Posted by According to one definition of home, I am currently homeless. I have been moving back and forth between friends and family while the future slowly sorts itself. While this sorting happens, putting down roots doesn’t feel like the right thing to do. It’s not surprising then that lately I have been wondering about what home actually is. Recently I re-read these words from John O’Donohue:
The word home has a wonderful resonance. Home is where you belong. It is your shelter and place of rest, the place where you can be yourself. (Eternal Echoes, 32)
Place and belonging. Home is about place and belonging. We can assume that this place and belonging is only physical. At this point in time I am sensing that, for me, place and belonging is not primarily physical – it is relational. There are wonderful and generous friends who are willing to share their physical home with me, who say that I am a part of the family, that their home is my home. As I grow in accepting this, something else is happening: we are deepening in the ‘place’ of our relationships, the home of our relationships. As this happens we express who we are with each other. In this place of relationship we discover ourselves. There is safety, shelter.
It has been good to be with family during this time – and important. With the passing of our mother, Marie, over a year ago now, family dynamics have changed. Mum was, in many ways, the one who held home as a physical place for us. She is no longer physically with us, so the experience of home has changed. The family home experience, for me, is no longer limited to a house. Mum is free in Christ and home is now something more. Home as a spiritual reality echoes a little more surely in the heart. The relationship I have with Mum has moved the place of home into a broader context, one that goes beyond the physical to embrace more of the eternal.
What has been important during this time has been faithfulness to the practice of meditation. It has been an anchor point, important for ongoing stability and peace. As home loses its physical foundation, taking on the relational and the spiritual, the contemplative practice of meditating during the course of each day has helped with the letting go of expectation and anxiety around what is next and what is happening. The grace of meditation grounds life in the home within.
In all of this I am seeing that, for me, being a part of The World Community For Christian Meditation at this time means being a global citizen. The physical of home and belonging that so often flows as gift from the relational and the spiritual is no longer limited to one place, one country. As the relational and spiritual goes global, so does the physical.
Jesus tells us that, if we want to be his disciples, we must grow in this relational and spiritual sense of home. This home is the heart of the Kingdom of God. The Kingdom of God is relational. Where ever there are relationships seeking true love, there is this kingdom. It is where we all belong. Where ever we are being drawn into the heart of relationship is where we must go. This heart is our home. It is where life is. It is the most important thing from which everything else flows. For our lives to proclaim the kingdom we must live into its heart – where ever this heart finds us.
As they were going along the road, someone said to him, “I will follow you wherever you go.” And Jesus said to him, “Foxes have holes, and birds of the air have nests; but the Son of Man has nowhere to lay his head.” To another he said, “Follow me.” But he said, “Lord, first let me go and bury my father.” But Jesus said to him, “Let the dead bury their own dead; but as for you, go and proclaim the kingdom of God.” (Luke 9:57-60).