Again, I hope you had a good Christmas and are looking forward to the New Year.  As we go forth, I offer another piece from the art/writing exhibit in which I participated recently.  This is "Home as Memory."

Home as Memory

Chitipa, Malawi.  Ever been there?  It’s tiny.  Tucked into a sliver of Malawi’s northwestern corner, Chitipa is an oasis and veritable metropolis, a cacophonous hub of activity to which people come from many miles around.  Stroll down its main street and you will see markets, markets set up by farmers of other counties, coffin shops (for the too many tragic deaths from AIDS), a wireless station, even a beauty shop and hotel.  A “city” in a bush filled desert.

When I was in Chitipa, I stayed in its only hotel.  It had mosquito netting over its beds (in the event we had not been taking our malaria pills), sinks with running water, a dresser, and a mirror.  Its toilets, however, didn’t work.  We used them anyway, then flushed with pails of water that the staff brought in each morning and evening.  Breakfasts and dinners were uniformly delicious and presented gracefully, a curious mix of African and Western food.  Some goat, some chicken.  Some squash, some okra.  And always, nsima, a maize-based concoction, usually served as a chunk or block that one takes into her hands to eat.  High in carbohydrates and fiber and low in fat, nsima is the meal of choice for every Malawian.

I had come to Chitipa to teach. One of the churches in town was holding a pastor’s conference and I had been invited onto the team of Western teachers who had been asked to come and share their theological insights with local pastors.  I use the term “local” loosely, however, as most of the attendees came from many miles distant, walking or bicycling to get to the church for the conference.  As they could not afford the hotel, they slept outside, each night bundling up on the grounds of the church, snuggled under the canopy set up outside the building.  They always waited for us to arrive before they ate breakfast.

Most nights, feeling, amidst my relative luxury, somewhat isolated from what was really going on in the area, I slipped out of my hotel room to walk around.  I usually didn’t go into town, but rather into the countryside, where most people lived.  As I walked, I stopped frequently to gaze across the tumbled fields and twisted trees that dotted the red dirt land.  Everywhere I looked, I saw fires.  Every hut, every dirt shack, anything resembling a structure for living had a fire. These were the fires of Malawians, fires of home.

And the center of everything.  When one day I had been teaching, expecting to stop for lunch at 12:30 p.m., only to learn at 12:45 that meal completion was still a considerable way off and I would need to improvise, I felt this center acutely.  Not only were fires the center of every evening, they were the center of all cooking and dining as well.  Outside of the hotel, stoves did not exist.

We didn’t eat until 2:00 p.m.

(And to think, I noted as I flew back to the States, that when in my Western affluence I now go backpacking, I carry a tiny stove for cooking.  A fire for cooking?  No way. Such anomaly, such disparity. What I use for play the people of Chitipa would happily embrace for basic necessity.  It was a radically different measure of home.)

And these were big fires.  By the time I got out each evening, dinner appeared to be over, and now people were celebrating the day and, likely, the night before them.  Life was good.  Even if some stomach pangs remained, even if there was no cash in the bank, even if water was a half mile to the well in town (donated by a Western NGO), and even if stoves were missing, life was good.

So many of my memories have to do with fires.  From my childhood in suburban beachside Los Angeles, when my siblings and I roasted hot dogs and marshmallows over our fireplace; multiple evenings spent around campfires on family camping trips in the national parks of the West; to countless solo wilderness travels since, I have made memories around a fire.  Even today, at home northwest of Chicago, whenever I build a fire in our fireplace, stacking and igniting the kindling and watching the flames come to life, I remember the many days and lives I have built around a fire.  In particular, I think about journeys of weather, rain or snow, journeys of unexpected difficulty and challenge, times in which, when the skies collapsed in shades of thunder, I was so grateful for a fire, so thankful for its reassuring comfort, its delightful warmth, its ability to tie everything, hard or easy, together.  I could think about what I had done that day; I could think about what I would do come morning.  And I could remember.  I could remember the flow of my years, the probing compulsions and diversions of memory; I could remember the hope of reflection, the primal lure of mnemonic recall, the ever present urgings of beginning and end.  And I could keep going.

All in a fire.  The memory of fire.

There is a time, Ecclesiastes says, a time for everything.  A time for every experience, a moment for every event, a time for every delight. Love and hate, war and peace, losing and gaining, birth and death, and much more:  it all has its time.  And for those who are no longer with us, Ecclesiastes further observes, their memory, our remembrances of them, fade steadily, slowly slipping away from the forefront of our thought and imagination, always in our heart, but no longer incisive and present.  Their progenitors are gone.

Maybe so.  But I will always remember my fires.

2015 was a big year for memory. In the space of one August, I attended two reunions, one from high school, the other from college.  Whenever I attend a high school reunion, whenever I return to the beaches of Los Angeles, I think about home.  I can’t help it.  As my plane makes its final descent into L.A. International, I look across the vast Angelean basin, the spires of downtown and Century City; the cliffs of the Palos Verdes peninsula; the millions and millions of homes spreading across the land.  I see the verdant arc of the coastal mountains, rising majestically over the teeming metropolis, and I see, directly below me, the 405, its traffic humming frantically along, all day and all night madly racing between Los Angeles and San Diego. And I remember.  I remember that somewhere in this feverish mass of existence I have a home.  A home with a fire.  Though I can no longer be with this fire, can no longer be in this home, I feel both. I feel their memories, I feel their remembrances.  I see their pasts bubbling up, touching and moving me, wooing me with tendrils of deepest longing, longings of what is gone and graspings of what remains, the misty fires and fireplaces of yesteryear, speaking still.  And I see Ecclesiastes’s wisdom once more:  all homes, lost or found, have their time.

All homes have their fire.

When I see my best friends from high school, two guys named Gary and Jeff, I think about their homes.  I think about the many days and nights I hung out at their homes, I remember the many times they visited me at mine.  Most of all, I remember an afternoon at Jeff’s house, the house he shared with his brother and mother (his dad died at a quite young age), an afternoon that several of us spent listening to Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young and, in our countercultural fantasies and predilections, smoking cannabis.  The chorus of one of the band’s songs will be forever with me, the way that CSN&Y’s harmonies captured writer Joni Mitchell’s description of the children of Woodstock as creatures stardust and golden, glistening and magical beings trying to return, as the progeny of a new God, to the garden.  Trying to return to home, trying to return from whence they believed they had begun.

Looking for that fire once more.

Yet when I arrived in Boise, Idaho, for my college reunion, a reunion organized by one of us who lives in Boise, I felt at home, too.  Greeting my most beloved of friends, seeing their deep and happy smiles, and hugging them with all the strength I could muster, I touched memory, touched it deeply, touched it as if I had never left its ethereal confines, had never left the home we had made:  we were together once more.  Like the afternoon at Jeff’s house, convoluted as it was, toying as it did with our collective imaginations, so were these moments.  They were moments of memory, profound memories and moments of home.

After a few days, we left Boise for a rented house in the Sawtooth Mountains.  Our first night there, I built a fire.  I had to.  I was home. We all were.  As the skies darkened and rain began to fall, we gathered together.  We read poetry, we read Terry Tempest Williams’s Refuge.  We talked of our work, we talked of our children.  We shared our journeys.  And we asked ourselves:  why are we here?

Few, if any of us, knew.  But we knew we were here, looking into a fire.

Come day two, some of us hiked five miles to a gorgeously sublime alpine lake, a picture of astonishing wonder and beauty.  We sat on the shore a long time, thinking and pondering.  Transfixed by the Apollonic imagery before us, we remembered.  We remembered why we are who we are.

I couldn’t wait to build another fire.

Like a quilt, an intricately woven quilt, home and memory envelop me, gathering and recollecting, recalling and inspiring, showing me that what I remember is no more than what I can fit into the adventure of, in a splash of irony, home.  Home shifts, home moves, home appears, and home vanishes.  But my memories do not.  Invisible and transcendent yet entirely present, they speak; they talk and they morph, transforming themselves continually. Always a newness, always a beginning. And always a home.

Let the center hold.  Let the memory remain.  Let the fire keep burning.  Oh Lord, take me back to the fires of Chitipa. 

     Yesterday many of us celebrated Christmas; today many of us remember the beginning of Kwanza.  Although Kwanza is a relatively new holiday, its impetus, in light of the Advent season, speaks to us all:   a celebration of human diversity.  Yes, Jesus was born a Jew in a forgotten town in Palestine, but he made it clear that he had come for everyone on the planet.  Jesus reminded everyone who would listen that God loves every human being, that God loves the immensely varied nature of human beingness and expression, every bit of it.  He leaves no one out.
      Kwanza lauds the beauty and meaningfulness of African culture, the joy of life, the richness of harvest.  It reminds us of the value of a world of unpredictable wonder, hidden beauty, and constant surprise.
     Rejoice.

     Christmas Eve.  Tonight--and in some parts of the world tonight is very near--in all corners of the planet, literally billions of people, religious or not, will remember Christmas Eve.  Regardless of how they view the birth of Jesus, they will make Christmas Eve a time of remembrance, generosity, warmth, and much more. It's a night unique in all the year, a night in which people around the world enjoy, for at least a few hours, each other. It's a time in which life, for a moment, seems suspended, captured in a hourglass of human bliss.

     And why not?  The event that birthed Christmas Eve is an event on which all of history hinges, a pivot of time, space, and eternity that transformed the entire span of human challenge and endeavor.  Jesus' birth changed everything, absolutely everything.  In Jesus' coming, we sense and appreciate, definitively, that God can--and does--irrupt into our experience, that God, in ways we cannot always fathom, can, and will, make himself known in our lives.  God has manifested himself in history.  Christmas Eve tells us that we tread on a very thin skein, a slender liminality of moment between time and destiny, the most profoundly possible doorway into who we can be.

     Christmas Eve opens our eyes to the totality, the absolute and unimpeded totality, of God, the one who made all cosmos, space, and time, for us.

     Winter solstice.  Today, around 4:30 p.m. Central Standard Time, the Winter Solstice begins.  From this point, the days will no longer get shorter, but longer, gradually lengthening until, six months hence, its counterpart, the Summer Solstice, appears.

     Though we in the Northern Hemisphere remember the Solstice in the shadow of Christmas impending and, as a result sometimes overlook it and what it means, we can in many ways bring the two celebrations together.  Christmas is about coming, the coming of God to earth.  The Solstice is about coming, too, the coming of Spring.  Though it seems to be the end of the light, it's actually its beginning   Though it leaves autumn behind, it ushers in the spring.  We wander through long and dark nights, yes, but we also move, move ever so imperceptibly, to the greater light to come.


     In the fullness of time, wrote Paul, in the fullness of time Jesus came.  It's a rhythm, it's a heartbeat.  It's the endless pulsing of the wisdom of God.  As we trek through these darker days and hours even as we look to the light of Christmas a few days hence, we come to understand that the darkness we see is but the light of song, the illuminating song which underlies and empowers all creation, a foretaste and reflection of divine favor upon all that exists.

     Remember the Solstice, remember Christmas.  Remember the light of God.

Today I offer "Home as Cultural Icon."  I trust that your Advent is going well and that you are looking forward to continuing reflection on the import and meaning of the moment, now and to come . . . .

Home as Cultural Icon

Sitting on our family’s bookshelf, the big bookshelf in the main part of our home, the sturdy wooden bookshelf that my ever resourceful father built into the wall of the dining room, was a set of books about British literature.  In them were listed every British writer and poet of any note, along with a sampling of their most significant or memorable works, beginning in the sixteen century and continuing into the early twentieth.  It was a five volume set.  Each volume’s cover was a different color.

We rarely looked inside these books.  Our parents were pretty familiar with British literature and could talk to us about most of it at will.  Because of where I sat at the dining room table, the side furthest from the wall in which the bookshelf was set, I saw those volumes every night.  I could not sit down to dinner without noting them.  Even today, I can envision that shelf, envision the massive Webster’s dictionary, the equally massive OED, Lewis Mumford’s The City, a book called American Past, various books of Ansel Adams photographs (my favorite was his Yosemite) and, stacked next to the Webster’s, the five volumes, their different colors creating a sort of cloth collage, of British prose and poetry.  (Of course, there were many other books on this bookshelf—it was eight feet all, as tall as the ceiling, eight shelves in all—many of which I remember, too, but I mention the ones I have because they were closest to the volumes of which I now speak.)

As my brother observed when we were cleaning out the house, “Those volumes are iconic.”  Quite.  None of us can think about that bookshelf without thinking about those books.  We can’t remember our childhood without remembering those volumes and the way they sat on our family’s bookshelf.

We populate our home with icons (and iconoclasts); we fill our lives with mementos.  Though at the time we do not know what will become an icon and, subsequently, iconic—how could we?—we always end up creating them.  We make what we set in our home, whatever and wherever home is, iconic moments, palpable iconic moments around which we shape our lives. 

And the longer we stay in our home, the more iconic these moments, these points of memory become, the more compelling and uplifting they show themselves to us.  They grow into us, we grow into them.  We make them our culture, our culture of home.  We first see them as items.  Later, we call them artifacts.  Eventually, perhaps, we make them icons.  And as the decades continue on, we see these icons become remembrances, bracing remembrances of what has been, remembrances that enrich us with poignant and expansive vistas of memory and song.

And beginning points for what is to come.

Icons need not be in our physical home only.  Some years ago, how intrigued I was, when reading a biography of Lynette “Squeaky” Fromme (one of the late Charles Manson’s “girls”), to realize that she had spent a few years in a home not too far from mine.  In fact, the biography stated, she even inscribed her name in the concrete around the lamppost in the parkway of the house in which she lived.

The next time I was in Los Angeles, running, as I often did, from my parents’ home to the ocean and back, I mapped my return so as to reach Fromme’s old street.  I slowed down, checking each address, scanning each house.  Then I saw it.  The number fit.  And there was the lamppost.  Gingerly (I didn’t want to seem like a loiterer or intruder), I walked to the sidewalk and looked.

There it was.  Direct from a young Squeaky Fromme:  “Lynette Fromme, 1960.”  A little girl she was, innocent as I, happily (according to her biographer) growing up in the oceanside suburbs of Los Angeles.  A little girl who attended some of the schools I attended, a little girl who lived and played where I played, a little girl writing her name on the sidewalk, her words now immortalized in the drying concrete.  Not writing with chalk, as my siblings and I did on the sidewalks of our street, but writing to last.  Writing, as it turned out, for posterity.

Iconic indeed.  And it wasn’t even in our home.

Many years after 1960, Dad built a workshop behind the garage.  His first task was to lay a foundation.  In order to do so successfully, he had to remove our own concrete icon.  In 1960, coincidentally the same year as the young Lynette penned her words, Dad had all of us, all four of us, place our hands in some freshly laid concrete behind the garage, to make our marks for the ages. But when he began building the workshop, Dad realized that he would need to rearrange the concrete behind the garage. He would need to remove some of it before he could lay the foundation for the workshop.

Although Dad had most of the offending concrete carried away, he saved the piece with our handprints on it.  We still have it today.  Its iconic moment now sits in the pleasantly appointed garden of my northern California sister’s backyard, its little prints still preserved for anyone to see.  When I visited this sister (I have two) a few years ago, I of course took time to stroll into her backyard and look at this memory, this icon of many days past.

It was time to be home.

Just a few miles north of my childhood beach is the community of Venice.  Venice, Venice, funny little Venice.  Parked on the ocean, full of little beachside houses, famous Gold Gym on its boardwalk, its population of iron and weight lifters doing their thing in full view of passerbys, and dozens of “hippie” shops, Venice had long hovered as a “freaky” place in an otherwise affluent stretch of California shoreline.  I had always liked hanging in Venice, loved its flowers, its boardwalk, its people.

And I really loved Venice’s beach.  I spent many afternoons on that beach.  Friends would come, and friends would go.  We did fun thing, we did crazy things.  One day, the women swam topless; another day, the men smoked pot openly on the sand.

Reading Fromme’s biography, however, I learned something else about Venice’s beach, something darker, something which was to color it in my memory forever.  On its sands, its silky yellow sands, in the early Sixties, Charles Manson approached Lynette Fromme for the first time.  Sensing her loneliness and teenage angst, and entirely convincing and persuasive, he talked to her about running away with him.  And she did.

I can’t now visit Venice’s beach without thinking about Charles Manson and Lynette Fromme.  And Manson’s recent passing and Fromme’s release from prison in 2009 only sharpen my sense of something gained, lost, and then found again.  The beach is a memory of memory, a moment of moments, a life and existence gone.  An icon and speech of a time long over.

I also think about the sidewalk.  I think about the writing, I think about the lamppost.  I remember the days, I recall the times.  I marvel at what happened, I weep at what has passed.  I mourn lives lost, lives fallen to suicide, lives eviscerated by drugs, lives snuffed out in Vietnam.  And lives destroyed by Helter Skelter madness.  I ponder the icons that remain.

I have the books of British literature and poetry on my bookshelf today.  I don’t look at them a lot, but I do look at them.  Occasionally, I even look at the biography of Lynnette Fromme.

Not so many years past, my son and I traveled to our beloved Sierra Nevada mountains to climb Mt. Whitney which, at nearly 14,500 feet, is the highest point in the lower forty-eight states.  I had climbed Whitney forty years before, and think often about the photo someone took of me on top.  So tired was he that he missed the top of my head; I’m a smile without eyes.

When after three days of hiking, my son and I reached Whitney’s summit, I was amazed:  in forty years, nothing, really, had changed.  The vistas were the same, the sky still hung overhead, the tattered rocks on the summit were still tattered.  And the plaque marking the high point hadn’t moved a bit.  I looked at the glaciated lakes, shivering under the thunderstorm venting far below, and gazed at the rows and rows of peaks thrusting up to the west.  And I thought about forty years before and me alone on the summit, two hours alone on top of the nation and, thanks to a weary photographer, without a top to my head. Never had I felt so much at home.

I treasure the photograph I have of my son and me on the top of Whitney.  Not only because I can see all of our heads, but because it is for me a home, a home of a home.  An icon of yesteryear becoming an icon of today.  In the photograph I can remember, remember then, remember now.  I can think and recall, I can meditate and ponder. And I can see, see the stormy day we had, the way the lightning slashed across the empty sky, the sleet that fell as we hiked out of the lake basin, the amazing view we had on top.  It all fits.  It all fits into the home I found, the icon without a head.

And now an icon with a thousand faces.  Always at home.

     Yesterday was Beethoven's birthday!  What can we say about Ludwig van Beethoven?  This famous portrait of him captures how many of us see him:  a brooding, brilliant composer. When we think about Amadeus Wolfgang Mozart, we think of the Enlightenment and how it liberated the human mind and imagination from the constraints of a Church struggling with its response to impending modernity.  We see Mozart's music as poetry, lilting and dancing its way across our lives.
     Not so with Beethoven.  His music overwhelms us with its passion.  It comes to us as a force of nature, barreling and twisting its way into our hearts, breaking our souls apart, forcing us to grapple with and contemplate the deeper forces that drive human existence.  We swoon over the viscerality of Beethoven's melodies, we wonder about the power of the universe which his songs describe.  A Romantic in the purest sense, Beethoven reminds us of other worlds and things, of the presence and possibilities of transcendence.

     I thank God for Beethoven.  I thank him for giving him to us, for giving him to show us as we are, beings of mind as much as creatures of heart, living, personal, dynamic entities made to step bravely and meaningfully into the weighty contingencies of life, to take hold of everything that is before us.  Given the many stories and legends that surround his life, we may never know exactly what Beethoven thought about God.  Regardless, he makes us think of him.  Beethoven makes us think about our deeper meaning, our deeper experience.  He drives us to wonder about the mystery of life and the mind of its creator.

     I thank God for using Beethoven to open and unfold for us glimpses of what we, life, and God, can be.

     Where did Christmas come from?  The obvious--and true--answer is that Christmas has its ultimate origins in the first century A.D. early Christians' commemoration of the birth of Jesus.  Flush with the joy and wonder of Jesus' resurrection, they set out to not only remember his rising from the dead but his entry into this world as well.
     At my atheist discussion group this week, we discussed criticized, the various ways that Western culture has attached accouterments to the Christmas celebration, things like Christmas trees, Yule logs, gift giving, and the like.  Mention was also made of how December 25 was made the date of celebration.  No surprises here:  clearly, the early church did not use Christmas trees or Yule logs.  Nor did it sing the Christmas hymns that accompany most celebrations of Christmas today.  Furthermore, it's no secret that the date of December 25 is somewhat arbitrary, that we are really not sure exactly when Jesus was born. 
     What's my point?  Simply, although Christmas today looks very different than it did two thousand years ago, its essence has not changed.  Regardless of these ancillary concerns, we know beyond doubt (and secular as well as biblical accounts confirm this) that Jesus was born.  Moreover, whether we wish to call Jesus God or not, we cannot deny the profound extent to which he shaped the tenor and course of world history and every human being who has lived it.
     God really did come.
     

     Yesterday, I shared "Home as Connection."  Today, I share "Home as Address" (this time, unlike yesterday, with the artwork!).

Home as Address

      Do you have an address? I do. In fact, I’ve had many addresses in my lifetime. You probably have, too. And like me, you’ll probably have a few more. Maybe a lot more.
     I like to look at my address as a signpost, a signal. It tells me, and other people, where I live, where I am, where I make my home. My address is a kind of bastion, a place where I center my thoughts, where I base my comings and goings, the setting in which I ready myself to go out and engage and understand the world. And it seems that the numbers of my address are not as important as that I have a number, that I have a locale, that I have a starting point, a destiny as well as refuge.
My address sets me apart. No one else has my number, no one else has my home. The loveliness of community notwithstanding, I feel good being my number, my me, my home.
     Whenever I am in Los Angeles, where I grew up, where I spent seventeen
years of my life, I try to make time to drive by my childhood home. My childhood address, my long ago space, the structure of number from which I birthed and nourished the activities and questions of my earliest existence. I look at the number—it’s still there, its four digits, 5 and 9 and 3 and 9 still on one of the pillars holding up the front porch—I look at the house. I look at

what it is now, outwardly different yet numbered still, I think about what it had been. Its numbering will probably never change.
     I like that. I like my roots of number.
     “Look for this number,” I say to someone who is coming to my current home or, “here’s my address.” Decades ago, I had to give this person directions, with added instruction about distinguishing landmarks, a stucco or siding color, a particular bush or tree, some feature that would set my number, my address—my home—apart. No more. Numbering has gone the way of the Dodo, lost in the world of GPS. Sure, people still need a number but, sadly enough, nothing else, no unique points, no colors, rocks, bushes, or trees. The voice tells them exactly where to stop, precisely when to pull to the curb and turn the engine off. My number has become a skeleton, a number untethered, a tapestry unframed, a canvas gone blank. Whatever once highlighted it, whatever once distinguished it, has vanished, gobbled up by the awesome and impressive yet at the same time pernicious and dread GPS.
     Nonetheless, our number remains. We may be blinded by our technology, but we are not blind to order. We still like our number.
     My address is a sentinel, too. I look for it, it looks out for me. It protects me from postal inundation, keeps me from affairs in which I do not need to be involved. (Although it can occasionally do the opposite, as when an errant package for one of my neighbors lands at my door, telling me, if I care to look, a bit about their interests, disclosing a slice, a very small slice of their lives.
     (Or they me. Now my neighbors to my north know I order clothes from Patagonia. It’s fine,really: now I know they order products from Frontgate.)
     When I lived in a city, be it a city in the West, South, or East, addresses were easy. Most people knew the streets, most people knew compass points. Living in the country, as I did in East Texas for a few years, surrounded by farmland, fields, and trees, I came to see address very differently. What does “Route 3” tell anyone about where I live? How is a person supposed to find a street without a real name? Even the best maps (like the ones from the Auto Club) don’tprovide enough detail to find every little rural road. Too many times, usually after dark and almost always on the coldest of winter evenings, people whom I had invited to my house wandered, wandered in and out, wandered around and around, tooling across the landscapes of where they thought they were, looking for an address that didn’t exist, a home that, thoughit was there to me, was not there to them: it didn’t have a “real” number.
     But it works both ways. Some years later, when I lived outside of Green Bay, Wisconsin, my home a cabin in a copse of trees perched on the cliffs overlooking the bay, I could find other

homes only with difficulty. Without a number, without specific direction, I frequently digressed, driving over and over again down the same roads, feeling at times like Mr. Toad at Disneyland, looking for something I assumed was there, but maybe, I occasionally concluded, was in fact not.
But we don’t “live” in an address. We live in a home. We live in the security and sense of place this home gives us. Yet we still live in a number, a number that invites our presence.
     On the other hand, when many years ago I traveled across North America, going months without an address, a physical number, a tangible starting and stopping point, I didn’t reallymind. I didn’t mind being a nomad. I didn’t mind not having a number or address. I’d trek through mountains weeks at a time, lost to the world, removed from address, set beyond even a number (this being in the days before wilderness areas required entry permits), absent and vanished from all attempts at list and citation. And I felt very safe, very sure, more sure, perhaps, than I would have felt had I been in a place with a number, a place in which people,good or bad, could come upon me. I didn’t mind being out of the test tube.
     Sometimes, it’s better not to have a number, an address. After all, as much as I appreciatehaving an address, I know that it is just a door. What goes on in that number is far more important than the number itself. In fact, sometimes a number gets in the way; it limits and circumscribes our experience of existence. That’s why I knew, even as I wandered, I wasprobably growing more in those weeks than I would have at any address: I was stepping into the heart of number, the beauty of number that, Pythagoras observed, is “the essence of all things.”
     I found who I most was.
     Of course, I knew that I could stop being a nomad any time. I knew that, unlike a truly homeless person, I could return to a home. I could turn to my number. It might be myparents’, it might be my aunt’s, it might be a friend’s. But I knew it was there. I was never totally alone, nor was I ever altogether forgotten. So I probably cannot fully imagine what it is like to be without any address, without any number, to be wholly deprived of location and place. To be acknowledged and remembered by no one.
     Once upon a time, a high school friend of mine had a home, her parents’ home. In it she grew up, in it she lived, in it she lived with her parents, in it she watched her parents die. To it I wrote letters, carefully inscribing the address, the number of a physical location to ensure its arrival. I needed the number if I hoped to keep in touch.
     Then one day this friend had to sell the home. She had to let go of what had been. But she bought a new home. And she still had an address.

     Tragically, several months later, she had to let go of this home, too (overwhelmingly large medical bills). She became homeless. Still is. Where is her home? What is her address?
     Many years ago, I saw a movie called “Eyes of Laura Mars.” It starred a very young Faye Dunaway and an even younger Tommy Lee Jones. Jones was a detective assigned to investigate a series of brutal killings in the streets of New York. As a photographer, Dunaway (Laura Mars)was somehow “seeing” the killings in her head. Jones found this odd. Though Mars seemed tohave no physical connection to the crimes, her unusual ability aroused Jones’s suspicion.
     But Mars proved elusive. So elusive, in fact, that Jones, against his best professional judgment, fell in love with her.
     As the movie draws to a climax, Dunaway and Jones are riding in an elevator, heading up to Dunaway’s apartment whose address, Jones is now convinced, is key to solving the crime. It turned out, however, that the real key was that Mars was a person with multiple personalities, one of whom was the killer. Jones then asked her to shot him dead, which she did.
     In the next scene, still in her apartment, still at her address, Mars is talking to a police dispatcher, reporting the deaths. When asked for her name, she said, “Laura Mars.”
     But her number never changed. It was still her home.
     Rebbe Menachem Mendel Schneerson, the much revered Lubavitcher rabbi whose followers came to believe that he was the Messiah, for years and years worked out of his office at 770 Eastern Parkway in Crown Heights, Brooklyn, New York. Not only was 770 Parkway Avenue his office, it was his home. (And, necessarily, that of all his disciples as well.)
     One of the anthems the Lubavitchers liked to sing at 770 Parkway Avenue was called“Uforatsto.” One line of “Uforatsto” reads, “You shall break out from your boundaries and limits.” As it happened, when the rabbis applied the mystical numbering system they called Gematria to “uforatsto,” they found that its numbers equaled to 770. The address of Messiah. The address from which the new dawn would break. The address out of which the Lubavitchers would come forth to call all Jews back to the Lubavitcher community, to summon them to leave the boundaries of the past and step into the limitless world of God’s future for them.
     It’s all in the address, it’s all in the number. It’s all in our point. Address as home.

     Last week, I traveled to Seattle to participate in the gallery opening night of an art and writing project on which I've been collaborating with an artist colleague for the last couple of years.  He did the art, I did the writing.  The theme of our project was "Home."  As we continue our journey through Advent, I will be interspersing my essays (on which the art appears) with other blogs and reflections.  Today I share "Home as Connection."

Home as Connection

A line, mathematicians tell us, is the distance between two points.  A line joins; a line connects.  A line takes us from one place to another, one destination to the next.  But a line is not a one way street.  We can go one way on it as easily as we can go the other. Like home.  We can leave home, we can come back to home.  Our home “line” runs both ways.

Home is a point, a point on a line.  Actually, it’s many, many points on many, many lines. Millions, perhaps billions of lines run through the points we mark home, millions and billions of connections to other lines and to other lines in turn, millions and billions of permutations and variations on what we come to call home.

But we’re still on a line connecting.

Many years ago, I was traveling in southern Alberta, my destination Victoria, British Columbia, thousands of miles from Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, where I had begun.  One night, I stopped in Lethbridge, a then little town south of Calgary.  I had been there before.  Several months earlier, I had spent an afternoon in Lethbridge with two couples, Patrick and Rosemary, and Dan and Ellen, who had befriended me after picking me up as I hitchhiked into town after a couple of weeks of backpacking in Waterton Lakes National Park.  After dinner, Dan, Ellen, and I took our leave of Patrick and Rosemary and drove to the house they were renting west of town.

Dan and Ellen had chosen well.  Their house, a charming white shuttered cottage with two bedrooms, sat on the top of the Continental Divide as it rumbled under Highway 2, the lonely stretch of road that travels from the cities of the southern Canadian heartland to Vancouver and the shores of the Pacific.  Even though we were well into September, the days were still long enough that we arrived at the cottage in time to see the reddish yellow sun sink behind the hundreds of peaks arrayed along the western horizon.  It was spectacular.

We had a pleasant evening, Dan, Ellen, and I, snacking and talking, discussing and contemplating together the puzzle of how the three of us ended up at this house on that night.  What connections, what lines ran through the universe that occasioned our stumbling into each other, our gathering in this home?

Come morning, Dan and Ellen had to leave their mountain hideaway to drive back to Lethbridge for work.  I traveled with Dan into town, then took my leave, setting my sights for Calgary and, subsequently, Banff National Park.  I didn’t think I’d ever see them again.

On this night, this night some months later, after I had backpacked through Banff, then Jasper, out of the mountain autumn and into the mountain winter, and was now slowly making my way to Victoria to stay with some childhood friends who had moved to Canada two years before, however, I thought that I might.  I had already bumped into Patrick at the bar of the hotel in which I was staying (Rosemary was traveling); why would I not see Dan and Ellen as well?  Why wouldn’t the universe surprise me with them, too?

But when the next day I arrived at Dan and Ellen’s house, the tiny cottage hanging on the Continental Divide, the white shuttered cottage set among the mountains of the world, I saw nothing.  The house was empty.  No furniture, no dog, no Dan, no Ellen.  Nothing. I was bummed.  Outside of going back to Lethbridge and tracking down Patrick again, I had no way to contact them.

There was no way to connect.

As I journeyed on, however, heading into the misty darkness of the highway, I realized that, although I felt a little lost and lonely not seeing Dan and Ellen, it didn’t matter.  I had had a lovely evening with them, truly a lovely evening.  We had some wonderful conversations, conversations of depth, hope, and meaning.  We laughed, too.  I felt as if I had bonded with Dan and Ellen in a way I had not with Patrick and Rosemary. Not that I did not treasure Patrick and Rosemary; I did.  But the connection was different.  The lines intersected in richer ways, the homes blended more seamlessly. 

Ironically, while I had actually seen Patrick, it was my connection with the people I did not see that remained strongest.  Although with her maternal ways, ways that reminded me of my mother telling me that she would be waiting for me when I returned home from my travels, Rosemary was a window into home, Dan and Ellen were home.  Stepping into their warm and cozy house on the crest of the divide, I felt as if I had walked into something more than me, something bigger than my emotional attachments, something anchored in existence itself.

I connected.

Recently, my thirty-one year old daughter told me how, at an autumnal gathering of friends at a cornstalk maze, she had been the only one who could start and maintain the campfire they built at the end of their time there.  As everyone rested after negotiating the maze, the proprietor of the maze approached and dumped several logs into the group’s firepit, expecting, I guess, that a fire would somehow light up on its own.

Sixteen years of family camping had not been without its effects.  Megan knew full well that logs do not catch into flame without some kindling, some gathering and coaxing of heat sufficient to ignite larger pieces of wood.  She subsequently pulled together a load of twigs and paper, set it on the embers still hot from the last group of maze patrons, and voilὰ:  a fire was born.

Megan hates camping.  She loves being outside, but she does not care to sleep outside.  She doesn’t wish to deal with insects, uncomfortable sleeping pads, inconvenient bathroom facilities, and lack of access to running water.  But she knows how to build a fire.  Through it all, through all those years of camping and hiking and sleeping in the mountain air, she absorbed the art of fire building.  She connected.  Though her memory of home, home as she experienced it in the mountain peaks, has its frustrations, she still connects to it.

A few years ago, I was riding the Metra train from my exurban home to downtown Chicago.  As I seize every opportunity to read, I had brought a book to see me through the one hour ride.  Many of my fellow passengers were not as zealous for the written word.  Glancing to my left, I noticed a row of twenty-somethings, male and female, not talking, not listening, maybe not even seeing: they were all looking at their smartphones.  Granted, it’s not my generation; I cannot fault them for being, as I was, creatures of their time, thoroughgoing inhabitants of their historical moment.  Maybe they are connecting in more ways than I think. Maybe they treasure home as much as I do.  Maybe they were looking forward to the upcoming Christmas holiday when they could go home, home to Mom and Dad and the homes in which they were raised.

Maybe they really wanted to connect.  Don’t we all?

As I sat in the lobby of my local YMCA one afternoon, I heard a rather unusual noise coming from the entry door.  A person with severe intellectual challenges had walked into the room.  He couldn’t even talk; all he could do was grunt and moan.  Though I felt immensely sad for him, I felt even sadder that he probably had great difficulty in connecting, in making himself part of the body politic.  Who would want to take the time to try?  Who would want to know him?

For one, his parents.  Gently, his father guided him into the lobby, then to a chair while he consulted the attendants at the lobby desk.  As his father stood at the desk, he called to his son constantly, encouraging, soothing, telling his son that he was fine, that he was OK, and that no harm would come to him, that no one could separate them.  He reminded his son that as long as he, his father, was with him, his son was at home, safe, secure, buried in love and affection.  And nothing would ever change that.  Wherever his son might go and whoever he might become, he would always be at home.  He would always be connected to his dad.  He would always know and enjoy his care and embrace. 

As I watched this young man, I thought about his connections, I thought about mine.  I thought about how we are all connected in more ways than we think.  I thought about how all of our lives, our lines are moving, blending, diverging, coalescing, and creating, together thrusting across the skein of the cosmos, together burrowing through the edges of what we can know. Our lines live, and our lines die. But the connections remain.  Every connection is a glimmer, a glimmer of light, a flash of hope, a hope that, in the end, we all share a home.  Sure, we all have our separate homes, our individual joys and dreams, but we also have, whether it is in the mountains of Canada or the lobby of the YMCA, a connection, a connection not just to our home, but to all home.

We will always be connected to the lines, the lines of home.

     "For the grace of God has appeared," writes the apostle Paul in the third chapter of his letter to Titus, "bringing salvation to all people" (Titus 2:11).  As we remember the second Sunday of Advent, we come to understand more fully that in Jesus, God in the flesh, we see, in flesh and blood, concrete and visible expression of God's grace, physical manifestation and display of his truest posture toward us.  Jesus' appearance tells us that, above all, God loves us.  And he provides us with a way to know and love him, fully and intimately.  Jesus is the grace of God.
     We grant each other grace every day, as we should.  Yet it is God's grace that enables us to see and do much more, to see and understand that amidst the frequent senseless and confusing vagaries of the world in which we live, there is hope, a hope that reality is more than what we see, but which frames and orders what we do.  Jesus' appearance tells us that whatever else we may think about God, what we ought to think most about him is this:  God is loving, God is gracious, and God is for us, for us today, for us tomorrow, for us forever.
     What else, in this Advent season, do we really need to know?

     Thirty eight years ago yesterday, musician John Lennon was gunned down outside the Dakota apartments in New York City.  Such a shock, such a tragedy.  As I think, again, about Lennon's life, I think about his song "God."  In it, he says, "I just believe in me; Yoko and me.  That's reality."

          Though I get that Lennon, along with countless others, wished to reduce what is real to what is immediately before him, and that on the face of it, this looks as the most viable way to look at the objects of our perception, I also wonder, given the possibility of the metaphysical and transcendent as well as the difficulty of reducing ourselves to a brain and attendant vat of chemicals, whether he is overlooking that reality is more than what he wants to perceive.  Otherwise, we are merely projections of ourselves—and who and where are we?!

       Granted, transcendence and religion do not lend themselves well to our perceptions.  And that’s the problem.  Ironically, it’s also the solution.  If we could explain everything with chemicals, if we never developed questions like Cohen and Young pose, if we subsumed all experience into a plastic (or computerized) box, then, yes, we would need nothing else.  But we can’t.  So we wonder.
     So does God.  And he's waiting for us, today, tomorrow, and beyond, to respond.

     "It is a day that will live in infamy," said Franklin Roosevelt after the attack on Pearl Harbor.  For those who were alive when it happened, the attack on the naval base at Pearl Harbor, whose 71st anniversary we remember today, changed their world forever.  Never before had America been attacked, never before had such devastation been visited upon its shores.  Life had been turned upside down.

     We grieve for those who lost their lives in this attack.  And we grieve for the thousand and thousands of additional lives that were lost redressing what happened.  The pain and carnage are almost unfathomable.  
     Regardless of where we live today, as we look back on that day, that day so long ago, we remember the gravity of every human life.  No one should die unremembered, no one should die alone. No one should leave this life lost and abandoned, an abandoned image of God.
     Most of all, we pray that the world will never see such horror again.
     

     Advent is upon us.  Advent is a time to celebrate:  Messiah is born.  It's also a time to reflect, to remember.  In Advent, we think about Christmases past and the joy they gave us; we think about those with whom we enjoyed those  Christmases but who are no longer with us; we think about things as they were, we think about things as they now are.  We think, we ponder.

     Advent brings time and memory together.  It's the culmination of hundreds and hundreds of years of memory, hundreds and hundreds of years of preserving those things that, though now disappeared, remain with us still.  Advent tells us that we can remember with hope.  It reminds us that we can believe in the worth of the present precisely because it is built on the trustworthiness of the past.
     Advent says to us that what has disappeared hasn't disappeared at all.  In the person of Jesus, the point of Advent, it is here, completely and wonderfully present and new.