Sermon given by Intern Minister Tori Rosati, September 26, 2021

When I made the decision to start seminary three years ago, I didn’t know that it would feel so much like leaving home. I remember this longing right before beginning the journey in the spring of 2019 to plant myself in a space for a while and let it work on me. I had spent the previous year in deep discernment about embarking and now I was ready to settle into a new space and allow myself to be formed in the studying, the exploration, and the learning. To touch down in a new home. 

I remember my first trip into the Boston. I took the commuter rail and organized myself for a long day in the city. Backpack -check. Pencil case – check., Notebooks, tea bags, lunch, travel mug – check, check check. From that cold January morning when I boarded the train beneath a darkened sky and watched the sunrise over the Rumney marsh in Revere – I carried myself from one place to another. I was on the road. Landing in classrooms, on city benches and at lunch tables. On my non-school days, I landed at my job where I settled into the familiar faux leather chair next to the south-facing window that overlooked a worn parking lot. Then back home to Tim and the girls to snuggle up on the couch and listen to the days stories, go to board meetings at my church community, connect with dear friends. And all along the way, my trusted backpack, my pouch of favorite tea and my mug – joined me as companions as I touched down and took off over and over again. And even though these transitions were jarring, I developed a rhythm to my travels between spaces. I found I could make home on the fly, set up a sense of belonging and centering in the most disparate of places.  

Then the pandemic. It was this new kind of landing home. Home took on a whole new meaning as we stayed put. In Frank’s sermon from a few weeks ago, he talked about homesickness and I think that is so powerful. We have all spent so much time at home and yet, we are longing for it. Home then is more than the place we go at the end of the day – as my pre-pandemic travels remind me, it sometimes on the road - often more than a place, it is a person, a community, something deep inside ourselves. So in this time of transition, this last year of finally beginning to leave our physical homes to return to these other ones,  I have been thinking a lot about home. 

Maya Angelou in her book, Letter to My Daughter, writes about how she doesn’t agree with this adage, “You Can’t Go home,” instead, Angelou writes, “I believe that one can never leave home. I believe that one carries the shadows, the dreams, the fears and dragons of home under one’s skin, at the extreme corners of one’s eyes and possibly in the gristle of the earlobe. Home is that youthful region where a child is the only real living inhabitant…. We may act sophisticated and worldly but I believe we feel safest when we go inside ourselves and find home, a place where we belong and maybe the only place we really do.” 

I love this – we never leave home – we carry it with us - it is deep inside ourselves, that youthful region where we find ourselves, where we belong. I love how Angelou ties home to youth. I think we can draw inspiration from our kids – the ways that they find and create homes in the wake of their play and imagination. 

I grew up in Springfield, MA before moving to a small rural, farming town just south on the Ct. border. We had this row of Forsythia bushes out front in Springfield. There were probably 6 or so bushes and they had grown together on the top, but their stalks remained separated near the ground so they made these little forsythia rooms that my sister and I would crawl inside and fill with things. Cups, blankets, trinkets, and toys spread out to adorn our tiny homes in the underbrush. At my grandmothers house in the summer, we would build home forts behind her couch with blankets and gather up her silver tea service and pretend we were entertaining guests at a dinner party. I watch my girls in turn create homes where ever they go. One of their favorite homemaking activities is to draw large squares in the sand at the beach and develop floor plans for their imagined homes then run around inside the lines decorating it with drawn furniture, doorways, and wall hangings. 

But, as Maya Angelou reminds us though, home can be a place of fear and pain. I know that even hearing the word home for some is unbearable. Home does not always mean safety, belonging or welcoming. Home for some is a mirage, unattainable, just beyond reach. US author, Wallace Stegner once said that “Home is a notion only nations of homeless fully appreciate and only the uprooted comprehend.” Home isn’t a given and as the pandemic has taught us, it is more than a static place, something hard to pin down, something precarious and maybe too in formation. Home is in formation. 

This home-making is so central, so foundational to who we are, I think Angelou is write, we never leave our longing for it. This longing is born from the reality that it isn’t always something stable. And while yes, it is deep inside us – and it is also out here too. We take this inner home, and we bring it with us when move through the world - beyond just our individual sense of belonging, the places we go to at the end of the day. We take it with us in the ways we are called to be home for others. In these moments of flux and change, when landing anywhere certain or familiar feels perilous, I find myself looking for it. Where are our youthful regions? Our forsythia crawl spaces, our floorplans in the sand? And what new things do we bring in our backpacks? 

Last week we talked about covenant, those promises we make to each other for how to live, love, and belong together – how they contain us in a sense of a congregational home. How they ask us to enter, bringing our full selves, our sense of home, into this beloved spiritual community. They ask us to celebrate both the strength we hold as individuals and as a collective to build the common good. To build a common home. A home that holds us in care and keeps up accountable to each other. This home that me make together…This belonging we make together…

In my three weeks here, I have already learned a lot, but one of the most central things is how well this congregation knows how to do this. Here is what I have learned about home from all of you…Home is not a static thing, a passive state of holding. Home is on the move. We can’t leave it and it doesn’t leave us and more than that, we can be in the business of making it. Home as a verb, a promise, a prayer - something we create and cultivate, and reproduce for each other. 

I have learned that as we come and go from this space, we bring and take home with us. Each person here, brings things – talents, passions, and gifts that makes home – home as shelter, home as food, meals – home as access, offering, service. We all bring our own sense and meaning of home into these walls and like the waters that mingled in our water communion ritual, they entwine, circle around and blend together into the tapestry that is this, the collective home we build and cultivate in our midst. 

I was in the church a Wednesday or 2 ago. All the staff had left and I was waiting for folks to arrive for the board meeting in a few hours. I had been feeling a bit frazzled by all the changes of a new semester, the start of this internships, new faces and stories – so many things. Frank encouraged me to spend some quiet time alone feeling into the space. I sat for a while in the sanctuary here, quietly breathed in the smell of polished well cared for wood and felt the hush of centuries of love and tending encircle me. I walked upstairs and sat in my office. Took time and care with my steps, felt my body move across carpet, listened for the sounds of creaking stairs, before heading to the kitchen to make a cup of tea. I flipped the tea kettle on to boil some water and l then did what I have done for the last few years  – I went over to my backpack, took out my travel mug, unscrewed the lid and leaned against the counter to wait for the water to finish boiling. But as I looked up, above me to the right, I noticed a shelf with a row of eclectic mugs (many likely brought in and left behind like church mugs are oft to do - an offering from someone’s home) and took one down. In that moment, I decided to put away the travel mug for now, and dropped my tea bag in a white UUCH mug and poured the water in – steam circling up from the steeping, and curled and warmed my fingers around the porcelain. Here I was, here I am, making this place home…

In this time together, we will share in the years ahead, may we find corners our lives to cover with blankets and fill with the hospitality of a warm cup of tea. May we draw home lines in the sand with open doors and greetings and say come in - you are welcome here. May home be a new place we move toward together. Something both already here and in formation. A place of curiosity and surprise as we bring our things – our new things - let our internal homes drift and intermingle with each other’s, and the ones we make together in the world – riding in backpacks, forming in covenant, collecting in the underbrush. We are on the road together, we are tracing the rivers, we are building, we are taking home with us when we go, bringing it back when we return and gathering in the homes of those around us. So that for all our lives there is a place of common good, for everyone - to always be coming home.