This morning I’d like to talk a bit about home; what it means to us and how it relates to our spiritual lives.
This morning I welcome all of you, whether new or long-standing friends of Beacon, to our church home. We who are friends and members of Beacon have certainly had our share of anxiety about where our church home, which means so much to us, was going to be. It puts me in mind of Luke 9:58; from the New International Version: Jesus replied, “Foxes have holes and birds of the air have nests, but the Son of Man has no place to lay his head.”
A church home doesn’t just mean that we have a big roof and a small parking lot… it means that we have the comfort and security of being able to offer the people who need us a safe and accessible place for their children to experience the special gift that is a U*U religious education; it means we have a proper kitchen for our soup lunches; it means we can give our tireless volunteers a bit of a break so they don’t have to haul signs and hymnbooks and glassware hither, thither and yon.
At the same time that most of us are relieved to be able to move into a bigger and more adaptable space, Beacon has become aware of a gift which has made our years of tenancy very worthwhile. That is that wherever there are three or more Beaconites, we can ‘do church’.
We know what we need, how to arrange the space, and how to make it sacred. We could do church anywhere; given the challenges since we left Place Maillardville, it’s useful to reflect that our wandering years have been an ongoing test of our ability to make Beacon happen, to do church, under any circumstances. With our outreach in New Westminster, we’ve proven that.
A church building of our very own, mortgaged, no doubt, to the gills, is a goal that is ever before us, but we don’t need that building to be Beacon Unitarian Church. And let’s not forget that the serious congregational business of building acquisition and maintenance, has been very hard on the financial and energy resources of other U*U congregations in Canada. As we face another move, let’s keep our ingathering song in mind….. ours is no caravan of despair. Let us remember that each caravan has a terminus.
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For most us here today, home is a real place, with a door that locks; our belongings are there, our precious mementoes and photos, our comfy beds. What a change home has gone through in these last millennia! Once upon a time home was wherever the fire was. Now, short of a fire or disaster, a home is a lifetime’s accretion of variously useful or familiar objects, each of which can be notable not just for its ability to collect dust, but also for the ability to arouse emotions of nostalgia or pleasure or irritation.
I acknowledge that for some people, home means addiction, madness, secrets, beatings, abuse, perhaps crushing amounts of drudgery, financial overextension, bugs, perhaps a lack of either peace or comfort. I acknowledge that some of our neighbours choose homelessness over a home that’s a disaster zone. But I’m not going to be talking about that this morning.
A home looks very different to the child who lives in it and to the adult who must feed the unending meter of demands on skill, time and effort. I remember one of my childhood homes as being a sanctuary, and my parents remember how, given that the yard was a third of an acre, it seemed less like a sanctuary and more like a series of yard and garden chores. We had pets in those days too; pets too can change how we think of home.
We’ve reached into the natural world and bred dogs, and to a lesser extent cats, to fit in with our concept of home. Many people here assembled have allergies or no desire to have a pet; many of the rest of us are very indulgent parents to our fur babies; I could certainly rhapsodize about my cat at great length, but that’s not the point I was aiming for.
For those of us who do have pets, especially the more sociable ones, home means having that bright brown eye and that inquisitive nose waiting for us as we push open the door coming home with the groceries; home is the feeling you have when your dog, sighing gently, puts her head on your knee. The dog has been our companion since the days when humans first had settled homes, and here in Vancouver, a sizable number of homeless people have dogs, to the point where homeless shelters have in some cases changed their policies to allow them.
Humans have been around, more or less as we are now in shape, size and intelligence, for something like 100,000 years, but we’ve only had permanent settlements for 10,000 years. We have built big cities over the last five thousand years — cities like Mohenjo-Daro, situated in the Indus Valley and having at one time 35,000 inhabitants. In four hundred centuries human beings walked away from following the migrations of game – and following coastlines — and instead walked into a domestic, habitual existence, one in which everybody knows the implication of the words “no fixed address”.
Home can be a group of habits rather than a defined location. You could be one of those rare individuals who live purely for the mind, people like the noted Hungarian mathematician Paul Erdos. Erdos spent his whole life living out of a suitcase to pursue mathematics across the world and to befriend people who could understand and converse with him about his ideas and interests. There’s no way I could live like that, no matter how fascinating the ideas. He enjoyed the ferment of having many collaborators. He had hundreds of them over the course of his life. He didn’t care about anything except math, and the world’s a better place for it, but I simply can’t imagine what it would be like to get my PhD in Mathematics at the age of 21 and then start globetrotting until I dropped dead at a math conference at the age of 83.
Big thumbs up for style, but I couldn’t live like that. When I’m thinking about things, I gather information, and then sit on it for a while, and then talk to people, and then brood on those musings for a while, and then I try to put together something coherent at the end — by myself.
Part of what makes my home a true place of refuge for me, is that room, that magical room with a door I can close. Behind that door I may commune with my own thoughts without anybody else’s noise or interaction. There are cultures in which any desire for privacy is considered a sign of mental illness, disobedience or laziness. I am very thankful that Canada and my parents have collaborated in giving me what I now feel is a right. That being the right to be left, by myself, to think , just to have an hour or two of reflection, as required.
It is when I consider how grateful I am to have that room and that door, that the true value of Beacon’s work on homelessness and the shared work of the food bank comes into stark focus. Beacon members have worked tirelessly and without much fanfare to advocate for and assist homeless people. As we in Vancouver wilt in the blinding glare of the publicity for the run-up to the 2010 Winter Olympics, we can’t ignore a nagging voice that says that homeless people are being treated as pawns in a large, ongoing struggle over what kind of communities we want to live in.
I want a Vancouver where no-one who wants a home will be denied access to one by reason of poverty, but I might as well be asking unicorns to slide down rainbows to think that marshalling the political will to end homelessness will ever be the primary objective of politicians elected in the GVRD. Besides, Jesus himself said that the poor will always be with us; I could never tell whether he was being sarcastic or just sadly truthful.
Beacon doesn’t feel that homelessness can ever be just, or justifiable. How we feel about, and what we do about homelessness in our community is part of what makes this church home for me.
When I was looking at the word home, I remember thinking, isn’t it odd how the word fractures along gender lines? If I say “Homemaker” you won’t be thinking of a man. But if you think the word “Homeless” you should be thinking of a man. There has been a rise in working poor families and single moms seeking shelter due to lack of access to affordable housing, but homelessness is in many ways a men’s issue; proportionately more men than women are made homeless each year, and men are more likely to stay homeless for longer.
Home is a social construction. Shelter may be a human right … I certainly think it is … but home itself is a series of agreements we make with ourselves about ‘how things should be’. Home is where we eat, sleep and keep clean.
I asked my friend Tammy what she thought home was, and what she said made me thoughtful. She said, “Home is the best of ourselves that we take with us wherever we go.”
What is home? Where is it situated? Is your home the apartment you pay for or the people who share that space with you? When you think of the word home, are you thinking about the place that you have the keys for, or are you thinking of your city, province, country?
Or are you looking at a picture taken of our planet by a Voyager mission, which shows the Earth, our magnificent home, as being a single blue pixel in the vastness of the solar system and all of the Milky Way. Looking at that tiny blue dot, so beautiful, so fragile and so serene in its orbit, I am reminded what Carl Sagan said. To paraphrase, he said he was looking at everything human beings had ever said or accomplished, dreamed, believed or taught; every atrocity and every act of kindness; every statue and gadget and weapon and belief system; every mother holding an infant.
To value home, at times we must travel, get some perspective. Well, we’ve gone places where we couldn’t see Earth, hidden behind the moon; right now the Cassini mission is dancing around Saturn. With each journey away, we are given new insights; now we scan the stars for solar systems with Earth-like planets. My home is the whole Earth, but my hope is that we will venture out into our galaxy and make the dreams of science fiction a reality, and we will homestead among the stars.
Not everyone who has a home stays in one place. Gypsies have caravans; retirees have motor homes; adventurers have sailboats; Mongols have yurts; astronauts have space stations. Sometimes, home moves while the rest of the world stays still.
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This past July (ed. 2009) I got up one morning and flippantly told myself that I should do one thing every day that scares me. My equally flippant response to myself was that I couldn’t think of anything more frightening than attending a high school reunion, so I immediately repaired to the internet and found to my shock that there was a 50th anniversary event in London Ontario planned for this past Thanksgiving.
I used the opportunity to revisit some places I used to live and see friends. I went to Toronto, and Madawaska, and Kanata, and London. The reunion itself was a complete wash; although there were 20 people registered for the reunion whom I would have been pleased to speak to, in two days of events I recognized precisely one person. The first night I didn’t recognize anybody at all. I worked the room three times and didn’t see a soul I knew. I ended up sitting next to an alumni’s spouse and commiserating with her about how strange it was to watch 400 people having a great time and feeling like a wallflower.
I went back to the motel and noticed that there was a little bar attached to it, and so I had a nightcap. The barmaid as she served me mentioned that the lease had not been renewed, and that they would be gone in two weeks, and that the next night was the last time they would ever have karaoke. The last ever night of Karaoke at a pirate themed bar called The Black Pearl? I thought to myself if tomorrow night’s a bust I’ll come back here. It was, and I did, and I had a great time.
Why? Because that bar, which was less than half the size of this room, made me welcome. Strangers spoke to me; I sang a couple of times, once well and once wretchedly; I watched the interplay of friends and laughter and conviviality, heard a dozen accents, and sat with a group of people who were all more or less my age. How strange is that, I thought; all the kids I grew up with are completely removed from me now; but here I feel at home.
The next morning I got up and drove by my old house in London. I sat across the street in the rental car and thought, it looks the same; the trees are a little taller. I called my mother and told her that the two big maple trees were still standing in front of the house, and she said, “That was the first thing I was going to ask you.”
Home is not just the building; it’s how it looks covered in snow, the sound the gravel in the driveway makes as you walk across it, the smell of coffee, the feel of the door handle as you fumble for your keys. It is the welcome that waits for you; it is the relief and comfort you take in it. As I made my journey, the physical aspects of home, which I can reproduce if I need to, if I lose the home I have, became much less important, and I was left with the sure and quiet feeling that home is the emotional comfort zone we make with other people.
Home is like the sanctuary we make every Sunday at Beacon. The faces change; but we ritually transform a space, with the help of other people, from a room into a shrine to all the things we jointly value, where we may rest our busy minds, wipe the dust from our spirits and our dreams, and partake of the spiritual nourishment that we bring and share. At its best, home is always a sacred space, wherever and whatever it is.
Blessed be.
