Home

In the two songs I sang this morning, Robert Louis Stevenson's poetry seems to express two quite different feelings about home. On the one hand, in "The Vagabond," he says he wants "a bed in the bush with stars to see."This certainly has nothing to do with home as we understand it.But behind his bravado, there is a strong sense of impending doom; "Let the blow fall soon or late, let what will be o'r me." I have the sense of a man who has been deeply hurt by life and wants desperately to lose himself in travelling.

In the second song, the poetry describes quite vividly, the ruin of what was his childhood home. I sense the loneliness and loss he feels as he remembers his life as a child and then, as an adult, he stands and observes the ruin that is left.He recognizes that he will never come again to that place.

Both of these powerful emotions are imbedded in the attachments we have to that physical reality we call home.If we are hurt, we want to flee and deny the existence of a warm hearth. If we return to ruins of what we loved we want to leave and never try to return again.What was a joyful memory now becomes covered over with the pain of loss.

It is common to say "home is where the heart is."Or "home is where you hang your hat." This Sanctuary is the home where we all gather to worship together.Our home is also a sanctuary. A home is a man's castle, a place where others cannot enter without due cause.But home is also that place to which we can never return.

So what is this thing called home?I will start by saying, "Home is where you make it."We create our own home, or homes, out of the placement of things with which we identify.Beds, favorite chairs, pictures, clocks, tables and lamps, dishes in the kitchen and that pot that our mother gave us, these are some of the things that make a house a home.

We create our own home out of the investment we make of our own efforts and affections.We paint, we clean, we decorate, we invest our efforts and we follow our nesting instincts.These investments are what make a house a home.For without these, there is only a building: wood, steel, glass, plastic, plumbing, plasterboard, paint and wallpaper.

After we left the home of our parents, most of us first lived our independent lives in rented buildings, maybe some of us still do. Never the less we made those places our homes. It didn't matter that we didn't own the property in which we lived, ate, and slept. We considered it our home.We made it our home.

As a society, we move often enough so that we get a lot of practice at making our own home out of whatever physical piece of property we rent or own. Many large businesses exist solely to the support this desire to make our own home out of the house or apartment that we rent or own. I am certain that all of us have frequented these business and have spent a lot of our wealth there. We spend a considerable amount of time and money in making a house a home. How come we do this? How come it matters so much what it looks like?

What has us invest so much in this physical reality called home? How much are you willing to expend on this enterprise of making a home for yourself. I am certain that you are not about to follow the example of Bill Gates and create a 37,000-square-foot, $30 million lakeside compound. I don't think that I could call something like that home. But, if you are not going that far, where are you going to draw the line? What will cause you to call it quits. Is running out of money the only reason to quit?

If you look at some of our closest animal relatives, you do not find a large investment in this kind of thing we call home. Dr. Galdikas, in reporting on her field research on the life of the wild Orangutan, describes their nesting habits. Both the male and female Orangutan are loners. They are on the move all the time looking for food or adventure. This means that every night they might be in a different place. So every night they spend a couple of minutes - and because they have four hands it literally takes only a couple of minutes - to make themselves nests out of vines. After they have rested, they get up and go on their way again with never a thought of looking back. They never use the same nest, even if they are in the same area.

The nomadic people of the world certainly don't have any fixed address they call home. They follow their herds and the seasons. They have personal belongings but these are usually for the practical necessities of life. They make, and use, the tools they need, the clothes they ware; and then, when they are worn out, they discard them. Certain items, especially ceremonial objects have a longer life and a higher status but they are recognized as being symbolic and not of intrinsic value.

These cultures - that we have the audacity to call primitive - place a high value on community life as opposed to objects. This priority is vividly illustrated by the movie "The Gods Must Be Crazy." The Coke bottle that dropped from the sky at first was a novelty. However, it soon became an object of desire. Everyone wanted to possess it. Even though we know it to be worthless, they imbued it with enormous intrinsic value. This is when the elders said the Gods must be crazy to give this to us for they should have known that it would destroy our society. The task was then to give it back to the Gods, which created the rest of the humorous story. The message, however, is loud and clear: "Do not become attached to worldly goods; for that attachment will destroy your community."

It seems to be our natural tendency to project some intrinsic value onto the physical objects we acquire. This tendency leads us to create Homes out of houses and apartments. We want both permanence and identity.

We want a place to which we can return and expect that it will be as we left it. We want permanence. We are acculturated to believe that our home is our castle. Our founding fathers placed a high value on this, so high, in fact, that they specifically included it in the Constitution.

Our personal home is our sanctuary. A place, which, by the law of the land, is a space protected from unreasonable search and seizure. Yet, with greater attention being paid to domestic violence, we are beginning to question this fundamental premise. Is a man's home so much of a castle that he can abuse his wife and children without fear of public retribution or punishment. This is a question that is being reexamined now. But, if what goes on in a home subject to public scrutiny, then what about sexual intimacy. Where do we choose to draw the line of privacy? I have no answer to these questions and they are very interesting avenues to pursue, but not today.

When it comes to a home, we seem to want more that just a permanent place; we want more than a sanctuary. We seem to be set on creating a home out of a house as an expression of our identity. We want others to recognize it as being ours.

If you are into Native American culture, you might want to express this interest by using articles from those cultures. You might adapt a Southwest kind of atmosphere for your decor. If you are into early American, you can decorate according to those customs. Our home then becomes an expression of who we are. This is true for the outside as well as the inside.

In my neighborhood, part of this identity for most folks seems to be a huge lawn. I see my neighbors saying that they want me to know that they are big and important. They are making a psychological and emotional statement with the physical reality of their property. This behavior seems to be a very close kin to what is called "body language."

There is a down side to this identification with our home. When our home is burglarized or burned, it feels like a violation of our person. To the extent we identify with our home as something very personal, any injury to it, is experienced as damage to us.

But if our home is so much a part of us, how come that we can never go back home? What is it about our past that makes it totally inaccessible to us? One obvious reason why we can never go back home is because it will always be changed from the way we remember it. Look at what happened to Robert Louis Stevenson.

The Greek Philosopher Herakleitus said "You cannot step into the same stream twice." The water is different every second so the stream is not the same. We change; the world around us changes; and yet we still want everything to stop and stay the same so that we can feel safe.

This desire for safety, for security, is a powerful driver of our nesting instinct. We want to be able to know in our hearts that there is someplace on this frantic earth where we can peacefully rest our weary heads. But if change is all that is constant, then permanence is an illusion.

The whole concept of a home being our castle, which is inviolate, is a myth. Nothing is that permanent. No structure of man or nature survives. But this does not mean that we can't continue to create our own space in which to live. This might be reason enough to seek out a "bed in the bush with stars to see."

But I am not suggesting that we quit working to create our home as an expression of who we are. I am saying that we need to be aware, while we are doing it, that it is all an illusion. But how can we live with this illusion?

Just a few weeks ago, at the installation service for Rev. Liz Lerner, the Rev. Dr. Eugene Widrick spoke about ministry. He spoke about how it all seems so futile, yet we go on. He said that the ultimate of our work futility cannot and should not stop our forward motion. We should go on because we believe in the value of what we do. Yes, the roof will leak, the light bulbs will burn out, the toilet will get stopped up, and the walls will need painting; but that does not stop us from doing what we do. We build, we create, and we live with the certain knowledge that it will all be futile in the end, for nothing is permanent. Most of us do this by simply not looking at the reality that it is all an exercise in futility. We wish to hide from it.

At the conclusion of his discourse, Rev. Widrick pointed out the true value of continuing in spite of the certain knowledge that our actions are futility. He said, "The journey itself is home." Did you catch that? "The journey itself is home."

My understanding of what he is saying is that we are deluding ourselves when we expect to have anything permanent in our earthy existence. But, at the same time, we need to keep going. For the truth is that the work itself is home; the journey itself is the end; living life is the purpose of living. Now is the most precious moment there is. We do not need to hide from this truth. Instead, we can relish the impermanence of everything by fully living in the moment. We do not need to seek a bed in the bush like the vagabond. We can face it.

The opening reading this morning says, "Look to this day! For it is life, the very life of life." Don't look away and hide; face it.

Another reading from our hymnal speaks to what we need to do in the face of the transience of this world. "Be ye lamps unto yourselves; be your own confidence. Hold to the truth within yourselves as to the only lamp." The source of this is Buddhist, but the truth is universal.

We cannot expand to the full capacity of our nature if we remain attached to the physical realities surrounding us. The Buddhist monk does not seek a home. He is his own home. Wherever he goes he is home, because he is an integral part of everything and he exists everywhere. He does not see himself as separate from anything. He is at one with the universe. He is his own lamp; he is his own confidence.

I am not suggesting that we all become monks and renounce our material possessions. I am suggesting that we need to be careful of how attached we become to physical things.

Taking myself as an example, in my rational mind, I know that I really do not need to continue to hold onto all of those old school books that are long out of date. I know that I can never go back there. The water in that stream has long since passed me by. I am in a new space and time and those are just memories. Well then, you might ask, "Why haven't I thrown them out?" That's a good question to which I have no good answer. But, when I look closer I can see that they represent an anchor to a past reality that I am fearful of releasing. Yes, fear has me frozen in the past.

The same is true for all of those pieces of memorabilia that I have carefully stored away in boxes in the closet; they are dreams of the past. I cannot go back there, ever; yet they have me anchored to my past.

In my better self, I know that to live life to its fullest, I need to surrender to the present as the only reality. The past is but a dream and I need to accept the reality that I cannot return to that dream. This is the truth.

Home, as a permanent reality is an illusion. The emotional value I place in it is misplaced. While I need to create a space for myself, I also need to be willing to release it from my grasp. For, as long as I continue to hold fast to the past and to physical reality, I am not free to live fully in the present. As long as I continue to clutch onto these old dreams, I will be tied to my past identity; I cannot grow.

My true home is not outside me; I am the source of my home. I am the creator of my home. In all my searching and exploring I will find the impermanence of all that is around me. I will discover that the past is a dream and the future is only a vision. In the end, I will return again to the understanding that the present moment is the only moment in which I live. And, when I can fully be present to the immediate moment I can say to myself "Welcome Home."

T. S. Eliot pointed to this circularity in our wanderings in Little Gidding. "We shall not cease from exploration and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time." In the end we will say to ourselves "Welcome home."

I am living toward the thought that I can always say to myself, wherever I am: "Welcome Home."

And so again I say to all of you, "Welcome Home."