Rev. Dr. Marilyn Sewell

Arriving home.  From time to time I ask myself, “Where is home?  Where is your home, Marilyn?”  Is my home that little town in North Louisiana where I grew up?  Is my home in Kentucky, where I raised my two boys and where I still have close friends?  Is my home here in Portland, where I have spent seventeen of the best years of my life as the senior minister of this church? 

The home, of course, is not a house, any house—although specific houses may have special significance to any one of us.  A house brings shelter, refuge, beauty perhaps, and if we live there long enough, a house may contain tender memories.  But it is not the house itself that we value; it is the space it makes for human stuff.  And houses of course can be lost.  In a moment, they can be lost, as the residents of New Orleans learned after Katrina.  Houses can be lost, and houses can be left, just as all of us left our family homes and went away to make our adult lives.  Or left one city, one life, to start another, in a distant place.  Some of you have done that a few times, others dozens of times.  A house is a house; a home—well, that is something more.

We may think of the family as home.  The truth is that in a family—certainly in your family of origin or your extended family--you may find yourself with people you don’t even want to talk to.  I grew up with grandparents who weren’t quite sure at their advanced age that they wanted their wayward son and his three orphaned children showing up on their doorstep.  So although they tried to be welcoming, I never felt that I had a real home.

I believe one of the reasons I got married was to find home.  I fantasized about a perfect place of innocence and protection, a place of constant love and good will.  That was a child’s wish.  I think we should understand that family at best—even the best of families—contain the full range of human possibility and complexity, including abandonment, violence, mental illness, and betrayals, large and small.  Try to place the gauze of sentimentality around family, and it breaks down pretty quickly—there is beauty, there is love, but there is also pain and disappointment.  Family has its shadow side.  We are confronted with the mystery of living, the comic and the tragic. 

Maybe this is why I hate the relentlessly cheerful Christmas letters that a few of my acquaintances send out each year—you know, the daughter has just had lunch with the Dalai Lama, and the son is on the short list for the Nobel Prize.  The fact is that the soul begins doing its work when we take into our hearts all that the family is, when we accept all its contradictions, understanding that these themes run through all families, through all of human life, that our family stories are part of the canon, or the scripture, of living.
 
My marriage was short-lived, but I did begin a family of my own, and two sons came from that union.  Sometimes when I get together with my grown sons, who live back East, I ask them questions they don’t want to answer.  Questions like, “Where would you like to put my ashes when I die?”  They don’t like to think of their mother as ever being--well, dead.  I think I ask them this question, not because the occasion is imminent, hopefully, but because I’ve been a wanderer all my life, and I really don’t know where home is.  “Well,” they said, the last time I asked them that question,”maybe your ashes should go in the family plot, along with Daddy and Joanne.”  Joanne would be the second wife, or as I refer to her, the “new wife.”  “I don’t think so,” I say to the boys.  “I think the family plot might feel a bit . . . crowded, with my ashes there, next to Joanne’s.”  What is home?  Where is my home?

I have begun to think home is not something we dwell within, but something, some Essence,  that dwells within us. 

The Scripture is informative on this subject—Biblical characters are always running from God, running from the truth of their lives.  Adam and Eve disobey God—they do the one thing that God asks them not to do: they eat the apple—and then the Bible says: “They hear the voice of the Lord God walking in the garden . . . and they hid themselves from the presence of the Lord God.”  And what does God do?  God comes looking for them.  Like a parent looking for a lost child.  God calls out, “Where art thou, Adam?”   Where are you, Adam?  And there is the beginning of the covenant--the promise that God gives to his creation.  Other characters run from God, as well—Jacob wrestles with the angel, demanding a blessing; he gets his blessing, but forever more walks with a limp; Jonah refuses to witness to Nineveh and gets swallowed up by a great fish and then vomited up on the shore.  Some of us have to learn the hard way.  (Now of course you don’t have to take these stories as literally true—they are myths, guiding themes.)  Whenever we run away from our lives, from our truth, from our own goodness, God will come looking for us, God will call us back.  We will never be left alone.

There is an Hassidic song that tells a story.  One day God made an angel who, like every other angel, had his own particular job to do.  This angel was sent to earth to bring back the most valuable object in all of creation.  He was ordered not to return without it.  First, the angel retrieved the most beautiful jewel anywhere on Earth.  This was promptly rejected.  Next, the angel discovered a soldier who had sacrificed his life for his comrades, and so the angel brought back a drop of the soldier’s blood, but he was told he needed to find something even more precious.  Searching again, the angel found a troubled man who had lost his way, who had made the wrong choices again and again, and now in anguish, was yearning to reconnect with God.  The angel captured one of the man’s tears, and returning to Heaven, was told that he had succeeded—this was the most precious item on earth. 

Could it be that God needs us?  That God longs to be close to us?  As poet Denise Levertov puts it, “Must <we> hold to our icy hearts a shivering God?”   Perhaps so.

There is a restlessness that characterizes the human experience.  St. Augustine’s answer to that seeking was to say, “Our hearts are restless until we rest in thee.”  The story of Adam and Eve tells us how this restlessness began--it is the story of the human breakthrough into consciousness, of going from that place of innocence to that place of self-knowing and moral decision-making, of asking why are we living and why do we have to die.  We have a baby elephant at the zoo now, and everyone wants to see the baby elephant.  Why do we love to look at animals?  Because they are so beautifully unselfconscious—they belong to a realm of innocence that we have lost.

The earliest earthly home that we know, of course, is the mother’s womb.  It must be quite a shock for the baby, who has been enveloped in love, having literally all of its needs met, to then be thrust into a world where that baby is dependent on the vagaries of others.  Does the father know why the child is crying?  Does the mother have the energy to nurse the baby?  Are they emotionally prepared for the immense changes in their lives?  Immediately, home for this child begins to be iffy, begins to be partial, even in the best of families.  We all have the deep memory of the womb somewhere in our unconscious, and we all long to be reconnected somehow to that source of unending love.  We are all in that sense, homesick.

Part of the reason we seek church community is that we need connection, we want acceptance as we are.  And whereas all human relationship is imperfect, including our church relationships, here at church we can at least be very intentional about how we receive one another and how we treat one another.  Our purposes and principles are a statement, not of theology or belief, but of covenant.  Some of your church leaders are in fact working on a church covenant now, which you will hear more about very soon, a covenant which spells out concretely for this church how we wish to be together, supporting one another and caring for this institution.

Searching creatures that we are, sometimes our longing for wholeness emerges in our dream life.  The great Jewish theologian Martin Buber tells the story of Rabbi Eizik, son of Rabbi Yekel of Cracow.  After many years of great poverty, which had never shaken his faith in God, Rabbi Eizik dreamed that he should look for a great treasure in Prague, under the bridge which leads to the king’s palace.  He dismissed the dream at first, but when it recurred a third time, Rabbi Eizik set out for Prague.  When he arrived, he saw that the bridge was guarded day and night, and he dared not begin digging.  Nevertheless, he went to the bridge every morning and kept walking around it until dusk.  Finally the captain of the guards, who had noticed him there every day, inquired kindly if he was looking for something or waiting for somebody.  So Rabbi Eizik told him of the dream that had brought him to Prague from so far away.  The captain laughed outloud, and he said, “And so for a silly dream, you have worn out your shoes to come here!  If I had faith in dreams, I would have left here long ago, for a dream once told me to go to Cracow and dig for treasure under the stove in the room of a Jew—Eizik, son of Yekel—yes, that was the name!  Eizik, son of Yekel!  I can just imagine what that would be like—I’d have to try every house over there, where half of the Jews are named Eizik and the other half, Yekel!”  And he laughed again.  Rabbi Eizik bowed, traveled home, dug up the treasure from under the stove, and built a House of Prayer.  “There is something you cannot find anywhere,” Buber says, “and there is, nevertheless, a place where you can find it.”

So what does that mean, anyway?  “You can’t find it anywhere, but there is a place where you can find it.”  Does it mean that you can go home again?  That we should go back to our roots, to our place of origin, to find fulfillment?  In a word, no.  I remember the last time I visited that little North Louisiana town where I grew up.  It was on the occasion of my father’s death.  Someone else was living in the family home, and I told them that I had lived there as a child, and asked if I could come in and look around.  They graciously agreed.  I noticed that the big stately oak tree in the front yard that my cousin used to climb, scaring us all to death, had been cut down.  The green apple tree was still there--those apples made the best pies.  And the big garden, that was still there.  I went inside the house, inside the dining room where my sister and I had slept during our growing up years, and I thought, “This room, this house, looks so small, so insignificant.  Why was I so frightened when I was here?” 

So what does that story about Rabbi Eizik mean?  The treasure is under your own hearth?  Maybe under your own heart.  Sometimes we may need to leave home, literally, as Rabbi Eizik did, as I have done, over and over again, to find home.  Perhaps we need to wander in the wilderness with no home, with only questions, hungering for a long time before we understand that the only home that will not leave us is the home within.  It’s not that the house and the family are unimportant, no, not at all—but of their nature they are fleeting.

Grief turns out to be our best teacher—it comes with loss and hangs around like a faithful dog until we have learned what we need to know.  We may feel battered, beyond redemption, and yet we trudge along, meeting the challenges of each day.  We see the little deaths that are occurring all the time—the bird’s song is there, and then it is not; each breath comes, and then it goes.  We begin to understand on a visceral level that impermanence is simply an immutable fact—the way things are. 

I have a favorite coffee cup at home—a handmade, hand-painted ceramic cup, a lovely cup, which my best friend gave to me.  When I feel a bit low, I make some tea and drink out of my cup.  I feel comforted.  Then once I went on a trip, leaving someone to house-sit for me, and when I returned home, I noticed that there was a crack in my cup.  I picked it up, and turned it over and over, ruefully.  I started to become resentful.  Then sad.  My beautiful cup was ruined!  Then I remembered the words of the Buddhist master Achan Chah, who said, “The glass is already broken.”  What I love is already shattered.  Even before it was made, it was already shattered. 

What makes us most completely who we are, who we were meant to be?  Is it our uniqueness?  Our talent, our ability to do what others cannot do?  Our high calling?  Not really.  It is our capacity to engage, to connect with what the world offers at any given moment.  Being fulfilled is being awake, both to ourselves and to others and to the earth, being awake, in all of the beauty and terror of our living. 

The awakening that I refer to has nothing to do with ego, nothing to do with earthly striving or reward or praise.  It has to do with healing, making whole.  In every great spiritual tradition, there is an emphasis on re-membering or re-collecting—bringing together that which was broken.  When we ask ourselves what our lives are about, or what they should be about, the question that we should pose is: “Am I a healing presence, or a hurting presence?  Am I separated—from others, from myself, from the Holy--or am I connected?  Am I really here, present, in love, or somewhere else?”

Eastern religions might say we awaken to “the Deathless” or “the Essence.”  Judeo-Christian faiths call it “the Soul.”  It is the spark of the Divine within each of us, the Eternal, which is absolutely incomprehensible to the finite mind, but which paradoxically is the only thing we can absolutely depend upon. 

We’re all human.  We love the comforts of a warm house, nourishing food, someone holding us close when we are frightened.  And yet when we are awake and engaged in the moment, fully alive, we find that we are not so dependent upon person or place, and in that freedom, we become unconstrained in our choices, fearless in our loving.  We belong to no one but ourselves, and yet so generous have we become that we have given ourselves away.  We have come home at last.  So be it.  Amen.

PRAYER

Spirit of Life, we become attached so easily, we humans, to beautiful things, to houses, to people.  We need comfort, we need love, we need home.  Help us to know that what is lasting is within.  Help us to be free to give ourselves ever more fully in love.  Amen.

BENEDICTION

As you go from this place today, and through this week ahead, may you know the Love that will not let you go.  Go in love and go in peace.  Amen.

Copyright 2008, Rev. Marilyn Sewell. All rights reserved.