Sermon given by Rev. Frank Clarkson, November 3, 2019
For years, without really thinking about it, I imagined the spiritual life as a journey. And I embraced this image, of heading out, like on an adventure, for parts unknown. Journey or pilgrimage has been the dominant metaphor for the spiritual life, and for human growth, for a long time. From the start, our nation has encouraged this spirit of exploration: The rallying cry of westward expansion in the mid-1800s was “Go West, young man.” Deep in our bones we have this impulse toward leave-taking, getting on a path heading somewhere. “Way over yonder,” Carole King sang. And this is the image that informs Mary Oliver’s poem, “The Journey”:
One day you finally knew
what you had to do, and began,
though the voices around you
kept shouting
their bad advice —
I especially love her picture of what the start of that journey is like:
It was already late
enough, and a wild night,
and the road full of fallen
branches and stones.
I embraced these images of journey, and the idea that the spiritual life will lead us to places we did not plan to go. When I felt lost, I was comforted by Thomas Merton’s prayer, in which he confesses that he has no idea where he is going, but trusts “you will lead me by the right road, though I may know nothing about it.”
I even saw my theological education as a journey; leaving my previous life behind and heading off to divinity school. But while I was there I read an essay (“Home and Pilgrimage: Companion Metaphors for Personal and Social Transformation,” by Sharon Daloz Parks) which helped me to see that journey is only half of the story. There is a companion metaphor for the spiritual life, which offers a balance to the call to head off somewhere, and that is the call to come home.
We live in a time and in a culture that tells us, when things get tough, it’s time to pick up and leave. Change your surroundings, and things will get better. Which can be easier than facing the reality that it’s we ourselves who need to change. Maybe we need to stay put and work on things right where we are, rather than run away from trouble. I’ll have more to say about this next Sunday. For now, let’s talk about home. Which happens to be our theme for November.
When you hear the word “home,” what comes to mind? Take a moment to let images and feelings rise up in you. Home…
I don’t know a more evocative word or idea than home. Or a more complicated one. Home is a place, certainly, or the memory of a place, and the sights and smells and stories and people that go with that place. Whether they are happy memories or not, we are formed by what happens in our early years; where we lived, and with whom.
My childhood home in North Carolina was idyllic in some ways--playing ball with the kids on our street; exploring the woods and creek nearby. But I remember a summer day when the neighborhood kids were lying on the grass under an oak tree. And when I thought of going home, I felt a pit in my stomach. Our house held tensions that I didn’t understand. My dad was emotionally absent, and my mom often seemed unfulfilled and frustrated in her job as mother and housewife.
When I was five or six, my parents bought a run-down farm a hour away, with woods and fields; a creek, a pond and a tractor. I loved it there. We went most Saturdays with our dad, we’d wander that land and feel free. When my dad got into financial trouble, the farm was sold. I’ve never been back, though every now and then I look down on it from Google Earth.
Still, when I read a story, I find myself picturing those fields, that particular dirt road, that pond. That land still occupies a place in my imagination. It lives in my memory, and feels more like home, than the house I grew up in.
I’ve lived in New England longer now than anywhere else, and I feel at home here. But put on James Taylor’s “Going to Carolina in My Mind,” and that song takes me back, and it’s Sunday night, and I’m driving up highway 54 towards Chapel Hill, heading back to college. I see the moon rising over rural North Carolina, and I miss that place, and that time.
We each have these images and stories of home, of places and people that have shaped and formed us, and we carry them with us, whether we are aware of them or not. This month, why don’t you do yourself a favor and take some time to remember some of your stories and the places you called home? Take some time to write down some memories, or tell someone a story that you carry with you. Because you can go back there, in your mind, and it’s good to be in touch with the places where you felt at home.
I’m not suggesting we spend this month looking backward. But it’s good to know where you have come from; it’s important to be in touch with what feeds your soul, so you can be at home in yourself, wherever you are. That’s the goal, isn’t it?
We live in a time and in a culture that seems determined to pull us away from our center, bent on distracting us with shiny objects or getting us upset about something. But underneath all the noise, there is a deeper voice, that points toward our desire for what is good and true. We are, as we sang earlier, longing thirsty souls. And what we’re longing for is home.
And this is not a going backward at all. We heard it in the reading from Hebrews, about those ancient heroes of the faith, who “confessed that they were strangers and foreigners on the earth, for people who speak in this way make it clear that they are seeking a homeland. If they had been thinking of the land that they had left behind, they would have had opportunity to return. But as it is, they desire a better country…” (Hebrews 11:13-16).
Home is not just a place; it’s also an idea, and an ideal. It is what we are seeking after, and what we are made for; to be in the companionship of human community, and in the presence of that which is sacred. Where we feel at home. And when you find yourself there, you don’t want or need to go anywhere else.
Many of us grew up with a work ethic that taught us that nothing good comes except by struggle, and the harder you work, the more likely you are to find success and happiness. I’m all for commitment and hard work, and struggle, even, but the older I get, the more I hear a different voice that says, “Slow down. Be still. Why are you in such a hurry? Savor this moment. Be here, now.”
The trouble with having journey as your primary image for the spiritual life is that you are always going somewhere! Rather than being here, rather than being present, and receiving the gifts of this moment, and this day. I’m not going to throw away the idea of journey, but what if we let journey be balanced and tempered by home? What if our striving was balanced by rest, what if our activism was informed by contemplation, our work nourished by play? What if the goal of all our journeying is to find our way home?
The poet Mary Oliver knew something about the journey away from hurt and suffering. She also knew about the journey home:
You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.
Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting -
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things. (Mary Oliver, “Wild Geese)
My spiritual companions, as Ram Dass said, “we are all walking each other home.” We are here to help each other find our way to that land of liberation and belonging. That’s where we’re bound. May this be our song: come and go with me to that land, where we’re bound.
Amen.