Sunday Musings

Solace, trust, and dwelling

After I’d written today’s newsletter, news broke about a mass shooting in a Texas mall. At the bottom of this post is a prayer I composed regarding gun violence in the US. If you’d like to use it in church or some other community setting, please do. To readers and friends outside of the US, please pray for us that we can defeat this madness.

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Today is the fifth Sunday of Easter.

Few verses in the New Testament speak more deeply to me than the opening words of today’s lectionary reading:

Jesus said, “Do not let your hearts be troubled. Trust in God, trust also in me. In my Father’s house there are many dwelling places.”

The overall theme at The Cottage this Easter season has been “practice resurrection.” Too often, we think of “practice” as a task or busy work. But today’s gospel takes us in the opposite direction. The resurrection is entwined with resting and dwelling — the promise that Jesus prepares an abode, a habitation for his friends, even as he opens the possibility for our lives to become the dwelling of God.

Practicing resurrection is an invitation to come home.

I’ve always loved words having to do with home: dwelling, abode, habitation, lodging, shelter, place . . . Savor those words, let them linger in your heart.

In that spirit, I share with you a short excerpt from Grounded: Finding God in the World, “Home,” about my own search for place — and rebirth. It is one of my favorite pieces from my own writing.

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The ache for home lives in all of us, the safe place where we can go as we are and not be questioned.

— Maya Angelou

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John 14:1-14

Jesus said, “Do not let your hearts be troubled. Trust in God, trust also in me. In my Father’s house there are many dwelling places. If it were not so, would I have told you that I go to prepare a place for you? And if I go and prepare a place for you, I will come again and will take you to myself, so that where I am, there you may be also. And you know the way to the place where I am going.” Thomas said to him, “Lord, we do not know where you are going. How can we know the way?” Jesus said to him, “I am the way, and the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me. If you know me, you will know my Father also. From now on you do know him and have seen him.”

Philip said to him, “Lord, show us the Father, and we will be satisfied.” Jesus said to him, “Have I been with you all this time, Philip, and you still do not know me? Whoever has seen me has seen the Father. How can you say, ‘Show us the Father’? Do you not believe that I am in the Father and the Father is in me? The words that I say to you I do not speak on my own; but the Father who dwells in me does his works. Believe me that I am in the Father and the Father is in me; but if you do not, then believe me because of the works themselves. Very truly, I tell you, the one who believes in me will also do the works that I do and, in fact, will do greater works than these, because I am going to the Father. I will do whatever you ask in my name, so that the Father may be glorified in the Son. If in my name you ask me for anything, I will do it.”

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From GROUNDED: FINDING GOD IN THE WORLD, pp. 169-171, 189-192

Home is a central theme in the world’s great religions: Jews seek a homeland with God; Christians proclaim that God dwells within our hearts; Muslims face home to pray; Buddhists find a true home in enlightenment; Druids and Wiccans worship gods who make their home in seas and trees. Human beings build temples to shelter God’s presence, we mark sacred places with shrines, and we bury or float or burn our dead that they might find their way home to God. 

The overarching narrative of the Bible is that of searching for home. In the beginning, God created the beautiful earth as humanity’s home, but we carelessly misused it, resulting in our exile. The rest of the story recounts how we either faithfully tended to our earthly home or sinfully abused it, with consequences of blessing or curses.  Throughout, a spiritual interplay emerges: God not only creates our earthly home, but God is our home. 

It is a powerful story — the earth, us, home, and God are almost interchangeable characters in this ancient record of humankind’s restless search to dwell. 

In addition to this theological narrative, specific Bible stories also relate tales of us, home, and God. Perhaps none does so more beautifully than the Book of Ruth. Ruth, a Moabite woman married to a Jew, is widowed. Instead of staying in her own homeland after her husband’s death, she pleads with her mother-in-law, Naomi, to go to Israel to find a new home:

Where you go, I will go;
where you lodge, I will lodge;
your people shall be my people,
and your God my God.
Where you die, I will die —
there will I be buried. (Ruth 1:16-17)

Home is the relationship between two people, a physical place, and God. This is sacred dwelling. Place, presence, and family make home.

In the Bible, “place” is Israel and “presence” is that of Israel’s God. “Family” is actually the most confusing aspect of the story. Who makes up our home? The biblical answer encompasses a surprisingly wide diversity of family arrangements and relationships. The Bible’s families include a naked couple cohabiting in a garden without benefit of state approved union, polygamous tribal patriarchs and despotic kings with their harems, women who baited men (including by incestuous measures) to impregnate them or who shamed them into marriage using sexual wiles, people tricked into unwanted marriages, and the shockingly unmarried rabbi Jesus (son of a teen-aged unwed mother) who urged his followers to leave their fathers and mothers to follow him and embrace a life of chastity for the sake of God’s kingdom. 

Jesus’ followers made a great deal of trouble when they redefined “home” to include women and slaves, upsetting the traditional Roman family everywhere they went, and, as a by-product created a home economics that resembled, for all intents and purposes, a spiritual form of communism. Christians had a disturbing tendency to eschew state-sanctioned marriage in favor of having their unions blessed by priests or bishops. Or they avoided marriage completely, placing themselves outside of familial arrangements of protection and inheritance, opting instead to live with spiritual brothers and sisters in shared houses. Still others chose a state of singleness as holy hermits intent on finding their home in God alone.

One could read the Bible and study church history for weeks on end without coming across any home that even vaguely resembles the domesticity of the Victorian family or the 20th century American ideal. Indeed, the complexity and theological messiness of “home” in our own time is much more like what our ancestors experienced in biblical times than most anything preached in a fundamentalist church. 

The people who make up a household, those who create a home, are not always related by blood, nor do they always form customary legal or religious bonds. But building a home together is intended as a grace, to be a place of sacred habitation, a sign of God’s universal dream to dwell with all humankind.

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In 1679, my newlywed ancestors Andrew and Eleanor Orem bought their first home, a parcel of land called Bantry, in Talbot County, Maryland. Bantry is longer a farm, but it still exists as a road outside of Easton, Maryland. I have been there, exploring the place they once inhabited. It is mostly woods now, with some houses off the road facing the water. 

An old house sits at the end of the road, but it probably does not date back more than a hundred and fifty years, and it is certainly not my ancestors’ abode. In the woods, there is a foundation of a small house, stripped bare by weather and scavengers and time, cracked by aggressive roots and vines, overgrown and hard to see. Somewhere here, in this place, Andrew and Eleanor established my family’s first North American home. 

We return to the lives of those who have gone before us, a perplexing mobius strip,
until we come home, eventually, to ourselves.

— Colum McCann

I do not understand why I feel compelled to find where they lived, as if by discovering the location of their house I will somehow find them, and, by implication, learn something of myself. Houses loom large in memory, but physical houses last only a bit longer than human beings — a generation or two, maybe three, and most family homes disappear. From Bantry Road, I see woods. And water. Lots of water. The ground here is only three feet above sea level. Andrew and Eleanor’s house is long gone, and one day, in the not-too-distant future — their farm will be gone, too.  Underwater, claimed by rising seas.   

Great spiritual traditions insist that houses, however significant, are not really our home. Dwelling in a space and with others, and the practice of lingering in place, these are the things that make home. Indeed, theistic faiths insist that ultimately God is our home. God dwells with us, and we in God. In Judaism, one way of referring to God is shekhinah, meaning the dwelling or settling of Divine Presence, a word that also is used to describe the nesting of birds. The ancient Hebrew prophet Isaiah spoke of Immanuel, “God with us,” as the promise of shelter and safety for Israel, one of the names that Christians will later adopt for Jesus. 

According to Christian teaching, Jesus is the Son of God, the human form of the Divine One, made incarnate through Mary, and born into the world. For Muslims, the Divine Presence, “God with us,” is the manifestation of tranquility, the spirit of God that extends shelter, protection, and blessing to the faithful. They believe that God dwells most specifically in the Ka’aba, the House of Allah, the physical portal between the sacred and secular worlds, and toward which they face when they pray. The Hindu Bhagavad Gita describes God’s dwelling as a string of pearls (a particularly interesting metaphor in light of contemporary physics) with the divine within and connecting all living beings.

Throughout all of human history, we have built dwelling places for the divine — temples and shrines and tabernacles and churches and sanctuaries — to shelter God and extend shelter to pilgrims who pray under holy roofs.

The word “dwell” is related to an Old English word for “heresy” or “madness.”  Perhaps it is a sort of insanity to believe that God dwells here, with us. Or that, somehow, resurrection is an end to our exile and an invitation to come home to God. If so, the madness is the long-lingering hope of the human race, the dream to dwell. Not only a hope, however, it is also hard work, this effort to shelter our souls. Perhaps home-making is both a divine madness and a profoundly human one. 

Ultimately, physical houses go to ruin, but home is an ongoing spiritual promise. The contemporary mystical poet Gunilla Norris writes:

I leave the bedroom . . . I begin walking
through my house.  I will traverse it
many times today like a creature
covering her turf.  It is a journey
that zigzags and returns upon itself . . .
a circumambulation . . . a re-remembering of place.
I know this is the way many ancients prayed—
Circling a holy site to deepen their devotion.
The floor in this house is wood . . . wide, old boards.
When I walk I am walking on the wood and in the woods.
I am walking on the life of these trees.
They have been cut and planed . . . offered up
for this sheltering. 
My foot falls. The ground rises to meet it.
A holy, ordinary moment is repeating itself.
All the time I am meeting and being met like this.
Your whole creation is ground.
Help me to remember that in this mutuality
we can become home for each other.
You are asking us slowly to become
Your holy site.

Home, a holy habitation. We dwell in sacred space. We do not often stop to consider where we dwell, much less how it shapes us to move about in the world, for either good or ill. But somehow, we keep searching for home, looking for a safe haven to reside. 

To me, Bantry is a holy site, a place of origin and return. As I scour the woods for traces of my ancestral abode, however, I inwardly sense the rising tides of an uncertain future. How long will this place remain above water? 

Then, the refrain of an old hymn sneaks up, words first learned in my childhood Methodist church:

O God, our help in ages past,
our hope for years to come,
our shelter from the stormy blast,
and our eternal home.

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INSPIRATION

It takes a heap o’ livin’ in a house t’ make it home,
A heap o’ sun an’ shadder, an’ ye sometimes have t’ roam
Afore ye really ’preciate the things ye lef’ behind,
An’ hunger fer ’em somehow, with ’em allus on yer mind.
It don’t make any differunce how rich ye get t’ be,
How much yer chairs an’ tables cost, how great yer luxury;
It ain’t home t’ ye, though it be the palace of a king,
Until somehow yer soul is sort o’ wrapped round everything.
— Edgar Albert Guest, from Home

It’s not much to ask. Just a door to lock.
A door that won’t break when someone kicks it.
Door with a keyhole. Respond to that knock
Or not. My choice. It’s broke so let’s fix it:
The world, I mean. Not the door. That’s ok.
It’s my door, to my room. Look: here’s the key.
The world, though. That’s different. Somewhere to stay
Is what we all need. Somewhere to be me
And not just someone you blithely ignore
When you see me sleeping on the street.
Let’s begin with this. A door. Just a door
To start with. A door. Food. Then light and heat.
The world must respond to this simple truth:
Let’s all have a door. Let’s all have a roof
— Ian McMillan, A Shakespearean Sonnet About Doors

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The Cottage is three this May!

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The whole universe is God’s dwelling. Earth, a very small, uniquely blessed corner of that universe, gifted with unique natural blessings, is humanity’s home, and humans are never so much at home as when God dwells with them.

— U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops

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Some music for today — How Lovely is Thy Dwelling Place, set to Brother James’ Air.

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A prayer after another mass shooting . . .

God of Plowshares:

We confess our need to face the misery, brutality, and evil of gun violence in the United States of America. Family, friends, and neighbors — children and adults — are being slaughtered by those with powerful weapons and powerful interests to ignore the suffering. We have failed you. We have failed them. Have mercy on us.

We grieve with the scores of thousands whose loved ones have been murdered in mass shootings, and in too many other shootings across this nation. We ask you to heal the injured, those whose bodies will be wounded forever, and those whose hearts are broken. We pray for all those living with the shock, trauma, and fear of these horrors.

Deliver this nation from anxiety and anger. Strengthen the resolve of voters, activists, policy makers, judges, and political leaders. Fill us with courage to change the laws that govern our communities so we may dwell in safety. Free us all from the idolatry of guns. May we lay down every weapon and wield only compassion and love.

Send your Spirit of concord among us. May we stand as peacemakers in this time of anguish and sorrow.

(DButlerBass, 2023 - the prayer was inspired by but substantially changed from a prayer by the Anglican Fellowship of Prayer)

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