Hajja Salesjana

Once upon a time, in a world without cars and screens, people had no choice but to live where they lived. If their home was in the northeast part of town, they worked and worshiped in the northeast part of town. They knew dozens of neighbors by name because, well, they said their names a lot. Entertainment was a family or community affair: conversation around the dinner table, games with neighborhood kids, festivals at the park. More often than not, they recognized the contours of the land, even if their livelihood didn’t depend on it. They knew where the stream branched and what kind of maple stood in the backyard. The newspaper offered the nearest doorway to the wider world, yet even the news was shaped by home. It arrived in rolls on doorsteps, the city name printed on top, local stories filling its pages. For them, “the news” largely happened in the place they lived, among people they recognized. An old proverb puts it quaintly: “The goat must browse where she is tied.” Humans in the past, finding themselves bound to a local place and local people, lived and laughed and loved there. They spent their seventy or eighty years within limits that would feel to us remarkably narrow. They had to; the goat must browse where she is tied. Today, however, many might respond, “Not if the goat has a smartphone.” Strangers at Home The picture painted above is not meant to be nostalgic. Sin, sorrow, and alienation laced the analog world before they laced the digital world. But questions still bear asking: How did we get to the point where we know our neighbors on social media better than our neighbors next door? Why are we often more aware of the happenings in the Capitol than the happenings in our church or community? And what are the consequences of browsing where we’re not tied — of living where we aren’t? In his novel Jayber Crow, Wendell Berry’s narrator describes the effect of the highway in mid-twentieth-century rural places: “The interstate cut through farms. It divided neighbor from neighbor. It made distant what had been close, and close what had been distant” (281). The information superhighway has done something similar: invisibly, it has paved four lanes between neighbors, and even between family Top Photo by Aaron Burden - Unsplash.com Photo by Tierra Mallorca - Unsplash.com LiveWhere You Live: Practicing a Lifestyle of Presence by Scott Hubbard 12 Lulju-Settembru 2023 hajja