Home is my superpower

“To be rooted is perhaps the most important and least recognized need of the human soul.” ― Simone Weil

The location of the new, part-time-hermitage (my friend Monica took this when I wasn’t looking)

In the last ten years, I have moved many times – Bolingbrook, the Gold Coast, De Kalb, Indianapolis, Des Moines, Chicago – restarting my web of geographic and social connections again and again. Since moving back, I tell people I plan to die here, in Hyde Park, because if I tried to move again I would just die anyway. (My body wants to shrivel up, just thinking about it.)

For years, I have wondered what “home” means. Sometimes I have felt at home in other cities and sometimes not at all, for reasons I couldn’t always discern. Some houses and apartments felt good and others felt wrong - upsetting, even. What made a place feel like “home”? Or not? I used to think it should be something I could control or engineer: if I didn’t like a city, surely there were things I could do to like it better – see more of it, go to community events, find “my” special places. If a house was giving me the heebie-jeebies, maybe I needed therapy or to find the right furniture or if we just renovated this one bathroom… (None of those things worked, by the way.)

“Home” is a story we tell about ourselves. We long for a home that can tell the story of who we are — or who we want to be. Sometimes I wonder if a place does not feel like home because it is a place where we can’t know who we are, or where we do not like who we are.

Sometimes this means we want to move home to where we are from, and sometimes it means we never want to move back there. Sometimes there are multiple places we feel at home. For some people, there may be no place that feels like home. Perhaps sometimes we can adjust or change our feeling of home, if we change the story we are telling ourselves about a place or about the self. But in my experience, that is pretty hard - especially if you move say, five times in less than ten years. (A little PTSD here, dear readers.)

As a part-time hermit, I spend a lot of time at home. Home is my superpower. I get overstimulated easily in public and shared spaces, so I need a protected place to re-center myself, to be in the midst of familiarity and quiet so my body and brain can reset and recharge. Being home helps me to think more clearly. When I can spend time in a home that I love, it helps me work better, love other people better, and be excited about being a person out in the world, too.

The idea of home tells a story, but it is also an incarnate reality. On a large stage, this is about geography and landscape: some people need mountains or forests, other people need the ocean or big sky or the prairie or the desert. We feel a familiarity or attachment, often, to certain kinds of trees, soil, weather, birds, flora, and even bugs and critters. Home may feel to us like a particular local culture or the way the people of a place live, behave, and respond to each other, or the styles, clothes, music, foods, and arts. On a granular level, even the actual space where we sleep, eat, and live: the furniture, floors, windows, layout, paint colors, and even appliances, can make us feel comfortable, neutral, or uncomfortable.

Sometimes a place feels like “home” so that means it feels uncomfortable, because the place we grew up is not a place of nostalgia or good memories. In that case, some people find a new “home,” and attach to a landscape or house or culture where they were able to form good memories and a valued sense of self and relationships. I am also sure there are some folks who barely notice their surroundings or landscapes, because there is a lot of human variety in this world.

Jesus never talked about home except to point out that he didn’t have one. (“Foxes have dens and birds have nests, but the Son of Man has nowhere to lay his head,” Mt. 8:20.) He lived on the road, staying in other people’s houses. He and St. Paul taught, in their lives and words, that there is no home or homeland or culture as important as love, community, and the gospel. In America, the family home and nation are sometimes presented as a Christian value; but that is impossible to trace to anything in the gospels or New Testament. “Home” is not the point of the good news of Jesus.

And yet, many Christian saints identified with a place, monastery, community, city, or nation that they made their place – their locus for service, identity, and prayer. Hermits and anchorites reduced this identification down to a very small place, set within a larger landscape, whether urban or wilderness. We are not to make idols of a house (no matter how adorable), a town, a culture, or a nation. But that doesn’t mean we don’t need a home.

I am grieved and traumatized that my country is destroying the homes and lives of others: my neighbors in this city, the homeless living in tents, cleared away, and refugees from other countries, kidnapped and deported, and the homes and lives of my neighbors far away, on the other side of the earth, with bombs. A safe home makes so much possible – it makes human goodness possible, because we all need a place to come home to, to feel safe and rested, in order to love one another. Idolizing or elevating my home or my land above someone else’s home and land does not make me safer or happier. Destroying someone else’s home can only make the world a more cruel, more violent, less habitable place.

After a decade of nomadic life, I am grateful to be back in Hyde Park and to have my little condo here as my part-time-hermitage. It makes me indescribably happy.

If you feel like reflecting on your own home life: What story does your home or local landscape tell you about yourself? What story do you wish it told? What physical aspects of your home or landscape delight you? Dismay you? How does your home or landscape help or hinder you, in the rest of your life?

Heidi

“When we find ourselves in the place just right, ‘twill be in the valley of love and delight.” (Shaker song)

MY BOOKS

Everyday Connections: Year A - if you are looking for a way to bring more scripture into your life or enlarge your preaching or personal journaling, I wrote this book for you! We are in Year A of the Revised Common Lectionary - Year B begins next Advent.

My other four books are listed here.

WHAT I AM READING

Other Minds: The Octopus, the Sea, and the Deep Origins of Consciousness, by Peter Godfrey-Smith (2016). I have a fascination with cephalopod intelligence, and how octopus, cuttlefish, and squid “think” in their arms. For now, I still eat squid, but I can see why some people can’t.

Jane and Prudence and Excellent Women by Barbara Pym (1952 & 1953). Pym’s novels are HILARIOUS and remind me of Jane Austen, but set in the 1940s and 50s and without quite so many happy endings. The detail of everyday life (teapots, shoes, clothes, supper menus) and the backdrop of church as an ordinary, almost unremarkable part of these people’s lives is compelling to me. Did I mention they are hilarious? Anthony Trollope also wrote about church, but when I picked up Barchester Towers again recently, which I first read back in 2006, I had to put it back down because the church politics are now too ridiculously depressing for me.

John: Fortress Biblical Preaching Commentaries, by Karoline Lewis (2014). I have only read the section on the raising of Lazarus, which I preached on last week, but this commentary is SO wonderful. Up there with Genesis by Brueggemann and Acts by Willie James Jennings. Someday, I would love to read all three of these texts in a small group, even though it would take a few years.

Thanks for reading, friends.

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