It has now been one year since I first looked out at the congregation of All Souls from this pulpit. It has been a wondrous year, a year of new faces, of getting to know the many-layered lives that speak through those faces, your faces. It has been a gratifying year. You have opened your hearts, stretched your minds, rolled up your sleeves, and given generously of your talents, energy, and material resources on behalf of our religious community within and beyond All Souls. You have made it possible for this congregation to undertake compelling--and in recent weeks quite audible--renovations as we seek to become a fully accessible church. As you seek to open doors for our ever extending community, you have opened doors for me and permitted me to feel at home among you.
What is it, this sense of being at home? I ponder and I wonder.
Home is a charged concept, a notion both gentle and powerful. The idea of home is ripe with images customized to fit our variable lifelong yearnings. The construct of home is commonly idealized, then internalized. The vision of home is a holy grail after which most of us conduct a lifelong search.
Home is the intersection of personal space and time, reassuring us that we belong somewhere. Home is a point of departure, a temporal landing, a locus of return. Home is a space of longed for safety and affection in a time that may or may not have come to pass. Home is a blessing and a curse, with associations sufficiently powerful to nurture the fullness of our living and to catapult us into the direst forms of human conflict. The notion of homeland incites love and war.
Home is a many-splendored notion. To be "at home" carries layers of meaning that resonate for us at our most individual core and at all levels of our life in community.
The notion of being at home is deeply infused with a sense of comfort and security. That initial space of comfort and security, for each and all of us, was the primal amniotic ocean from which we surfaced at the moment of birth. It was a traumatic surfacing. We were cast forth by a force that we do not yet understand onto the shores of what we have come to call life. We sacrificed that pre-conscious security to lay claim to a state of being that was jarringly new and noisy and bright. We traded a tranquil pool for a sea that never promised a safe voyage.
Clifton Fadiman, in his introduction to Melville's Moby Dick, ruminates on what he terms "the most magical first sentence in literature, 'Call me Ishmael.' "Who is Ishmael?" he queries. "He is the narrator, but he is also [Captain] Ahab," Fadiman continues, "....and he is also you and me considered as eternal outcasts, which we are, the experience of birth being in a sense the casting-off of the moorings that attach us quite literally to [humankind]." (Fadiman, 1943) And so the voyage begins.
When we are "at sea" with ourselves, we are thought to be in an unwelcome state of flux with regard to who we essentially are. We are adrift with regard to our point of departure and our presumed point of return. Because we commonly consider it desirable to be "at home"--whether we mean in harmony with ourselves or in the physical space we call home--we readily project onto all who seem to be "at sea" a deep yearning to return to shore.
It's more complicated than that. We harbor among us tempestuous souls who crave the uncertainties of storm-tossed waters, relishing them as adventures or realizing them as obsessions. Ishmael and Ahab are variations on this theme. Homer's Odysseus is another. Kazantzakis' Odysseus is yet another.
Homer's Odysseus negotiates his epic journey with his eye ever on the remembered shores of his beloved Ithaca and his foremost passions directed to the prospective reunion with his beloved Penelope. The Odysseus of Nikos Kazantzakis' epic poem, The Odyssey, A Modern Sequel, reached home, stayed just long enough to brutally assert his primacy, then turned his back on Ithaca, setting out on a journey from which he had no intention of returning. Home for this Odysseus was a spirited lust for freedom melded with his vision of God. Homeostasis was spiritual anathema for this restless one. Yet even this Odysseus carries in his heart another remembered harbor, and its essence wedges through the crevices of his willfulness.
"Deep voices, secret instincts in the archer's chest rose up and fell like long-forgotten ancient souls,
and his mind struggled to recall, his inner ear to listen. ....memories surge in my heart's root that once, perhaps, once long ago, with yet another boat and crew, with yet another body I moored in this same harbor."
What is this thing called home, this state of at homeness, that is capable of swimming through the wine-dark seas of a soul as tempestuous as that of this fierce and willful Odysseus? Is it good? Is it treacherous? Is it value-laden at all? Or is it simply so?
Most of us are refugees by choice or benign circumstance. We have left the homes of our childhood to explore life on our own terms and eventually to create homes of our own. We are in this place at this time, a time/space that we may or may not identify as home. To these more or less self-created points of refuge we bring our best and worst memories of what other homes have spawned over the course of our lives. Our current places of shelter are marked with the blessings and scars of these past homes.
Some in our congregation have been driven from their childhood dwellings by forces that are diabolical in their intensity and scope....the Nazi Holocaust, our government's detention camps for U.S. citizens of Japanese heritage, the legacies of the Middle Passage, the Trail of Tears. Such epic atrocities tear at the heart of our shared histories. How do the cherished spaces lost to the sweep of oppression and conquest live on in our here and now yearnings for what it really is to be at home?
For those of us who have left our childhood abodes by choice and benign circumstance, to what extent do we pack them up and carry them with us? The power of home ripens in our senses and rises in our memories. The home that was created for us informs the home that we create. Why is it that Christmas holds such magic for me and that for the entire month of December I am under a spell of delicious habit in immersing myself in the purchase of whimsical stocking stuffers or in stretching the hours of the day to bake--sometimes at midnight--more cookies than sanity should admit? Why is it that the Christmas Pageant here at All Souls kindles anticipation and delight that most likely transcends what I experienced in landing the role of angel or donkey in the pageants I knew as a child? Why is it that Christmas is a legacy I seek to bestow with slightly daft abundance on my children? It is simply a time and place of the heart that will always shape my vision of what it is to feel at home.
Symbols distill memory.....the Washington Square Arch. I first ventured into Washington Square Park in 1964. As a young seminarian, I had just "discovered" Greenwich Village and the relish of shopping and dining in some of our city's most intriguing nooks and crannies. Only a few years later, I returned to the park on a daily basis with my firstborn daughter. The sequence was predictable--first the swings, then the sandbox, then the Good Humor Man--all in the protective shadow of the Arch. The West Village was home. New York City was home.
Who would say it is not desirable to cherish a sense of home? Who would doubt that feeling at home nurtures our sense of well-being? When I am "at home" I envision myself in chosen accord with the space that I occupy and the spirit that pervades that space. Being at home with myself connotes a profound spiritual harmony. I am in the harbor. I have found a refuge. I know the blessing of sanctuary.
The shadow side of this vision is false security and self-satisfaction. What nourishes the tranquillity of our personal space when interpersonal discord is so rife? How calm are the waters of our harbor when pervasive poverty--girded by racism, classism, and simple greed--occupies our land from sea to shining sea? Where is our refuge when families elsewhere are in flight for their lives or on a final desperate journey towards a hoped for morsel of food? Where is the blessing of sanctuary when children of poverty and children of privilege gun down other children in a world that offers so many models of violence--from Ulster to Nairobi to Dar-es-Salaam to the familiar corridors of this nation's Capitol?
If we are too much at home with ourselves, we miss the dissonance that calls us forth to confirm the abuses of power and privilege and advance "justice, equity, and compassion in human relations." If we bask too much in our personal comfort, we miss the call to promote the "inherent worth and dignity of every person." If we delude ourselves with the notion that the perks of life we enjoy are benefits we have singularly earned, we self-identify as exiles from "the interdependent web of all existence."
"'Tis a gift to be simple, 'tis a gift to be free, 'tis a gift to come down where we ought to be....""To turn, turn will be our delight, 'till by turning, turning we come 'round right."
Turning allows us to see the space around us, to take in all 360 degrees of where we are in the time we are. In motion we come to a place of wholeness, "we come 'round right." Turning towards wholeness finds extended voice in the words of poet Lucille Clifton. (the poem, "Turning") turning into my own turning on in to my own self at last turning out of the white cage, turning out of the lady cage turning at last on a stem like a black fruit in my own season at last.
It is not by stasis that we find ourselves. It is not without a profound understanding of the integrity of motion that we speak of our "journey toward wholeness." Home is a state of space and time. It is also a state of heart, mind, and spirit.
Is the earth or any particle of it ever ours to call home? "Life is a bridge -- build no house upon it; a river -- cling not to its banks;....a journey -- take it, and walk on!" writes Christmas Humphreys in his exposition on Buddhism. Between that moment of being cast upon the shores of what we call life and that moment of departure to we know not where, are we not in a state of transit, with so many way stations that we heed more or less as home? Is home perhaps a spectrum of heart, mind, and spirit that runs deep in all we know ourselves to be and all we hope to become? Is home amorphous, yet shaping and reshaping our innermost space? Is home a personal construct, yet driving and directing the character of our communal living?
What we can know is that we are here and now together. What I know is my gratitude for sharing this space and time with you, for the vibrance of this morning's music, for your open hearts and open minds, for our sounds and silences as a congregation. What I am sure of is the promise resident in this congregation to keep the dissonance of injustice within earshot and the celebration of interdependence within our range of vision. It is a promise that attaches to our journey together. Echoing the words of Roberto Juarroz, "Everything is fleeing towards its presence." Here and now, we are part of everything. Carpe locum. Carpe diem. Amen. Copyright AllSouls 1998.