finding home
Some days I feel like my heart is just lost. I suppose that everyone feels this way at some point, but then, we often don’t talk about it. I usually just cram it down inside and think that maybe it’ll get better on its own. I hope that whatever it is I’m troubling about will just solve itself and suddenly I won’t have to deal with it anymore. Lately I can’t seem to figure out what I’m doing with my life. One day I think, yeah, it’d be great to just travel around and find some ultra-transferable job skill that I can hop around with. And the next day I want to finish my Philosophy/English degree. Or maybe go back and finish my Bible college degree. But then I slip out and get a little tired of all the abstract learning that doesn’t seem to be worth a damn when it comes to actually loving people and living.
Walking around downtown Winnipeg, I see these hurting people who are lost and homeless and asking for help, but I can’t see any kind of practical or enduring way to help. It could be as simple as just giving what you have—but then it seems I could be drained away to nothing. The Christian cliché comes back to me that God will fill you up; the “popular” idea that “running on empty” is simply a lack of trust in God. But that doesn’t really do all that much for me. I have enough trouble trusting God to talk with me, let alone sustain me. (It seems a little screwed up when I see it in writing.) This faith thing can be pretty tricky, but then the beauty is that we’re not on our own. And I don’t just mean God (although he’s pretty good too), but love and community. Strange mystery, that is. When you feel it, really actually experience community, you know exactly what I mean by “mystery.” It’s the sudden and overwhelming sense that, yes, I’ve found home.
Home is a funny thing. It’s usually the place where you grow up that you call home. For me, Mom and Dad’s house was home. And I think the reason home is home is because there’s love there. Some people may never have a place like that though, and I find that one of the most disturbing thoughts: the fact that “home” has been stripped of love and security, warmth and acceptance. In some sense, home is defined by who’s there, not by where it is. But still, one day, you leave it. I went to a wedding last year and the couple being married said that home would be wherever the other person was; home was where they were together. That’s a beautiful thing.
I think I left home in the Fall of 2000, when I went to England to Capernwray Bible College. I didn’t know it at the time, but eventually it just dawned on me that I had left home. And it’s not that I lost love. I think it might be that I lost the acute awareness of a safe place to be loved. I had moved on. Don Miller wrote in the dedication to Through Painted Deserts, “Mom, Here is the first book, rewritten a bit. I didn’t know, when I was living it, that it was about leaving home. I think you always knew. Thanks for letting me go.” Even though I left home and came back again, it wasn’t really the same. In some sense it will always be home, but something gets lost. One day you realize that you’re adrift in the world.
Frederick Buechner: “Yet we are homeless even so in the sense of having homes but not really being at home in them. To be really at home is to be really at peace, and there can be no real peace for any of us until there is some measure of real peace for all of us. When we close our eyes to the deep needs of other people whether they live on the streets or under our own roof—and when we close our eyes to our own deep need to reach out to them—we can never be fully at home anywhere.”
I guess I’m just saying that it’s far too easy to be selfish and to forget about love—both to be loved and to love others. I find it exceptionally easy to let people alone, some kind of emotional detachment maybe. But I also find it exceptionally hard not to become attached to people. You know the way, hanging all our hopes on a friend or confidant, on any relationship, and expecting it to make us whole and fill all the empty bits and unmet needs we have. No one person can do that. And I have to say that I find it endlessly frustrating that God doesn’t have skin on to touch and meet with and talk to and, ultimately, help out with all this. Then again, he kind of does in the church. It’s community that can truly embrace you with “human hands that hold you and show you God’s faithful love,” as Henri Nouwen puts it. That’s the mystery I mean: the fact that human touch has some kind of spiritual and divine aspect to it. You’re never so aware of a person as when you reach out and touch them, whether it be a handshake or a hug or a poke in the ribs. And stranger still, you can touch somebody without laying a finger on them. Call it the meeting of souls.
Walking around downtown Winnipeg, I see these hurting people who are lost and homeless and asking for help, but I can’t see any kind of practical or enduring way to help. It could be as simple as just giving what you have—but then it seems I could be drained away to nothing. The Christian cliché comes back to me that God will fill you up; the “popular” idea that “running on empty” is simply a lack of trust in God. But that doesn’t really do all that much for me. I have enough trouble trusting God to talk with me, let alone sustain me. (It seems a little screwed up when I see it in writing.) This faith thing can be pretty tricky, but then the beauty is that we’re not on our own. And I don’t just mean God (although he’s pretty good too), but love and community. Strange mystery, that is. When you feel it, really actually experience community, you know exactly what I mean by “mystery.” It’s the sudden and overwhelming sense that, yes, I’ve found home.
Home is a funny thing. It’s usually the place where you grow up that you call home. For me, Mom and Dad’s house was home. And I think the reason home is home is because there’s love there. Some people may never have a place like that though, and I find that one of the most disturbing thoughts: the fact that “home” has been stripped of love and security, warmth and acceptance. In some sense, home is defined by who’s there, not by where it is. But still, one day, you leave it. I went to a wedding last year and the couple being married said that home would be wherever the other person was; home was where they were together. That’s a beautiful thing.
I think I left home in the Fall of 2000, when I went to England to Capernwray Bible College. I didn’t know it at the time, but eventually it just dawned on me that I had left home. And it’s not that I lost love. I think it might be that I lost the acute awareness of a safe place to be loved. I had moved on. Don Miller wrote in the dedication to Through Painted Deserts, “Mom, Here is the first book, rewritten a bit. I didn’t know, when I was living it, that it was about leaving home. I think you always knew. Thanks for letting me go.” Even though I left home and came back again, it wasn’t really the same. In some sense it will always be home, but something gets lost. One day you realize that you’re adrift in the world.
Frederick Buechner: “Yet we are homeless even so in the sense of having homes but not really being at home in them. To be really at home is to be really at peace, and there can be no real peace for any of us until there is some measure of real peace for all of us. When we close our eyes to the deep needs of other people whether they live on the streets or under our own roof—and when we close our eyes to our own deep need to reach out to them—we can never be fully at home anywhere.”
I guess I’m just saying that it’s far too easy to be selfish and to forget about love—both to be loved and to love others. I find it exceptionally easy to let people alone, some kind of emotional detachment maybe. But I also find it exceptionally hard not to become attached to people. You know the way, hanging all our hopes on a friend or confidant, on any relationship, and expecting it to make us whole and fill all the empty bits and unmet needs we have. No one person can do that. And I have to say that I find it endlessly frustrating that God doesn’t have skin on to touch and meet with and talk to and, ultimately, help out with all this. Then again, he kind of does in the church. It’s community that can truly embrace you with “human hands that hold you and show you God’s faithful love,” as Henri Nouwen puts it. That’s the mystery I mean: the fact that human touch has some kind of spiritual and divine aspect to it. You’re never so aware of a person as when you reach out and touch them, whether it be a handshake or a hug or a poke in the ribs. And stranger still, you can touch somebody without laying a finger on them. Call it the meeting of souls.
posted by chris at 09:54
2 Comments:
"The way to love anything is to realize that it might be lost."
- G.K. Chesterton
sorry we couldn't make it to the exchange church this week. we're going to try for next week. our schedules will be better then. see you on monday for our weekly meeting of the souls.
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