Redeeming Adam’s Thorns

Physical Space and the Spiritual Life

In the summer of 2021, I spent some time weeding our church’s landscaping bed along Fifth Avenue. It was sweaty, dirty work, and unrewarding work too. At the time, our sanctuary was still under construction. The only people who would see the fruits of my labor were waiting at the bus stop (and dropping fast food wrappers in the bushes).

I later spoke about it in an offertory, because it was a positive experience for me. Although the weeds came back, and we later hired a landscaping company to maintain the grounds, I was physically present on our corner in a way that I had never been before. I met some of our unhoused neighbors. I waved to the people who lived across the street. I was there in a new way.

It also gave me a front-row seat to what our physical space is like for our neighbors. In the summer, the heat of the concrete jungle is unrelenting, and the only refuge from the sun in a few blocks is the shade of our magnolia tree. But it’s hard to access that shade, given that the base of the tree was (at the time) full of a leafy, clump-forming plant, and bordered by thorny barberry bushes. I wondered then, and I wonder now, how it could be more hospitable. I also wonder how the space was and is forming my relationship to our neighbors—especially since I was terribly inconsistent in my weeding endeavors and gradually stopped showing up during the week. 

Last week, Phil wrote about what physical space tells us—the “language of buildings.” In the rest of this reflection, I want to briefly consider how physical space forms us. Ultimately, I want to explore how we might participate in the work of redemption by bringing all things—including our material spaces—into the shalom of the kingdom of God.

First, what counts as spiritual formation? It’s easy to see how our explicitly Christian practices form us. Taking the Eucharist every Sunday, for example, continues to remind us of the death and resurrection of Jesus. It’s a repeated reminder how Jesus is resurrecting us in our everyday lives. We’re used to thinking of these liturgies as spiritually formative, after all.

But as the theologian James K. A. Smith shows us in his book Desiring the Kingdom, so-called “non-religious” practices can form us too.¹ We have “cultural liturgies,” Smith says—think of them as the secular equivalents of taking the Eucharist on Sunday. They unconsciously tell us who we are and what we love. Those cultural liturgies, like sacred liturgies, can be transformative, but they can also be deformative. Smith describes the American mall as a potentially deformative liturgy: repeatedly shopping at the mall as a form of recreation tells us who we are (consumers) and what we love (material possessions). Without even realizing it, we might begin to believe the story that the mall is telling us about the purpose of life: to consume products for our own pleasure.

Smith stresses that these liturgies are embodied. Put another way, we learn these liturgies through what we do with our bodies, not just what we believe with our minds. Just as the Eucharist is an embodied story that tells us who Jesus is—through the very physical act of eating the bread and wine—so all liturgies are embodied stories that tell us what to love through what we physically do.

So, let’s take that one step further: How else might the Christian life be embodied, not just in what we do, but in the physical spaces we inhabit? How do our material surroundings form us spiritually?

I know that’s really abstract, so let me start with an example. Say you’ve got two houses: one house has a back porch with a fenced-in yard, and one house has a large front porch with a view of the street and the sidewalk. How might these houses form you and your relationships differently? Well, if you sit on the front porch, you’re more likely to see your neighbors and greet their kids. You might notice who walks to the bus stop every day. You might even see an unhoused neighbor with a backpack full of their belongings.

But if you sit on the back porch, you’ll be insulated from the world around you. Your fence will block your neighbors from view. You’ll see only the space that you’ve curated. There are no unhoused people here. It might be nice, but it won’t be shared—except by the people that you hand-select to join you. 

Now, I’m not saying that front porches are inherently better than back porches! But nevertheless, these physical structures shape our view of the world in implicit ways. They shape our relationships with our neighbors and our sense of what theologian Willie Jennings calls “our shared thriving.” And as Jennings points out, social and physical structures that isolate us from one another can have a corrosive spiritual effect. 

As Phil wrote in last week’s post, Christians have always considered physical space to be important for our spiritual lives. They tell us something about God and the life of faith. Just look at the ancient cathedrals of Europe. They were built to focus our attention and form us spiritually through beautiful art-based storytelling like stained glass, just as our own sanctuary was designed to focus our spiritual attention. In our own church building, the Cross takes center stage—literally! The Table where we participate in the sacrament of the Lord’s Supper is also a focal point in the room. The physical space orients us, again and again, to the centrality of who Jesus is and what he did for us—and what he is still doing today. 

But while we chose to design our sanctuary in a spiritually formative way, much of the All Souls building and outdoor space is relatively unchanged from its past as a AAA building. How might it have been built for purposes other than our own? How might it be forming us—in the wrong direction?

Take one simple example: the bushes on the north end of our building, along Fifth Avenue. They look pleasant in the summer and winter. They have nice red berries and interesting red leaves. Paired with mulch, grass, and our magnolia tree, our yard looks neat and well-curated.

But if we look a bit closer, we begin to see the purpose behind this built environment. The bushes are a species of barberry, prized in landscaping not because they’re beautiful, but because they’re easy to grow and maintain in the punishing heat of an urban environment. They’re convenient. And they also have thorns. In the downtown area, thorn bushes have the added bonus of discouraging our unhoused neighbors from finding a private spot to sleep, relieve themselves, or discard their needles.

Unsurprisingly, there’s a cost for convenience. Japanese barberry have been banned or regulated in some states because they are an invasive species in the U.S. and harbor ticks. Some research has indicated that the presence of barberry bushes correlates with a rise of Lyme’s disease, a disease carried by ticks. In our current context, I can’t help but see them as a literal representation of the curse of Adam: the ground “will produce thorns and thistles for you” (Gen. 3:18). 

Now, I doubt that the original designers of this landscaping intended to plant something that is actively harmful to our environment and our neighbors. But, as Hannah Arendt argues in Eichmann in Jerusalem, evil can be insidious and pervasive precisely because it is banal and thoughtless. And our country has a long history of thoughtlessness. In fact, I strongly believe that one of the original sins of our culture is our thirst for thoughtless expansion. We have often built structures that are great for (some) humans and are terrible for what St. Francis of Assisi called our “brothers and sisters” of creation: the animals, birds, bugs, bees, and even the very soil beneath our feet. “Cursed is the ground because of you,” God says to Adam in the Garden (Gen. 3:17). 

These easy, efficient decisions might make sense for a business, but they malform us spiritually. They speak to our need for convenience; our desire to keep people out, with thorns if necessary; our desire to maintain a pleasant-looking landscape at the expense of a welcoming one. While the landscaping was not our choice originally, maintaining it is our choice. 

But just as the resurrection of Jesus has given us spiritual life, so shalom is taking resurrection to all of creation: “We know that the whole creation has been groaning as in the pains of childbirth right up to the present time,” Paul writes to the Romans (Rom. 8:22). Yet it waits in “eager expectation” for the children of God (8:19), because of hope, “hope that the creation itself will be liberated from its bondage to decay and brought into the freedom and glory of the children of God” (Rom. 8:20b-21). This too is part of the work of redemption.

Sometimes there is a spiritual answer to these musings: prayer, fasting, and study of the Scriptures. Paul, after all, connects the groaning of creation to the groaning of our own spirits in the following verses. But sometimes, as James reminds us, faith without works is dead. 

Rather than giving into a cultural liturgy that sees neighbors as problems and landscaping as aesthetic convenience, let’s replace it with a liturgy of redemption for all creation, redeeming the thorns of Adam. Let’s tear out the bushes and see what God will grow.

Author: Jake Buller-Young

We are inviting our All Souls Youth to come to the Church on Wednesday, April 26th (6:30pm), and participate in the removal of these bushes from our property. Don’t worry, it’s definitely not backbreaking work, but it will be a meaningful time! Pizza will be provided. Hope to see you there!

1. James K. A. Smith, Desiring the Kingdom: Worship, Worldview, and Spiritual Formation (Ada, MI: Baker Academic, 2009).