Then Jacob woke from his sleep and said, ‘Surely the Lord is in this place—and I did not know it!’ And he was afraid, and said, ‘How awesome is this place! This is none other than the house of God, and this is the gate of heaven.’  So Jacob rose early in the morning, and he took the stone that he had put under his head and set it up for a pillar and poured oil on the top of it. He called that place Bethel; but the name of the city was Luz at the first…

Jacob came to Luz (that is, Bethel), which is in the land of Canaan, he and all the people who were with him, and there he built an altar and called the place El-bethel, because it was there that God had revealed himself to him when he fled from his brother.  (Gen 28.16-19; 35.6-7 NRSV)

God appeared to Jacob at Bethel as a young man setting out in life.  Jacob returned to the place twenty years later, older and wiser.  As I imagine the scene, the original pillar was still standing when he returned to Bethel, and he took its stones apart and incorporated them into a new altar.

Jacob’s return to Bethel makes me think of sacred places and times in life.

Davis Creek Park sits in the foothills of the Sierras, midway between Carson City and Reno.  As a young man, I often drove there, set myself down at a picnic table and read the Bible.  I have an old Bible with wrinkled pages at 2 Timothy because it was raining lightly at Davis Creek Park that day.  This park is a Bethel to me, a place where God appeared to me in the beauty of nature and in the practice of reading holy scripture — two of the ways God is indirectly present to us, according to Simone Weil.  I knew nothing of Weil then, of course.  I only knew that God became real to me as a young man in northern Nevada, and one of the key places this happened was Davis Creek Park.  I’ll return there someday.

I watch religious people fleeing from their past, a religious upbringing they regard as harmful.  It’s as if they return to Bethel, topple the pillar and scatter its stones in all directions.  But for all its flaws, wasn’t the experience of God then genuine?  Where there not fragments of authenticity to it?  It’s more challenging, and more useful in the long term, to take those stones and build them into a new altar, as Jacob did, a new place to worship and seek God.

It’s important also to seek out new Bethels.  I cannot live in the past as I was twenty or thirty years ago.  So the Quaker mystic Thomas Kelly says the key to an authentic spiritual life is “continuously renewed immediacy” rather than “a memory of the divine touch.”  True.