As we watch the landmarks around St. Johns fall one by one, we have to wonder at our own human reactions. "Why do I care so much?" a friend asked recently. An equally interesting question might be: Why do some people seem not to care at all? Why is it that the same set of bricks and mortar can be a revered place to one person while it is merely an eyesore to another?

The easy answer is that there is something in our nature that predisposes us to bond with something outside ourselves. We need to bond with other people in order to insure our survival as individuals and as a race. Perhaps our apparently irrational bonding with places and things is just a little genetic slop-over from our survival instincts.

Something I read recently suggests that our emotional investment in places may come from an even deeper instinct and serve an even more important role in our development as people. Pope John Paul II, in a letter explaining his desire to go on pilgrimage to the Holy Land, explains it this way:

My meditation therefore turns to the "places" in which God has chosen to "pitch his tent" among us . . . Everything has come from his hands and there is no place where God cannot be found: . . . God is equally present in every corner of the earth, so that the whole world may be considered the "temple" of his presence.

Yet this does not take away from the fact that, just as time can be marked by . . . special moments of grace, space too may by analogy bear the stamp of particular saving actions of God. Moreover, this is an intuition present in all religions . . .

Perhaps our bond with our buildings, our locations around here, springs from innate spiritual sources. The places we love, the buildings we weep for -- Are these not the very places where at some point in our lives we personally have chosen for a time to pitch our emotional and spiritual tents? And is it not also possible that those who welcome the demolition of our old hunks of brick and stone have simply chosen over the years to pitch their tents elsewhere?