given 10/26/17 at the Lutheran School of Theology at Chicago
I grew up in Vermont, on a dirt road off another dirt road. Place for me was always rooted in the soil, in the dappled shadow from maple trees, and winding roads.
My mom grew up on the beaches of New Jersey – her tactile memory passed onto me is of gritty sand and powerful crashes of water.
My mom also grew up in Chicago, which was the start of my coming to this place. She was here in the late sixties and early seventies, while my grandfather, Ralph Holmin, was teaching religious education at LSTC.
My grandfather would walk between the seminary and their house on Woodlawn, daily life marked by seasons and the diverse population that has always made up Hyde Park.
After spending a lot of time in theater rehearsal rooms, my body has become attuned to the memory of a space. Rúben, my academic and artistic mentor during undergrad, spoke openly and often of how spaces physically transform and remember the energy and work that was done in them – I know that our main classroom felt different at the end of the year than at the beginning. It felt vulnerable, and creative, and full of life.
I lived abroad for three years before moving to Chicago, and one consequence of that is I have moments where memory takes over my body – a feeling so real that my brain takes a second to remember where I physically am, because the wash of emotional and spiritual memory is so strong.
Which is an experience that’s difficult to articulate, because it directly counters what I’ve learned about embodied existence. In that moment, when I actively work to remind myself where I physically am, what ground my feet are on, I can feel the Spirit passing by me.
It sometimes happens here, in this place, especially on the second and third floors, where the architecture speaks back decades. That experience is really unnerving, because it encompasses an embodied truth that isn’t true in the logical sense. It feels like I have spent time in this place already, grounded, conflicting with the lived experience of being a newcomer in this place. It is both known and unknown, a third thing that is both/and.
And it feels mystical, and of the Spirit, how this visceral body memory, connected to my grandfather, exists. It speaks to collective memory, and collective trauma. It means that my body and heart remember lived knowledge even when my brain disputes the facts. It acknowledges connections between temporal and physical space. It breathes radical life into the narratives of alienation and separation that surround us.
Reed Fowler 