we hold our breath even as the ordinary carries on. The ordinary carries on even as the world fractures and glows. The ordinary is what Bruce often sings of, it is one reason why fans feel heard and seen by him. That night though, all the ordinaries he sang of formed something extraordinary.

Then there was light, and Bruce walked slowly from the side to the front of the stage, his guitar suspended across his body, his face a relaxed, broad smile, his bandmates and companions beside and behind him. Then there was music. No videos, no pyrotechnics; just old songs that felt as if they existed for the now. My City of Ruins, Death to My Hometown, Land of Hope and Dreams, The Promised Land. The song Long Walk Home was introduced as a “prayer to my country”. It is a country that he embodies, despairs of, and loves. He sings of his home with fury, sorrow, tenderness, and love.

Riffs and rhythms that were decades old were being made urgent again. Springsteen’s music holds both grit and glory, and hard-won joys leave space for sorrow. I write this and lines by Mary Oliver come to mind: “We shake with joy, we shake with grief / what a time they have these two / housed as they are in the same body.” What a time they had, joy and grief, that night with Bruce.

The evening unfolded not as spectacle but as liturgy; all of us involved in something like devotion – in part to Bruce, but also to moral clarity, to the power of poetry, to the promise of who we could be. At times the crowd seemed silent, ushered into something deeper – not entertainment or escapism, but something like confrontation and communion. We were being offered the joy of music and memory, but also an opportunity to reckon with who we are.

Between songs, Bruce spoke. He apparently rarely does so in his gigs. His voice slowed and deepened – not chit chat, not to entertain, but to bear witness and stand defiant and call us to the best versions of ourselves. “I’ve spent my life singing about where we’ve succeeded and come up short in pursuit of our civic values,” he said. “I just felt that was my job.” He proceeded to describe how those values are being torn apart, and why they matter. The crowd roared. He was making civic values shine, speaking about them with urgency. He acknowledged both the dream and the failure, but still he believes in the promised land and he asks us to as well. Before he belted out Rainmaker, he said, “when conditions in a country are right for a demagogue, you can bet one will show up.” He spoke of America, and really of the world – what it is, what it is becoming. His honesty and poetic rage situated us, then became a map for how to keep going.

We can be glad to be alive even while we are honest about sorrow, injustice, broken politics, fractured families, and tired hearts.

I found myself wondering: why is it that Bruce can sing and speak about justice, warped politics, and who we are becoming, and be met with cheers, while so many churches avoid doing so, preferring instead to whisper in neutral tones while the world burns? That night, I stood in a crowd of thousands and I heard a kind of moral clarity that orientates the soul and made me cry. It wasn’t partisan, it was human. Why can it feel riskier to speak specifically and prophetically in a sermon than in a stadium? I wonder if it’s because Springsteen has always rooted his politics in people’s real lives – in work, family, grief, memory. He doesn’t gesture toward abstract ideologies for fear of alienating people, or in the hope of retaining fans: he tells stories and gives names to problems and injustices, singing about crooked institutions, boarded-up factories, buses that never come, lovers who don’t come back.

The evening felt, for me, like the kind of church I long for and sometimes touch: no tidy answers, no insincere lyrics, no vague calls for justice, but rather honesty and specificity and the chance to stand alongside strangers and feel something challenging, beautiful, true.

I scribbled a question as the music soared: can a chord be mystical? Because that’s how it felt. As if there are progressions – minor then major, dissonance into harmony – that can reach past language and speak directly to the part of us that longs for love more than cynicism, to the part of us that still dares to hope even when there is very little obvious reason to do so, to the part of us wondering how to be truly alive.

Near the end, Bruce quoted the American writer James Baldwin:

“In this world, there isn’t enough humanity as one would hope. But there’s enough.”

There’s enough. It was a small phrase but it hung in the air like incense. For Bruce, there is enough humanity to keep singing for, and about. Now, he seemed to ask the crowd, what will you do with that enoughness, with that humanity?

In the final stretch, Bruce leaned hard into hope with songs like The Rising and Born to Run. The energy in the room felt like resistance – not against something, but for something. He didn’t pretend everything’s fine, but he sang anyway. “It ain’t no sin to be glad you’re alive.”

We can be glad to be alive even while we are honest about sorrow, injustice, broken politics, fractured families, and tired hearts. Gladness is being asked to stand its ground now, and to do something with our improbable aliveness. For the final song, Bruce played Bob Dylan’s Chimes of Freedom. It is a song about lightning and exiles and freedom, about the trembling of the soul and about a sky that “cracked its poems in naked wonder.” He sang it slowly, tenderly, like a prayer – which can also be a trembling of the soul, a song of naked wonder. Perhaps he prayed to God, perhaps to some other sacred thing: our better angels, or the fragile hope of who we might yet become.

In a BBC documentary about Bruce Springsteen’s history with the UK, someone says “there’s something in Bruce fans, you know you can implicitly trust them.” As we filed out of the arena, it felt like 25,000 of us briefly knew each other, trusted each other, could take on the world together. Perhaps we just had.

Soon it was just me, my husband, my father-in-law, and the silent dark canal as we walked back into the night. We were tired, we were awake. I thought of Bruce’s belief in the promised land, and of Baldwin’s line: there’s not enough humanity, but there’s enough. These are beliefs that can feel risky. So can belief in God. But enough is plenty. Enough can turn up the volume and let the spirit be our guide. With 25,000 other people, I’d turned that volume up and I could hear the spirit defiant, unifying, guiding. It is – has always been – time to go and sing of it, despite everything.