Paul Tournier wrote A Place for You from inside its subject. His father died when he was two months old, his mother when he was six, and the Swiss physician spent fifty years building a psychology whose first axiom is the thing he lacked: a person needs a place before he can become a person, the place is granted by others, and the two movements of a life, attachment and detachment, run in that order or run wrong. A title like his selects its readers. Most people pass it on the shelf. The ones it stops are carrying the file.
Luke Ford (b. 1966) is carrying the file. Run his life through the frame and it reads as a sequence of granted places withdrawn, each withdrawal arriving before the grant had set, followed by a long adulthood spent doing the two things Tournier says such men do: petitioning new grantors, and turning grantor himself.
The sequence first. His mother fell ill early in his life and died of cancer in 1970, when he was four. Tournier calls the mother the first place, prior to houses and countries, and he treats her early loss as the template deprivation, the one his own life taught him. By the son’s own account he spent stretches of her decline in other families’ homes, a small boy billeted among households that were not his, which is placelessness in its exact childhood form: a bed, a table, a kindness, none of it his ground. At eleven the country went. The family moved from Australia to California in 1977 because administrators transferred the father, which meant the boy’s second place was revocable by committee before he knew what a committee was. At fourteen he watched the lesson repeated at scale. In August 1980 the church that had granted his father a place at seventeen convened at Glacier View and withdrew it, and the family’s standing in the only social world the boy had known went with it. A child of that year learns something Tournier spent a career treating: the men who grant places can be ungranted, and the deed to your ground sits in someone else’s drawer. Then, in his twenties, the body went. An illness kept him largely in bed for years, and Tournier, a physician before he was anything else, would read those years without metaphor. The body is the place all other places require. A man confined to a mattress has had his radius revoked.
The petition began from the bushes near UCLA’s softball field. A voice on the radio, arguing for Judaism, reached a sick frightened man in August 1988, and the direction of the transmission deserves a pause: a place arrived by broadcast, which is how his father’s ministry was reaching its own scattered audience in those same years, and which is how the son now transmits over Youtube. He converted to Judaism in the nineties and then kept petitioning, since Orthodoxy does not hand the grant over at the door, and the choice of tradition looks, through this frame, less like theology than like homing. Judaism is the religion of place. It fixes a man’s seat in the synagogue, the makom kavua, and counts the fixing a virtue. It builds the week around a table. It defines the people by a land. And it names God HaMakom, The Place, the Name used in the one formula this convert had been receiving since age four, the consolation spoken to mourners: may The Place comfort you.
Then the pattern he knew arrived on schedule, except this time the record shows him summoning it. He built a beat covering an industry his community despised, wrote what he saw, and synagogues expelled him, more than one, and he titled the memoir XXX-Communicated: A Rebel Without a Shul, which names his condition. Without a shul is without a place, said in the dialect of the place that withdrew it.
The frame offers three readings of that stretch and declines to pick.
The first is the Abraham reading. He possessed a place, and he renounced its comforts for a vocation, truth over the warmth of the pews, which is the second movement performed as Tournier prescribes it, from possession, at cost, by the man’s own act. His stated program since, truth first, minimal coalition work, is this reading carried forward as policy.
The second is harder. A man taught at four, eleven, and fourteen that grants do not hold might spend adulthood testing every subsequent grant to destruction, pressing on each new place at its least tolerant point until it confirms the childhood verdict. Tournier saw the pattern in patients who could not distinguish proving a place false from making it so. The expulsions, on this reading, were experiments with a predetermined result.
The third reading watches what he built while the second and first were arguing. In 1997 he started a website, and he has run one since, and a personal site is the one place in his biography with no landlord. No committee convenes over it. No beit din grants it and none can revoke it. Twenty-nine years of daily construction on ground he holds outright looks, through the frame, like the deprived man’s rational architecture: if every granted place has been withdrawn, build the one place that cannot be, and live there in public.
Two inheritances complete the portrait, one of them a repetition and one a reversal.
The repetition: his father sat for thirty-nine years beside the church that defrocked him, joined nothing else, and kept the law of the body that took his credentials. The son, expelled from synagogues, stayed in the neighborhood, within walking distance of the congregations, davening at the margins of the world that ejected him, joined to nothing else until he made things right in 2009 and regained entrance to his old haunts. Neither man departed. The son returned to his new home and stayed there in peace by taking his ADHD medication.
Tournier observed that the place-deprived become one of two men, hoarders of ground or grantors of it, and this subject became a grantor, which is also the father’s pattern, the classroom and the radio congregation reappearing as the essay and the livestream. The essays build rooms and seat their subjects in them, one at a time, under sustained attention, which is what a grant of place consists of. And then there are the dozen livestreams he titled “A Place For You,” each stamped with that day’s date. A room with the date on the door, open to whoever arrives, offered by a man who is not sure the title was ever honored in his own case. The streams gather what his father’s mailing lists gathered and what Good News Unlimited gathered, the unplaced, and they offer what a broadcast can offer, which is something but not a home.
That leaves the objection he raises against the book: it is so Christian that he does not know what he thinks of it. Two answers. The lesser one is biographical. Tournier practiced his medicine of the person on patients of every confession and none, insisted the method required dialogue rather than conversion, and would have taken an Orthodox Jew at his word and his Word. The greater answer is that the book’s theological floor exists in the reader’s own tradition, in an older form. Bereshit Rabbah, on why God is called HaMakom: He is the place of His world, and His world is not His place. Tournier’s closing claim, that every human place is provisional and its function is to make a man capable of trusting the place no committee administers, is that midrash in a Swiss accent. The reader does not need to settle his opinion of the Christian book. His own liturgy has been making the book’s argument to him at every house of mourning he has entered since 1970, in a Name.
So, in the second person, since the title is in the second person and that is what it has been doing to you. The sentence that stops you on the shelf reads as a promise addressed to you by an uncertain sender, and the frame cannot certify the sender. What it can certify sits in your own production log. A dozen times you took the sentence that was never reliably said to you, put the day’s date on it, and said it to strangers. Tournier’s account of how the promise travels is that it travels that way, through the ones still waiting on it. The mourner’s formula agrees. It does not tell the mourner that the comfort has arrived. It names The Place, and hands the sentence to the next man at the door.
