I am doing more and it is meaning less.
I feel helpless against my own chaos.
My voice is for others. My listening is for others.
Am I making all this noise so I don't have to hear something deeper?
I am longing to belong to both the world and myself.
How do I find my way home when I am lost?
What is my poverty now, what is my real wealth?
How do I create meaning from the events that happen to me?
How do I create coherence in a chaotic life?
How do I find my way home when I am lost?
- Dawna Markova
I read this poem and was struck by the poet's perception of home, not as a place, person or activity, but as an experience. I've been thinking maybe home is more an experience than anything else. More and more, that strikes me as true.
When I was 12 we lived in a small Wisconsin town, and my folks' options for liberal religion was the Congregational church. As a child church was a place of comfort, familiarity. My Lutheran grandmother went to church every Sunday. In 1978, the year I was 12, she hadn't missed a Sunday service, rumor had it, since a crisp September day in 1957 when the neighbor's tractor had unexpectedly died in her driveway on Saturday. Sunday morning arrived with a bevy of farmhands strewing wrenches and lug nuts across her gravel driveway, blocking her parade to Jesus in her Sunday best. This grandmother wanted one of her grandchildren confirmed. When her zeal reached its peak, I was within arms length and I become her ticket to heaven having secured her hold with a believer left in her stead.
So for twenty Sunday evenings we met with the pastor who enlightened us on Christian theology. My interest in the subject lacked luster. It wasn't that the concept of living a spiritual life didn't captivate me, it was just when the answers to the questions I harbored were answered they were limited, finitely constructed. A supernatural, conscious, willful universe predominated the minister's revelations. So I did my homework for Sunday evenings half-heartedly. Sometimes, I cheated. When the carpool arrived at our house, I'd scrunch in next to Martha Goetsch in the back seat, who'd conspiratorially whisper, "did you finish?" Nope, I'd reply, and she'd extract her carefully constructed answers, laying them on my lap and I'd copy them onto my own blank dittoed form. With each meeting, my internal compass soured. My faith that once was buoyed in a rich cream of belief in an omnipotent God now curdled into a tangy yogurt.
Soon enough, my meeting with Rev. W was up. I sat in a straight back gothic chair in his office and he asked whether or not I believed Jesus died to save my sins. "Yes," I said, but I lied. I had just confessed a belief in a God I did not believe in and perhaps never had. I said, "Yes," when my head, heart and gut were telling me no. I did not answer from a wellspring of integrity within. And it was that moment in my religious home I felt miles away from home. I was a feather bound to a swirling wind--adrift, without body or belief to hold me tethered - homeless, lost.
Parker Palmer in his book, A Hidden Wholeness, tells a similar story of a government official who participated in a workshop he led. This man worked for the U.S. Department of Agriculture for a decade after farming for 25 years. The official explained that at that moment, a proposal laid on his desk for the preservation of mid-west topsoil, which was being rapidly depleted by agribusiness practices, valuing short term profits over ongoing soil viability. The man referred to his dilemma over what to do with the proposal as being spoken to by his "farmer's heart." His political instinct told him that following his "farmer's heart" would get him in trouble, not the least of which was likely losing his job.
Palmer explains that on the last morning of their gatherings, this fellow looked dog tired, exhausted, and yet said that it had become clear over his sleepless night that he needed to return to his office and follow his "farmer's heart." He said, "During this retreat, I've remembered something important: I don't report to my boss, I report to the land."
Now this government official didn't speak about finding home, but he spoke about living with integrity, to whom he was, to where his allegiances needed to lie. Of being true to a heart that was intertwined with the root of who he was. And that my friends is when we find home, when we know who we are and how we should, can and do live, that is when we are most at home.
Elizabeth Andrews in her book, On the Threshold, reminds us that home is not the places we inhabit but how we inhabit our life.
She comments, "Certainly my desire to be grounded in a place and therefore in myself isn't unique. Even the most restless among us yearn to be at ease in the world, to be fully satisfied with ourselves. I understand this as a spiritual longing because I cannot detach the sacred from the self. Home, as the tortuous teaches us, we carry with us ...only a small part of being at home is the home itself. The rest is the being, the creature who dwells, and the very nature of our dwelling. Home is the experience of feeling deeply at ease, of feeling settled into oneself."
It wasn't until I walked into a Unitarian Universalist Society in my teens, and sat through a service, that I felt deeply at ease; I felt settled into myself. As an atheist, when I come to church holding on to my rock of atheism, I don't encounter a community that critics this rock as simple minded, immoral or void of a spiritual center. I find a community that accepts my rock just as I am. Neither do I find a community that tries to get me to whip out a chisel, reshaping my rock to look like my neighbor's. I find a community where everyone doesn't stand on the same foundation (whether, theist, atheist, pagan, or agnostic) but celebrates, supports and challenges each other, while we build our own foundations together, our own means to home.
So I'd like you to pull out those little sheets of paper in your order of service. As you'll notice the top section is titled, "my rock."
I'd like you to think about what your rock symbolizes for you, what place or experience it represents, and then below that, how does it make you feel at home in your own skin.
On the bottom
My church
Helps me feel at home in my skin, by. . .
When you leave the sanctuary today, there are boards situated in the Gallery for you to tack your answer on the board - helping and affirming to each other that the vast wellspring of our grounding, our authentic selves are plentiful and rich.
I'll give you a few minutes to sit with, and reflect with, what is home for you by fitting into your own skin and how this church makes that happen for you.
[Music]
I invite you to turn inward, and image the words I say now are your own. With your rock in hand, let us begin.
May this stone remind me of that which speaks to my truest self.
May it beckon to me, when that still small voice within speaks the truth about me, my work or the world. When I hear it and yet act as if I did not, let its weighty self call to me when I withhold a personal gift that might serve a good end, or commit myself to a project that I do not really believe in--call me home, to self, to center, to weighty ground.
Let this rock help me salvage my tongue from silence on issues I should address or when I break faith with one of my own convictions. This piece of Granite, Shale, Sandstone, Marble, Chert, Limestone, Quartz, Slag, Obsidian or Pumice--you are that which calls me to my truest self. May I be blessed with your wisdom and action. Bringing me home today.
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