by Brent Gavin Was, Intern Minister

A sermon given May 25, 2003

First Unitarian Church

Portland, Oregon

Ten months ago, I left Massachusetts and came to Portland.  I left home.  Family, friends, job, school, a plot of farmland that I love dearly were all in my rearview mirror as I headed west.  I had a year away from home ahead of me. I’d be back.

Well, I am going back.  These ten months have passed quickly and I return to Massachusetts in three short weeks.  As this departure nears, I am thinking a lot about home.  What is home? Where is home?  Where is my home?

What is home to us?  Is it a house, land, ancestral grounds?  Maybe, but how many of us have land that has been in our family for even our life times let alone generations?  Is it an intimate partner, like that old Billy Joel song “You’re My Home” hopes?  Is it family?  My parents are here visiting, and it is wonderful, and familiar, but it is not home in Portland this weekend because they are there.  Friends?  Colleagues?  Career?  I mean does Home Depot, does real estate, does ecosystem even have anything to do with home? I don’t think so.

Our culture is pretty toxic to home.  In our culture it is not desirable to be native to a place, because nativity is not profitable and it is not easy, it’s messy.  If we become native to a place, we learn to rely on a place, local resources, the community that is present, fellow human beings.  A system develops and everyone has a part. 

Our culture doesn’t approve of cooperation.  The self is the primary unit of our society.  We are told over and over again that we alone are responsible for whatever we do or fail to do in our lives.  Warren Buffet, the billionaire investment guru, recently criticized the President’s reckless tax cut, saying that so little of what he has is deserved.  He recognizes that luck made him rich.  He admits to some talent that he feels blessed by God with, but it is a talent that he knows would be useless had fate destined him to be born in Bangladesh, rather than the US, or in 1726, rather than the 1930s.  He sees that our national values reflect that the individual is responsible.  Poor folks are poor because they don’t work enough.  If all students have the same test in front of them, then the playing field is equal.  Kendra James should have been more cooperative with the police and she wouldn’t be dead now.  Our culture of personal responsibility is a culture of isolation.  We are islands separated by the fear that someone might think we are failing, or weak, or incapable. We are left adrift in the world, nameless, faceless, and most importantly, homeless.  Home is where we belong, and I don’t think we know how to get there. 

I know I haven’t known how to get home.  But as I am leaving this place to return to where I am from, I am reminded of an old Oliver Cromwell truism, “A man never goes so far as when he does not know where he is going.”  In looking over my life, and the lives of many people that I know, I see that few of us really know where we are going.   I have been seeking a home for my adult life.  I am looking for that place of belonging, that sense of safety and wholeness.  This is what home means to me. We are all looking for that. 

We look for home in all sorts of places.  In intimate relationships.  In a house that we pour affection and energy into.  Into groups of friends and our community.  We seek home in church and in civic organizations and our employers.  Each of these help us to find home, but they are not home.  Some of us find home in the security of alcohol and drugs, or in sex or even abusive relationships where wants we scarcely recognize are being fulfilled.  Many of us have dabbled in or been exposed to these conditions, and we know that none of these are home, but we keep at it.

As I am leaving this place, I am sadder than I have ever been leaving a place before.  It is not just that I have learned to love you so much, though I do.  It is not that I don’t want to miss an Oregon Summer, or more marches in downtown, though I don’t.  It is not even that some of the closest relationships I have ever had in my life will be forever changed in three weeks that makes me sad.  What makes me feel so sad is that I am allowing myself to feel sad.  For the first time I am feeling able to risk feeling all the feelings that each of us have in times of major transition.  I feel sad, lonely, nervous, as well as happy, excited and eager.   I am learning that it is safe for me to feel more, to open my heart to others and to my own emotions because more and more I am finding that I am home.  I am becoming native; not to Portland, not to Massachusetts, or the ministry or a relationship… I am becoming native to myself. Home is not a destination, home is found within.

Thich Nhat Han teaches about home very gracefully.  I attended a retreat he led and we did a simple walking meditation.  For each slow, conscious step we took, we paused and thought “I have arrived.”  Step.  “I have arrived.”  Step.  “I have arrived.”  It was the living practice of wherever you go, there you are. It was a powerful lesson.  It is not the journey that matters, it is where you are each moment that does.  And it was pretty funny, because there were several hundred of us in this walking meditation and we were walking in circles around Harvard Yard, you know, Mecca West. 

“I have arrived.”  What if each day we were able to claim that we have arrived.  That wherever we are, wherever we are going, we are already home.  In our hearts, in our souls, we are in the moment, in the place that is most important.  In every moment, with every breath, we are exactly where we belong.  That is what being home is—being where we belong.  And we each have the potential to be there always.

Home is within.  It is not dependent on the outside world.  Place does not make a home.  Relationships do not make a home. We are responsible for our home in the way Warren Buffett means.  We can work hard; we can build an inner life that sustains us through practice, mindfulness, and culturing a spiritual life.  But in the end, it is pure grace that enables us to be home.  The grace of something infinite that says with gentle authority, “You have arrived.”

But of course, that’s some higher math, spiritually.  I sometimes think I have arrived but when I look around, I realize that I have no idea where I am.  I feel groundless.  Unrooted in anything.  I think this is the danger of our American ideal of self-reliance.  To come to the realization that we have arrived, we need homes that sustain us in the world.  And to be sustained in a genuine way by our world, we need to be dependent on something greater than ourselves.  Our culture forbids dependency, or at least it forbids healthy dependency.  Men are to depend on self, as in ego self.  Women are too often forced to rely on men and family.  Children, too often rely simply on parents, not the village.  And nations?  Well, nations depend on fear.  We have felt the consequences of that.  We can’t rely on that any more.  We need to find our home.

To arrive at our homes within us, we must first surrender to the world around us.  We must become native to the earth.  Wes Jackson, the McArthur Fellow and radical plant and agricultural scientist wrote a beautiful book whose title I borrowed for this sermon. At the time of the first European conquerors in the 1500s, 25,000 natives lived in the land comprising the county that he lives in modern Kansas.  They were sustained by seemingly endless bison herds, which traveled the prairie powered by contemporary solar energy stored in the grasses covering the prairie.  It was sustainable.  It lasted.  Those people were native to that place.

That modern county in Kansas is now powered by solar energy captured millions of years ago in the form of fossil fuels driving tractors and trucks, and the land can sustain barely 20% of the population of the 1500s.  Central Kansas, once the breadbasket of the free world is waning.  People can’t live there any more, there are no jobs.  The soil is blowing away by the inch, per year.  We, eaters of grains and meat fed on that grain, are out of balance with the earth.  As we are here in the Northwest, with forests disappearing, Salmon fisheries on the brink, and even the remarkable regional planning laws that keep Portland from creeping beyond its boundaries are under attack, again. 

To become native to our selves, we must realize how dependent we are on our Earth, not as a consumer, or even as a steward, but as a guest.  And we have not been gracious guests, but it is not too late to start.  Find a home on the earth by learning about our impact.  Try composting.  Try walking more, or riding a bike to work.  Try to shop less, and buy fewer things that had to be shipped from across the world.  When I treat someone well, I feel better about asking things of them.  The Earth is the same.  And as we ask the earth to sustain our bodies and the bodies of those we love, we will feel better, more at home if we are respectful.

To arrive at our homes within us, we must surrender to the human world around us.  We must become native to our relationships.  People complete each other.  We often have an idea about what we want or need, and we seek out those who can fill that.  Those of us who are self absorbed or emotionally distant will seek out caring, feeling mates to feel for us.  Raised in a home broken with violence, emotional distance or divorce?  Chances are we will recreate this in our own lives. 

Relationships can be terribly messy.  To often we enter them or maintain them simply because we are scared of being alone.  What do we really need, and how does this differ from what we want?  Do I need someone to take care of me?  No, but I want it.  Do you need to be three sizes smaller in order to be loved?  Of course not, but it gets complicated.  What we need to do is live in relationships without being owned by them.

We have little control over the happenings in our selves, so we need to realize we have even less control over other people.  No matter how hard I try, I can’t make any one else happy.  I can’t fulfill the deepest needs of anyone else, nor can they fulfill those needs for me.  Falling into the trap of taking responsibility for fixing or being fixed by others is being owned by our relationships.  We can’t be home when we are owned.

We are home when we care about others deeply, but are not invested in the outcome.  When we can sit with someone and share, expecting nothing but love and affection.  This is right relationship.  But what we really need, more than all the advice, all the worry, all the anxiety that comes with trying to fix or be fixed, is to have a caring set of ears attached to arms that hug. 

We find our home in relationships when we discard the entanglements, the dependency on someone else and trust that our friends and family and partners care.  That they know that we make mistakes and are sorry, that we have amazing gifts to offer them and the world and that we deserve their love.  That is being at home with someone.

To arrive at our homes within, we must surrender to the goodness of ourselves.  Become native to this place, know you are beloved. The most difficult part of finding my home is understanding that I deserve it. That I am beloved, that I belong.  Usually I believe I didn’t work hard enough, or am just not good enough.  We all do that, some.  Our ego gets in the way, we seek blame for what is wrong with us, our bodies, our relationships, our lives.  But you know, there is no one to blame, not even ourselves.  Blame means there is some fault deserving correction or criticism.  No.  We are human beings.  That means we are flawed, we are broken, we make mistakes and at the core, in our soul of souls, we are beloved.  Somehow, each of us is the son or daughter of creation, and on us, favor rests. The challenge is recognizing it and feeling that we are in fact worthy of that love. 

Our lives are lived in a world constantly trying to convince us that the burden is on us to prove that we are worthy of being loved, we are worthy of being home within our selves.  It is hard to feel beloved nowadays.  But the frustrating catch-22 is that we can only feel beloved if we surrender and decide to accept it, but we usually can’t do that because we feel so wretched so often.  What are we to do?  Practice.

Living this life of the beloved is realizing that fear and loneliness are part of life.  We can find home within when we no longer have to flee the feelings that flow through our hearts, fears that flash through our minds.  Some years ago as I was leaving the business world and starting off on the path to ministry, I was scared to death.  What would my life look like?  Would I have any money?  What would people think of me?  Could I even do this? Well, a good friend took my hand held it for several years.  She didn’t tell me there was nothing to be scared of, there is, but she showed me that living with fear is not the same as living in fear.  I don’t have many more answers to those questions than three years ago, but I am not nearly as worried about it.  Answers will come.  They always do.  They come for everyone.

Sadness is also hard to accept in our culture.  I think the first time I let myself feel sad was a couple of years ago when my grandmother died. I missed her.  She was dead and there was nothing I could do about it.  The only thing I knew how to do was to not think about her, to ignore the loss and pain.  But at that moment, that was not an option.  So I did think about her, and it hurt, and tears flowed freely over the course of several days.  And I didn’t loose control.  I could handle the truth of my emotions.  The depth of our sadness is a testament to the depth of our feelings.  Easier said than done, of course, but as we own the wholeness of our feelings, we can see how beautiful it is.  How lovely and loveable we can be.

Accepting our brokenness is another step towards feeling beloved.  We are broken all broken in some way—physically, mentally, emotionally.  A broken heart is probably the most common ailment in our culture, broken from estrangement from our environment, our friends, families, partners and most often, from ourselves.  But we are unique in our brokenness.  As uniquely broken as we are uniquely blessed.  Our smiles and tears, our talents and failures, our love as well as our shame are, in the words of Henri Nouwen, “all part of the journey towards the full realization of our humanity.”  Would Jesus have been Jesus had he not known about his coming betrayal? Or the terrible cross he would bear in his future?  Would the Buddha be the Buddha with out seeing that dead body rotting on the side of the road? 

The challenge of embracing our brokenness is that letting ourselves feel how hurt we are, how much we have failed, can simply confirm for us what we already believe; we are bad people, or shameful, or ugly and not deserving love.  But we find our way home when we bring our hurt into the light.  When we can say, “I made a mistake.  I’m not a bad person, but I messed up.”  “I failed to achieve what I wanted to, but I have learned, haven’t I.”  Admitting mistakes takes strength and courage even as it is painful.  Allowing deep feelings to flow freely is scary and can be excruciating, but as we emerge, we see our lives in greater depth.

I used to run marathons.  I loved it.  The sense of accomplishment was great.  There is camaraderie in training and on race day with thousands of strangers.  I have fond memories of my races.  But when I remember what it was actually like, it was awful.  Exhaustion.  Chaffing in places you didn’t know you had.  I still have residual pain in my hips and lower back, but had I not gone through some of that suffering, the joy at the end would not have been so profound. 

So why is it admirable in our society to see athletes suffering deeply to achieve a greater wholeness while suffering emotionally is something shameful, to be hidden?  It is because we let it be.  Embrace your pain as much as you can.  Know that your broken parts are as much you as your joyous ones. Our failures and success, joys and sorrows are the sum that makes us whole.  Embrace this as warmly as you can. We find our way on a road where light and dark walk hand in hand.

We each have a long journey before we can take a step and know we have arrived.  Becoming native is a life long process.   We become native to the Earth when we live respectfully.  We become native to our relationships when we are present with each other, unattached and loving.  We become native to ourselves when we become comfortable with who we are.  Our homecoming awaits us when we embrace ourselves and our brothers and sisters as whole people.  We find our way home when we understand that we are deserving of the love of each other, the love of our selves and the love of that which we can not understand, God.  Maybe that is the voice that is calling to us like that woman in the poem Nancy read for us.  Maybe that is the voice of God calling us home. That woman waiting all this time. The one who loves you.  The one who can say, “What kept you?” Amen.

PRAYER

Precious God, we are far from home.  Please remind us that we are good, born as an image of inner and outer beauty.  May we forgive as we are forgiven.  Give us the courage to see ourselves honestly, and claim our belovedness from you.  Take us home to the place we belong.  Amen.

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Copyrights 2003, Brent Gavin Was, Intern Minister.  All rights reserved.