Home
Sermon given at the Brookfield Unitarian Universalist Church
September 22, 2019
by Rev. Craig M. Nowak
Have you ever visited a place for the first time and yet experienced it as if you’d returned home?
This happened to me when I visited Rome for the first time. Within an hour of arriving at the train station, I found myself walking the streets of the large, sprawling, ancient city as if I’d just gotten home from a brief trip away. The streets felt familiar. I had no trouble finding my way around. I never felt unsafe of unsure as to where I was or where I was going. So unusual and vivid was this experience that to this day it still fascinates me.
Contrast this with my experience of Boston, a city I’ve been visiting since I was a child. As an adult, I visit Boston several times a year and I almost always get lost, even when going to the places I’ve been to there dozens of times, which frustrates me. Still, I like Boston, but I have never experienced a visit to Boston as anything close to a homecoming.
That doesn’t mean I’m about to pack up my life and move to Rome, however. For though I feel at home when I’m there, is Rome itself, my home? Maybe. Maybe not. Which begs the question,
What is home?
Is it, to quote Irving Berlin’s “God Bless America”, a “Land that I love.”…a nation, the US, Great Britain, Colombia, or a city, like Rome or Boston or Worcester? How about a town, like Brookfield, Sturbridge, Barre or Spencer? Or even a region, like New England or central Massachusetts? Is home a place we can point to on a map or scroll over on Google earth?
Is it a structure? A house, an apartment, a trailer, cabin or other dwelling, “be it ever so humble”, as John Howard Payne wrote, that is home and for which there is no substitute? Is it the building or even room you grew up in, once lived in or now wake up in each morning and lay your head down each night? Is it some other kind of building you go to regularly or visited only a few times, maybe even just once? An inn, church, school or workplace, perhaps? Maybe a museum, theater, or a shopping mall?
Or is home less geographically or materially bound, as Robert Frost suggests in “The Death of The Hired Man”, where he said, “Home is the place where, when you have to go there, they have to take you in.” Is it a friend of group of friends? Family, the one you were born into or have carefully chosen? Is home a community, gathering in person or online? Is it a communion of persons, past and present?
What about the familiar idiom attributed to Pliny the Elder, “Home is where the heart is.”? Does home lie in the valley of our affections, to whatever or whomever it is we hold most dear regardless of physical location or presence?
Then again, perhaps as James Baldwin wrote in Giovanni’s Room, “…home is not a place but simply an irrevocable condition.” Is home then a self? Or a part of our self some are privileged to inhabit without thought or concern, while others must come to terms with or struggle to inhabit fully and freely. Is sexual orientation and gender identity home? What about the color of our skin? Our ancestry?
It seems home is not all that easy to pin down. Some definitions feel too limiting while others open the door to ever broadening and deepening ideas and insights. Indeed, home, like so many religious and spiritual words, points to a much larger concept than we typically assume.
What makes home a religious and spiritual word, is that its contemplation nudges us, as all religion ought, in the words of writer Thomas Moore, toward, “a quality of life in which you stand at the edge of your existence and remain open in mind and heart to the unknown all around you.” In other words it invites us to engage the mystery of “life and the cosmos.”
Mystery which is felt, the poet Maya Angelou attests, in “the ache for home.” which, “lives in all of us.” Home, in other words, is a universal human longing. Still others, like Thomas Moore, go even further and describe home as a need that, “lies deep in the human heart.” Which is perhaps why the loss of home, be it a physical place or community, to natural disasters, to war, to family breakups, to misguided or cruel policy decisions, to climate change is so tragic and painful to both witness and experience.
For when our need for home is not being met, is ignored or denied, we experience homesickness. Is there anyone among us who has not known some degree of homesickness at one time or another?
Memories of being or receiving a call from a tearful child pleading to be picked up from camp or some other stay away from home form one expression of homesickness.
The Zulu chant we sang, “Thula Klizeo”, written by Joseph Shabalala on a trip to New York City in the late 1980’s offers another. The full chant, translated as “Be still my heart, even here I am at home.”, is an expression of homesickness and hope for his home in South Africa, to which, because of Apartheid, he did not know if he would ever be allowed to return. [Singing The Journey Song Information]
Homesickness impacts individuals and entire societies. Indeed, Thomas Moore says, “All signs indicate that our society is suffering from profound homesickness.” Such signs include, according to Moore, “Aimlessness, boredom and irresponsibility.” Kind of sounds like the land of Nod, which if you were here for worship a couple of weeks ago, you will recall was the place to which Cain was exiled after he killed his brother Abel and which means, “staggering, wandering about aimlessly, confusion.”
I don’t know if Joni Mitchell said it first, but as so often seems true, “You don't know what you've got till it's gone.” And so it is the loss of home and the experience of homesickness that makes us most keenly aware of our need for home and serves as our invitation to contemplate or explore what home really is to us. And, “stand at the edge of our [your] existence and remain open in mind and heart to the unknown all around us [you].”
This is no fact finding mission with the aim of understanding, rather, it is a quest to open ourselves and experience what is most true.
The difference between fact finding to understand and opening ourselves to experience what is most true is illustrated in the story, “Henry Builds A Cabin”, our first reading this morning which our children and youth are engaging downstairs right now.
You will recall Henry’s friends focus on what they can see and measure…the cabin and its dimensions…. in other words, the facts. Using these they arrive at an understanding, the cabin is too small and too dark. But Henry is not limited by what he can see, measure or understand. He is open to experience without having to fully grasp or articulate its immediate value or meaning. Which is why whenever one of his friends declares his cabin, “too small” or “too dark.”, Henry replies, “It’s bigger” or “brighter than it looks.” Just as a bean patch can be a dining room, a sunny spot a library, and a curved path to a pond a grand staircase leading to a ballroom, both the need and experience of home is more than is readily observable or grasped.
Thomas Moore reminds us, “The [soul’s] need for home has to do not only with shelter and a house, but with more subtle forms, like the feeling that one is living in the right place, being around people who offer a sense of belonging, doing work that is truly appropriate, feeling [maternally] protected and enlivened by the natural world, and belonging to a nation and a world community.”
Moore’s words point to home as a place or state of deep consequence, of safety yet also profound intimacy with self and others, of aliveness and meaning that defy expression through precise language and often can only be felt or lived.
Like the apple tree that, “Do lean down low in Linden Lea”, as the choir sang this morning, home, to which we are continually drawn, provides not only for the body, but offers spiritual nourishment as well. Which suggests home is not, or at least need not be, but one place, or even a place at all, but a state in which we experience our need for home acknowledged, heard, and even met. A state to which certain places can awaken us, like the lake isle of Innisfree made famous by William Butler Yeats poem of the same name. A state Yeats, describes in last line of the poem as something to which he’s called, “I hear it in the deep heart’s core.”, he says.
What do you hear in the deep heart’s core? The question, like the poet’s statement, uncovers the pathway home, where our guide is that still, small voice within. Not the loud external voices of those, however well meaning, who are quick to should all over people. Certainly not the screeching voices shouting America or any other country or cause first. Not the imperious holier than thou, do as I say not as I do, or the here’s what I’d do voice of those obsessed with fixing people. But that still small voice all these others can so easily drown out.
What that still small voice lacks in volume, it makes up for in persistence including notably, manifestation as homesickness, beckoning us to “return again.”
Indeed, it was a persistent still small voice, not external voices, even supportive ones, that ultimately guided me home from frightened, self-loathing and closeted to an out and proud gay man, and a religious one, to boot! That same voice points to the ways Rome awakens a sense of home in me, but reminds me I need not move there to be home.
You can almost hear that still small voice singing in Joseph Shabalala’s exclamation, “Be still my heart; even here I am at home.” in the face of the deafening blare of Apartheid and inspiring him to write, “Thula Klizeo.”
Or imagine it transporting William Bulter Yeats from the “pavement’s grey”… the busyness of London… to the quietude of the lake Isle of Innisfree without ever having leave his room.
And we can sense the ease it gives people like Henry, from our first reading, to gently, but confidently respond to a world of increasingly limited spiritual and religious imagination, that home, mine, yours and ours, is bigger and brighter than it seems.
For the still small voice within speaks of home and is fluent in the myriad languages of the body and mind, our conscience and the senses too, and broadly speaking, those of spirit and soul. Our physical and emotional responses, questions, conundrums, feelings, inspirations and intuitions that mark and move the boundaries of home throughout our lives.
And so we end where we began, with a question of home, two actually.
What is home, to you? And, how do you know?
Amen and Blessed Be
Sermon given at the Brookfield Unitarian Universalist Church
September 22, 2019
by Rev. Craig M. Nowak
Have you ever visited a place for the first time and yet experienced it as if you’d returned home?
This happened to me when I visited Rome for the first time. Within an hour of arriving at the train station, I found myself walking the streets of the large, sprawling, ancient city as if I’d just gotten home from a brief trip away. The streets felt familiar. I had no trouble finding my way around. I never felt unsafe of unsure as to where I was or where I was going. So unusual and vivid was this experience that to this day it still fascinates me.
Contrast this with my experience of Boston, a city I’ve been visiting since I was a child. As an adult, I visit Boston several times a year and I almost always get lost, even when going to the places I’ve been to there dozens of times, which frustrates me. Still, I like Boston, but I have never experienced a visit to Boston as anything close to a homecoming.
That doesn’t mean I’m about to pack up my life and move to Rome, however. For though I feel at home when I’m there, is Rome itself, my home? Maybe. Maybe not. Which begs the question,
What is home?
Is it, to quote Irving Berlin’s “God Bless America”, a “Land that I love.”…a nation, the US, Great Britain, Colombia, or a city, like Rome or Boston or Worcester? How about a town, like Brookfield, Sturbridge, Barre or Spencer? Or even a region, like New England or central Massachusetts? Is home a place we can point to on a map or scroll over on Google earth?
Is it a structure? A house, an apartment, a trailer, cabin or other dwelling, “be it ever so humble”, as John Howard Payne wrote, that is home and for which there is no substitute? Is it the building or even room you grew up in, once lived in or now wake up in each morning and lay your head down each night? Is it some other kind of building you go to regularly or visited only a few times, maybe even just once? An inn, church, school or workplace, perhaps? Maybe a museum, theater, or a shopping mall?
Or is home less geographically or materially bound, as Robert Frost suggests in “The Death of The Hired Man”, where he said, “Home is the place where, when you have to go there, they have to take you in.” Is it a friend of group of friends? Family, the one you were born into or have carefully chosen? Is home a community, gathering in person or online? Is it a communion of persons, past and present?
What about the familiar idiom attributed to Pliny the Elder, “Home is where the heart is.”? Does home lie in the valley of our affections, to whatever or whomever it is we hold most dear regardless of physical location or presence?
Then again, perhaps as James Baldwin wrote in Giovanni’s Room, “…home is not a place but simply an irrevocable condition.” Is home then a self? Or a part of our self some are privileged to inhabit without thought or concern, while others must come to terms with or struggle to inhabit fully and freely. Is sexual orientation and gender identity home? What about the color of our skin? Our ancestry?
It seems home is not all that easy to pin down. Some definitions feel too limiting while others open the door to ever broadening and deepening ideas and insights. Indeed, home, like so many religious and spiritual words, points to a much larger concept than we typically assume.
What makes home a religious and spiritual word, is that its contemplation nudges us, as all religion ought, in the words of writer Thomas Moore, toward, “a quality of life in which you stand at the edge of your existence and remain open in mind and heart to the unknown all around you.” In other words it invites us to engage the mystery of “life and the cosmos.”
Mystery which is felt, the poet Maya Angelou attests, in “the ache for home.” which, “lives in all of us.” Home, in other words, is a universal human longing. Still others, like Thomas Moore, go even further and describe home as a need that, “lies deep in the human heart.” Which is perhaps why the loss of home, be it a physical place or community, to natural disasters, to war, to family breakups, to misguided or cruel policy decisions, to climate change is so tragic and painful to both witness and experience.
For when our need for home is not being met, is ignored or denied, we experience homesickness. Is there anyone among us who has not known some degree of homesickness at one time or another?
Memories of being or receiving a call from a tearful child pleading to be picked up from camp or some other stay away from home form one expression of homesickness.
The Zulu chant we sang, “Thula Klizeo”, written by Joseph Shabalala on a trip to New York City in the late 1980’s offers another. The full chant, translated as “Be still my heart, even here I am at home.”, is an expression of homesickness and hope for his home in South Africa, to which, because of Apartheid, he did not know if he would ever be allowed to return. [Singing The Journey Song Information]
Homesickness impacts individuals and entire societies. Indeed, Thomas Moore says, “All signs indicate that our society is suffering from profound homesickness.” Such signs include, according to Moore, “Aimlessness, boredom and irresponsibility.” Kind of sounds like the land of Nod, which if you were here for worship a couple of weeks ago, you will recall was the place to which Cain was exiled after he killed his brother Abel and which means, “staggering, wandering about aimlessly, confusion.”
I don’t know if Joni Mitchell said it first, but as so often seems true, “You don't know what you've got till it's gone.” And so it is the loss of home and the experience of homesickness that makes us most keenly aware of our need for home and serves as our invitation to contemplate or explore what home really is to us. And, “stand at the edge of our [your] existence and remain open in mind and heart to the unknown all around us [you].”
This is no fact finding mission with the aim of understanding, rather, it is a quest to open ourselves and experience what is most true.
The difference between fact finding to understand and opening ourselves to experience what is most true is illustrated in the story, “Henry Builds A Cabin”, our first reading this morning which our children and youth are engaging downstairs right now.
You will recall Henry’s friends focus on what they can see and measure…the cabin and its dimensions…. in other words, the facts. Using these they arrive at an understanding, the cabin is too small and too dark. But Henry is not limited by what he can see, measure or understand. He is open to experience without having to fully grasp or articulate its immediate value or meaning. Which is why whenever one of his friends declares his cabin, “too small” or “too dark.”, Henry replies, “It’s bigger” or “brighter than it looks.” Just as a bean patch can be a dining room, a sunny spot a library, and a curved path to a pond a grand staircase leading to a ballroom, both the need and experience of home is more than is readily observable or grasped.
Thomas Moore reminds us, “The [soul’s] need for home has to do not only with shelter and a house, but with more subtle forms, like the feeling that one is living in the right place, being around people who offer a sense of belonging, doing work that is truly appropriate, feeling [maternally] protected and enlivened by the natural world, and belonging to a nation and a world community.”
Moore’s words point to home as a place or state of deep consequence, of safety yet also profound intimacy with self and others, of aliveness and meaning that defy expression through precise language and often can only be felt or lived.
Like the apple tree that, “Do lean down low in Linden Lea”, as the choir sang this morning, home, to which we are continually drawn, provides not only for the body, but offers spiritual nourishment as well. Which suggests home is not, or at least need not be, but one place, or even a place at all, but a state in which we experience our need for home acknowledged, heard, and even met. A state to which certain places can awaken us, like the lake isle of Innisfree made famous by William Butler Yeats poem of the same name. A state Yeats, describes in last line of the poem as something to which he’s called, “I hear it in the deep heart’s core.”, he says.
What do you hear in the deep heart’s core? The question, like the poet’s statement, uncovers the pathway home, where our guide is that still, small voice within. Not the loud external voices of those, however well meaning, who are quick to should all over people. Certainly not the screeching voices shouting America or any other country or cause first. Not the imperious holier than thou, do as I say not as I do, or the here’s what I’d do voice of those obsessed with fixing people. But that still small voice all these others can so easily drown out.
What that still small voice lacks in volume, it makes up for in persistence including notably, manifestation as homesickness, beckoning us to “return again.”
Indeed, it was a persistent still small voice, not external voices, even supportive ones, that ultimately guided me home from frightened, self-loathing and closeted to an out and proud gay man, and a religious one, to boot! That same voice points to the ways Rome awakens a sense of home in me, but reminds me I need not move there to be home.
You can almost hear that still small voice singing in Joseph Shabalala’s exclamation, “Be still my heart; even here I am at home.” in the face of the deafening blare of Apartheid and inspiring him to write, “Thula Klizeo.”
Or imagine it transporting William Bulter Yeats from the “pavement’s grey”… the busyness of London… to the quietude of the lake Isle of Innisfree without ever having leave his room.
And we can sense the ease it gives people like Henry, from our first reading, to gently, but confidently respond to a world of increasingly limited spiritual and religious imagination, that home, mine, yours and ours, is bigger and brighter than it seems.
For the still small voice within speaks of home and is fluent in the myriad languages of the body and mind, our conscience and the senses too, and broadly speaking, those of spirit and soul. Our physical and emotional responses, questions, conundrums, feelings, inspirations and intuitions that mark and move the boundaries of home throughout our lives.
And so we end where we began, with a question of home, two actually.
What is home, to you? And, how do you know?
Amen and Blessed Be
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