The Way Our Landscapes Overlap
The Way Our Landscapes Overlap
Jonathan Chan
‘Stay away from anything
that obscures the place it is in.
There are no unsacred places;
there are only sacred places
and desecrated places.’— Wendell Berry, ‘How to Be a Poet’
I developed a routine of evening runs throughout 2020. It was a habit that solidified during the early days of pandemic restrictions, an assertion of mobility against languid stretches of time at my desk. With each footfall, I grew more attuned to the bends, curves, and rhythms of the familiar trails through Singapore’s landscape, the beauty of God made manifest before my eyes. It would always begin up a steep hill, its edge overlooking a morass of vines and leaves which eventually led to a football pitch.
Past the first psychological and physical hurdle of this hill, there were roads flanked by houses on the left and thick swathes of vegetation on the right. Each run would stir my memories of military exercise routines during my conscription, along with the momentary desire to dress in my fatigues and bash through the jungle just to see what was there. The scampering monitor lizards, tinkling arias of mynahs, and rustle of the leaves in the evening breeze formed familiar soundscapes, distinct from the staccato of typing at my office desk. The vitality of these small interactions, these edgelands, presented the beautiful landscapes of Singapore I’d come to know and love.
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And yet, as I would run through these vast and beautiful landscapes that I felt deeply connected to, the experience was always tinged by the mystery of all that I did not know of these lands–who knew them as home before we did? Who spoke their affections in languages we would never master?
Samuel Chia
With the arrival of the British in the 19th-century came the relentless logic of development and urban planning–the paving of roads and construction of buildings and subordination of the land to commercial and bureaucratic use. The island, so sparsely inhabited before, became populated and, through meticulous management, its potential as a thriving port was realized. Urbanisation and economic activity came in conjunction with waves of settlement, as Chinese and Indian labourers arrived to live alongside indigenous Malay communities, faint shadows of the crowds of traders and merchants who had come when Singapore held its place as a trade centre in the Srivijayan Kingdom, when dramatic transformations were still yet to come–booms, busts, war, occupation, decolonisation, survivalism. Hallmarks of a newly sovereign nation state overcome with the impetus to make itself known to the world.
There are few traces that remain of the history of the neighbourhood I live in, no sense of the lives and places that preceded the construction of bungalows and paving of vegetation. At one point, my area was close to military barracks, and at another it may have formed the grounds for kampongs, the villages that offer a distinct substance of popular nostalgia in Singapore. As a relative newcomer to my neighbourhood, I have yet to fully grasp who had lived through those familiar bends, scents, and sounds before machines began their march. This absence swallowed up a deeper sense of wonder and empathy, a severed historical and affective connection that often left me feeling unmoored.
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Even when I find myself dealing with the grief and mystery of being cut off from geographical and cultural origins, there remained a profound sense of God in that place—my steady companion through runs and ruminations. As a new citizen, I had even less claim to a longstanding familiarity with the lands that I had come to regard as home, and I often prayed in the midst of that anxiety to be drawn back into right relationship with the place God had brought my family.
Theologian John Inge once spoke of the presence of God in the Created world in a way that resonates deeply:
“Sacramentality is not simply an affirmation of the world as it is, but of the fact that Christ is in the world to unite the broken fragments of life by making the material a vehicle for the spiritual. […] What is broken is coming together again: this is the Christian hope. The life and person of Jesus reveal the grammar of reality to which these experiences point, which the liturgy is seeking to evoke, and which the poet is seeking to illuminate.”
Inge identifies the persistence of reconciliation through the figure of Christ, of glimpses of beauty that hold reality in rapt tension. This sense of a divine hand holds everything together that stimulates the ability to recognise glimmers of what is eternal, wondrous, and true. Christ is the grammar of reality, and it is in Him through which our search for belonging can begin to make sense. In him, my yearnings, unmoorings, fears, and listlessness could come to rest, where the fracture I encountered between my home and neighbourhood could find a means of suture. The presence of Christ in all places in all times shapes what it means to find the trace of an eternal home in the midst of a physical home.
Beyond the experience of nature, urban settings, and the fierce intermingling of their edges as a beatific, oceanic swell, we see that it speaks to the ultimate reconciliation between man and land, oriented to God, where, as the psalmist declares:
“All the earth worships you
and sings praises to you;
they sing praises to your name.” (Psalm 66:4, ESV)
As I read this psalm, the feelings that I experience in the midst of these landscapes—one so often foregrounded by certain readings of Genesis—are subordinated to a feeling of being embedded in a much wider creation. It is here that awe can reign—the deep, embodied reminder that we were not present when the world began. I find that I can reconfigure my relationship with creation along the lines that Ellen Davis once described, not as one of “dominion” but of “skilled mastery”, a position of stewardship where we are aware of being enfolded within each and every created thing. Such an impulse opposes our tendency to seek control but introduces the feeling that we are all united under God’s sovereignty, His immanent and transcendent shalom, praise and worship ringing in a choric swell.
This is the promise we cling to wherever we may be, even if a community’s relationship with the land they inhabit may be fraught, marred by histories of bloodshed, expulsion, or violence. It is out of this redemptive impetus that we can begin to rethink the habits of resource consumption we’ve cultivated but also about the environments in which God has placed us. The reconciliation promised in the person of Christ is revealed in moving toward the restoration of relationship with our lands. In a moment that portends profound ecological disruption, it is in this intertwining of affection for both the land itself, as well as those most poised to suffer from the climate crisis that new boldness must arise. It is a boldness that must be stimulated by a love of neighbour and a desire for environmental stewardship stemming from an obedience to God.
In Singapore, I have sought to find a way to articulate the wonder that accompanies getting to know the intricacies of my neighbourhood. I have yearned for a way to describe the teeming, overlapping connections in the landscapes where I reside. And I have searched for a way to honor the lives of all those who have lived and continue to live in the city. My neighbourhood continues to be a place where my attention can be honed, where my imagination can be vivified, and as with all places we hold dear to our hearts, where I can hope to be drawn into deeper communion with my Creator. Poetry has been one such conduit to express these deep realities of land and Christ-infused wonder.
Friday Evening by Jonathan Chan
‘Blessed be the light upon the tiny dark plains.’
— Leonard Yip, Edgeland Visible
bless the light that drapes upon the trees, glistening as a golden gossamer.
bless the roots that cause the earth to crumple, spilling down the walls of concrete drains.
bless the scampering of the monitor lizard, darting into grassy cover.
bless the arias that map the treetops, sparkling into scattered flocks.
bless the edges of blue and pink, the blending into ocular paint.
bless the dance of wilder grasses, the serrated line along the footpaths.
bless the leaves that kiss the forehead, curling over calloused concrete.
bless the cathedral formed of branch and frond, covering a tarmac aisle.
bless the balmy breath of emerald, rustling through a tattered mind.
and bless the calm of afterglow, coalescing in a wisp of prayer.
Jonathan Chan
Writer & Poet
Jonathan is a graduate student at Yale. Born in New York to a Malaysian father and South Korean mother, he was raised in Singapore and educated in Cambridge, England. He is a naturalised Singaporean citizen. He is interested in questions of faith, creative expression and human identity.
Photography by Ethan Chan