Not as well known as Mozart, whose birthday we remembered a few days ago, Franz Schubert was nonetheless one of the most remarkable musicians in Western history.  Immensely productive and profoundly creative, Schubert wrote some of the most ethereal and haunting melodies of all time.  We listen to his music and feel transported, lifted above what is earthly and material, moved into transcendence.  Today, January 31, is Schubert's birthday.
     Schubert's music gives us pause.  If music only told us what we already know, we probably wouldn't get as much out of it as we do.  We do not need to be reminded of what is obvious and normal.  We rather need to be encouraged to ponder what is beyond the apparent, what breaks down the seen, what splits the visible apart.  We want to know what we, at the moment, cannot.
     And this is what Schubert's music does.  Descending into the darkest recesses of his soul, Schubert talks to us about the deepest mysteries of existence, how we walk in a wisp, a gossamer veil stretched between us and the other side of time.  He romanced eternity.
     As do we all.  Every day we balance, balance between presence and absence, perched on a thin line of reality and ultimate destiny.
     Thanks, Franz Schubert, even if you didn't intend to do so, for showing us that life is bigger than life itself.

     "Without revelation, the people perish."  Translated as the first part of Proverbs 29:18 in the King James version of the Bible, these few words say volumes about the state of reality.  They tell us that without revelation, that is, communication from God, we miss the point.
               Without revelation, we live in a closed world, a terminal system.  We cannot see beyond ourselves.  We miss the greater meaning without which we cannot make sense of who we are.  Absent revelation, we wallow in the speculations of our finitude, even while we remain fully aware of our tendency to look beyond it.

     To a larger point, whether it is of this world or another one that speaks into our present moment, we can agree, I suggest, that we cannot easily live without acknowledging such a vision's necessity in our lives.
     So whose revelation is right?  All of them?  None of them?  If we reject transcendence as a source of vision, we are left with a revelation of ourselves and our ideals, ideals which we and ourselves, and only we and ourselves, assess and judge.  And how do we ultimately know?  It seems that revelation and greater vision are most meaningful if they reflect the vision of a reality out of which this present one comes.

     Yesterday was the 263rd birthday of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart.  Around the world, people continue to be astonished by the immense creativity and wonder of this Austrian's music.  Fluent in all genres of classical music, Mozart, though he sadly died at the tender age of 34, produced an array of musical expression that most musicologists agree is unmatched.  As a contemporary said of him, "He was like an angel sent to us for a season, only to return to heaven again."  Most of us can only stand mute and marvel at Mozart's immense ability.  How could one person write works of such extraordinary beauty?

     Genesis tells us that God created people in his image, in his likeness.  For this reason, every person who has ever been born and walked through the history of this planet has the potential to duplicate and express, albeit in finite form, the creativity that birthed the cosmos.
     Rightly do we weep and swoon at the beauty of Mozart's compositions; they are works of unsurpassed wonder.  Yet rightly do we marvel equally at God, the personal infinite God who made and fashioned this artist--with all his prodigious talents--and enabled him to be and become who and what he is.
      As he does for all of us, we who are gifted in an nearly infinite number of ways, we who are made to create in unabashed wonder.
     Enjoy and appreciate the people--all the people--whom God has made.
     Thanks, God, for giving us Mozart.

     There are barely twenty of them left in the world. The vaquita porpoise is perhaps the least known porpoise, but certainly one of the most interesting.  For many years, a small group of them have lived in the waters of the Pacific Ocean off the coast of Baja California, doing no harm to anyone.  Unfortunately, these waters are also used by various fishermen whose modus operandi is to drop massively lengthy nets into the ocean to catch fish.  The problem is obvious:  the nets catch any animal that happens to run into them, not just the fish on which the fishermen are focusing.  The little vaquitas have been decimated by this practice, leading to their near extermination.

     It's easy to say that, well, this is a minor animal species, and if it disappears, the ecosystem will adapt.  Although from a broad biological standpoit this may well be true, it is, by any other standard, patently false.  If this world has purpose, if this world exists by virtue of divine intention, everything in it is important and, significantly, reflective of truth.
     And it is this truth that is, not to be redundant, the truth on which we ought to base our lives.
     Go, vaquitas!

     Lately, I've been reading a book about the puma.  Called variously mountain lion, cougar, and any number of other appellations, the puma is the largest feline predator in the Western Hemisphere.  It is perfectly designed to do what it does, beautifully equipped to stalk, pursue, and capture its prey.  So skilled is it at concealing its whereabouts, so adroit is it at finding its meals, that we rarely see it, even if it is wandering, as it is doing with increasing frequency, in our backyards.
     Some years ago, one night while I was backpacking in the Rocky Mountains, my tent pitched in the shadow of the Continental Divide, I heard a puma come through my camp.  So quiet it was that I barely knew it was there.  But I could sense it, prowling around and, when I assume it had detected prey (not me!), hissing over its fresh kill.  It was chilling, but absolutely fascinating:  the raw beauty of the natural world directly before me (happily, I was in my tent).

     We may be frightened by the thought of a big cat slipping through the spaces of our lives, but I believe that without these glimpses and intimations of wildness, we would be less than human.  We are not independent of the rest of the creation, nor are we beyond the currents of wildness that course through the life of the planet.  It is us.  In a good way.
     God made a perfectly wild world:  amazing and breathtaking and, most significantly, marvelously apart from full human control and comprehension.
     

Today I offer yet another selection from the art/writing project which I recently completed.  As did the selections I've shared previously, it has to do with the subject of home.  This one is "Home as Stillness and Rootedness."

Home as Stillness

One sunny Southern California afternoon, as I was walking home from elementary school, one of my classmates (whom I thought was a friend) approached me, looking a little leery, maybe mischievous—and definitely wary.

I soon learned why.  Suddenly grabbing me behind my back and securing my arms, he called, “I got him!”  Two other classmates immediately appeared.  As I squirmed, one of them, Eddie, took a few fake swings at me, laughing, as did the others, Rick and Don.  I had no idea what they were up to, but I felt scared, very scared, more scared than when, the previous year, as I passed by a house one block north of mine, a large dog ambling serenely through its front yard suddenly and without warning, ran and leaped toward me.

I struggled and struggled, but could not break free.

And I cried.  I didn’t see any way out of this; I didn’t see how I could ever free myself of these classmates’ grips.  It seemed helpless.  What could I do?

Happily, another guy soon appeared, trundling up the sidewalk from the next street.  It was Kelly (this being his last name, the only name anyone ever used for him).  Kelly was several grades ahead of us and carried an air of unmistakable authority.  “Kelly,” I mumbled through my tears, “help me.”

“Let him go, you guys.”  And they did.  Without saying anything else, I started running, started running faster than I had ever ran before.  I flew. I flew to the next street, crossed it, then kept flying, kept racing down the block until I reached the alley that, when I ran left and through it, led to my street and my parents’ home, nine houses away.  Nine beautiful houses away.  I was desperate.  I was desperate to get to the safety of my home.

Walking in the door, stepping into the soothing quiescence of the threshold, I immediately felt at ease.  My heart calmed, my nerves relaxed.  My breathing returned to normal.  I plopped onto my bed and lay perfectly still.  It felt good.  It felt good to be home.

So good that I didn’t bother letting my mother know I was there.  No need. She’d figure it out.  Right now, I just wanted to be at home, to be safe in my home.  I wanted to plant myself anew in its comforting soil, I wanted to find restoration in its soothing embrace.

When Mom walked in my room, I started crying all over again.  Tears of relief.  I was with my mother, I was in my place.  I was where I had begun and where, from my young vantage point at that time, I thought I would end.  Where else would I go for such comfort, such peace?  Where else would I really go?

(Many years later, when I studied the Gospel of John in seminary, I read, in chapter six, how Jesus, having alienated many people with his metaphorical language about eating his flesh, asked his closest disciples whether they would abandon him, too.

(“To whom would we go, Lord?” Peter replied, “you have words of eternal life.”)

Indeed:  where else would anyone go to find her ultimate stillness and deepest roots?

She’d go home.  She’d go to the words of home.

When I was seventeen, preparing to graduate from high school and looking to the summer ahead, a summer in which, I was told, I would not need to work, I considered what I would do.  It didn’t take long to decide.  I’d hike the John Muir Trail, a 210 mile long trail that follows the peaks, valleys, meadows, and lakes of the Sierra Nevada range in California.  I figured it would take me six, maybe eight weeks.

Had I ever backpacked before?  Absolutely not.  But I really wanted to do this.  After some hesitation, Mom and Dad approved, helping me buy the equipment I needed and driving me to the trailhead.  I began with a companion (at Mom and Dad’s insistence), but after a week he went home, and I was on my own for the next six or so weeks.  

It was wonderful, so very wonderful.  I reveled in everything I saw, everything I came to know and experience.  All too soon, however, it was time to leave.  It was time to go home.

Hiking over a pass and out of the range one stunning mountain morning, I spent the rest of the day trekking another fifteen miles down to the bank of a river, a lovely stretch of water rambling gracefully through the sheep and date farms set below the range.  There I camped for the night.  The ground, covered in dense grasses, was incredibly soft.  It made for a delightfully relaxing sleep.

The next day, stepping onto Highway 395, the forgotten road that, sandwiched between the lush Sierra and the arid White Mountains (home to the Bristlecone Pine, one of the oldest trees on the planet), winds from the Mojave Desert to Lake Tahoe, almost half the length of California, I started hitchhiking, headed toward Los Angeles, looking forward to seeing my family. To be at home.

Just after sunset, just as the skies were darkening over the ocean and the lingering smog was painting the horizon a deep red, I reached my front door.  My home. I didn’t have a key—did I really need one in the mountains?—so I rang the bell.  Sister Kathleen answered the door.  I smiled.  “It’s Bill,” she called out.

Rushing to the door, my mother, my dear mother, she of deepest love and solace and childhood bliss, opened her arms wide, kissed me on the cheek, and took me into the house.  “I know you,” she said.  Indeed, she did.  And I her. I was at home again, secure, protected, whole.  “The prodigal son has returned,” Dad said, joking with my grandfather, who had come for dinner that night.

I knew better, however:  I had never really left.

And why not?  Here I flourished, here I grew.  Here I found foundation, here I found place.  Here I found the colors of my life, the pools of my desire.  Here I could be me as I could not be anywhere else.

A sea anemone plants itself in the rocks of the tide, a gopher tunnels in the bowels of the earth.  A tree springs from the dirt of the forest, a flower from the loam of the meadow.  Like these animals, like these plants, only doing what they instinctually long for, consciously or otherwise, so had I dug myself into my home.  So had I made it my center, the locus and linchpin of all I had known.  Whether I was seeking safety, encouragement, or affirmation, I had looked to this home as the eye, the eye of the many hurricanes that swirled through my life and time. Here I began countless journeys, and here I would always come at journey’s end.

I knew I could never really leave.

Although I love many mountain places, I think I love the arctic the most.  It is a place of pure magic.  Absolutely. Its stark beauty, beauty born of miles of lonely lakes and deeply green tundra, of light shining from peaks whose jaggedness looks as if it been sculpted just yesterday, of endless vistas of yawning valley and glacier unseen, a beauty grounded in what is not there as much as what is, drives deep into my heart.  Dazzling abundance, shimmering effervescence, spectacular desolation.  It boggles my mind.

During winter, the arctic is silent, very silent. Aside from an arctic wolf or white fox slinking furtively across the snow, nothing breathes or moves.  The birds and caribou have migrated south; the grizzlies are hibernating; even the musk ox shrinks its footprint.  Deepest Kelvin temperatures grip the land.  Aphonia reigns.

Come spring, however, everything changes.  The tundra explodes with life.  Millions of birds return from their winter hibernation, including the arctic tern who has spent the winter on the tip of South America; thousands of caribou journey from the boreal lowlands; and in a case of taking the good with the bad, billions of mosquitos appear, birthed and invigorated by the massive snowmelt oozing into the tundra.

Why do they come?  These animals come because of home.  Though they appreciate their winter climes, they come to life most in the summer arctic.  This is where they mate, this is where they teach their offspring, this is where they put down their roots.  They will never stop coming; they will never stop returning to this land.

How could they?  Indeed, whywould they?

I know the feeling.  Over forty years have passed since I hiked through the arctic, over forty years since I trekked alone in the forgotten eastern stretches of the Brooks Range.  I reveled in everything I saw, rejoiced in all I experienced, the grizzlies, Dall sheep, and caribou, the treeless mountains, the icy streams.  The eagles soaring to the edge of the sky.  My days were incredibly long, my nights breathtakingly short:  the northern sun was in full bloom.  Like James Joyce’s young man of the Irish seas, I was alone and apart, breathing and tasting and touching the landscape.  Alone at home.

One day I’ll go back.  So will you.  Can you ever fully let go of your nascent stillness?  Can you ever really lose your roots of home?

     In her latest collection of stories, called Mouthful of Birds, Samanta Schweblin gives us some distinctly heart rending accounts of human mystery and longing.  Most are too bizarre to share here.  Oddly enough, however, if Schweblin's vision of a world of meaningless random events is anywhere close to being true, we have no hope.  We move beyond Camus's picture of absurdity--we live, we look, we die--to an even darker vision of existence:  we live, we have nowhere to look, we die.  It is a world of utter abandonment, a world lost to even itself.

     

     But maybe that's Schweblin's point.  If we are indeed the only sentience in the universe, and if we indeed have no idea why we are the only sentience in the universe, well, yes, life really does seem bizarre.  It seems bizarre in a way that reminds me of the old character Bizarro in the original Superman comic books:  precisely the opposite of what we think it ought to be.
     Yet we live it anyway.

     In Pink Floyd's movie, "The Wall," the protagonist, a rock star named Pink, though he enjoys the trappings of his commercial success, is nonetheless constantly plagued by the sense that something is missing.  As the movie winds on, Pink veers in and out of joy and angst, inevitably despairing that he will ever find what he is looking for.  In a world of conformity, a world in which education serves merely to subjugate the people, a world in which an invisible and nameless authority defines what is meaningful, Pink finds himself struggling to make sense of who he is.  The movie repeatedly depicts him, an immensely popular musician, moving forward, only to be halted by a massive, impenetrable wall.  There seems to be no escape from the caldron of his existential aporia.
     I wonder.  Why did the Buddha decide to leave the walls of his father's palace?  Why did Robert Peary leave the walls of his American home to be the first person to stand on the North Pole?  Why did Joan of Arc step out from the walls of her French peasant house to lead the French to victory over England?
     And why does a wall of death separate us from eternity?

     Today, I offer another piece from the art/writing show in which I participated last month.  This is "Home as What is Known."

Home as What’s Known

Many, many times in the course of my teaching I’m asked—or ask—what can we know?  All things considered, it’s a very good question.  What can we really know?

For a thoroughgoing materialist, the answer is easy: we can only know what we physically experience in this present (and only) world.  We can legitimately claim to know no more than what we perceive and process with our five senses, our sense of sight, hearing, smell, taste, and touch, the bodily operations that we so often take for granted, the perceptual experiences that are part and parcel of being human.  Anything else (of course for a materialist this is a moot question) is out of bounds.  Apophatic, invisible:  it’s verboten.  If we cannot “sense” it, it doesn’t exist.

For the spiritually minded, or perhaps I should say for those who invest in the idea of a somehow present and accessible metaphysical or metaphysical experience, knowing becomes much different.  Though it encompasses the five senses of physicality, knowing, for these folks, also means knowing, to some degree, distantly or intimately, what they believe to be forces, spirits, and presences not anchored to this material world.  Things that find their origins in what is beyond this world.  The spiritual, the ethereal, the “stuff” that we do not, as a matter of course, hear and see.

Without trying to resolve who is right, I want to wonder what this dichotomy might have to do with home.  What does it mean when we say that home is what’s known?

As we observed when we thought about home as an address, narrative or a place of, in some form, survival, home, though it may be something intangible, remains, for most of us, physicality.  Home is, at least initially, physical presence.  But when we consider home as what’s known, we find that we must take into account not just what we see, hear, and touch about our home, but how we feel, physically, transcendentally, and otherwise,about our home as well.  What sort of emotions, what sort of inner movements, what sort of spiritual moods does home stir in us?  It seems that to know home is to know not just palpable place, but dream, feeling, and spirit as well.  To know what, oddly enough, what we may never know.  To know home is to therefore know, in some very curious ways, the mystery of what makes us human.

I have a friend named Hashim.  Hashim came to the U.S. from Pakistan over forty years ago. He’s happy to be here.  In the home he shares with his wife Raana, Hashim has a photograph of Mecca.  Thousands of worshippers are circling the Kaaba, the massive black stone believed to have been built by Abraham (Ibrahim) millennia ago.  Every one of these worshippers, whether he is rich, poor, black or white, is clothed in two white sheets, steadfastly connecting with God. It is in Mecca, Hashim tells me, that he feels at home.  It is in Mecca where, Hashim says, he knows who he most is, for it is in Mecca that he stands closest to what he most deeply believes, what he most deeply knows. Life and eternity lie open before him, and God is standing with him:  Hashim is home.

Another friend of mine, Mary Kate by name, who, though she is a Christian (an Episcopal priest, actually), finds her deeper sense of place, her deepest sense of home not in a church but in a meadow, a meadow known only to her, a meadow nestled in a remote corner of the Wind River Range of Wyoming.  Yes, as a priest, Mary Kate treasures worshipping God in a church, and yes, as a Christian she finds tremendous fulfillment in reading the Bible.  But when she considers where she is really “at home,” Mary Kate mentions the meadow.  Why? For her, this meadow is as much a physical place as spiritual feeling.  She knows it as both.  It is in this meadow that she encounters her most profound moments of mind and heart, it is in this quiescent fragment of tundra and flowers that she comes into her richest sense of “knowing” home.  As Mary Kate sees it, she bonds with her place more intimately in this meadow than she does anywhere else.  In this meadow is her most complete expression and point:  her living home.

At the memorial service that my siblings and I held for my mother when she passed away in 2010, one of my sisters, Kathleen, spoke eloquently of her feelings about what she knew and treasured about the home that our mother had made for us.  “What I remember,” she said, “is coming home from school and smelling freshly baked cookies. I knew that Mom had been busy.  It always made me happy.”  Although Kathleen knew home as physical place, she knew it even more fully as feeling, a feeling that affirmed and tugged at all she knows, and even what she does not.  A feeling burrowing deeply into her spirit.  It is a feeling of knowing that the home she knew growing up is a home that encompasses the entirety of her life, past, present, and future, the home in which, even if Mom was now, as Kathleen once put it, “in the spirit world,” will be, like her “sense” of Mom, always with her.  She will know it for the rest of her life.

When in October 2011 my siblings and I hiked four miles to the 9,000 foot summit of Mt. Baden-Powell in California’s San Gabriel Mountains to scatter, at Mom’s request, her ashes, I knew this feeling of home, too. As I stood off to one side of the summit, having just released the last of my allotment of ashes, I chanced to see a crow, a lovely jet black crow, gracefully soaring about the summit.  How often does a crow hang out on the top of a mountain peak?  Rarely. They prefer the lowlands, the forest and fields, where food and resources abound.

Though I don’t believe in reincarnation, at that moment, that singularly magical moment, I wanted to think that Mom was talking to me. That she was making her presence known. That she was reminding of our life together and that she was with me still.

That, somehow, I could know that I would always be home.

A few years ago, my wife and I were traveling in Romania.  We had come to see some missionaries who lived in Bucharest and, we hoped, to see some of the land to the north of the city, particularly the Carpathian Mountains, the range that moves through Transylvania, in the middle of the country. I was eager to get a closer look at the cultural milieu out of which one of Romania’s most famous legends had come.

We’re all familiar with Dracula.  Introduced to the world through the book by Bram Stoker and popularized as a cultural icon by America’s Hollywood, Dracula lingers in many of our imaginations as a symbol and manifestation of all that is dark and mysterious, an oddly delectable tale of horror that never fails to send shivers down our spine.

Most research points to Dracula’s origins in a certain Vlad III, otherwise known as “Vlad the Impaler” (son of Vlad II Dracul), prince of Wallachia in the middle of the fifteenth century.  It seems that Vlad acquired a reputation for inordinate cruelty towards enemies and dissenters.  His principal method of reprisal was, of course, impalement. When we toured Bran Castle, the castle from which Stoker developed his story, I thought often, well, this was Vlad’s home.  He knew it. He knew its corridors, he knew its ways. He knew its secrets.  And he ensured that all who came to his home would know and understand that, like it or not, this was indeed his home.  At all costs, Vlad would make his home “known” to all.

As we left the castle, I concluded that, yes, Vlad’s home is not mine, but now that I had peeked into its mysteries and uncovered a bit of its darkness, I had come to know it.

And, frighteningly enough, he now knew mine.

Several days later, our missionary friends invited us to accompany them to a gypsy village.  Ah, the Roma.  Such inscrutability, such intrigue.  I couldn’t wait to go.

The village proved to be everything for which I had hoped.  Dollops of brick, wood, and thatching—homes in the making, homes in the doing, homes now decaying—horse drawn carts, colorful gardens, tidy farms, wheat and hay shining in the setting sun.  Like a painting, a painting of a lost world.

For these Roma, however, this was home.  It was all they knew.  And despite the hardships of their lives, it was all they needed to know. In this little village, this isolated enclave of family and friends, an enclave set definitively apart from the Romanian mainstream, the Roma knew home.

Do we not live in a vast and lovely and unyielding universe, an amazingly remarkable cosmos?  And do we also strive in vain to know it fully?  Absolutely.  We’ll never everything it has to say.  Nonetheless, this universe is our home, all the home we will ever need, all the home we will ever need to know.  We may know this home in opulence and luxury, we may know it in poverty and pain.  But we will probably never know it as it really is.

On the other hand, maybe we don’t need to. Maybe it’s enough to know home is there. Maybe it’s enough to know that we can know home.

Maybe it’s enough to know that wherever we go and whoever we become, we will know our home.

     Defining spirituality is difficult.  If we attribute it to a god, we miss that many unbelievers attest to having spiritual experiences.  If we assign it to a nebulous immaterial presence, we encounter the problem of making something amorphous into something that is physically real.  And if we say that spirituality is thoroughly human, we run into the perennial dilemma of understanding how consciousness can emerge from inert matter.

     Wassily Kandinsky, a Russian surrealist painter and whose birthday we will remember in December, thought much about spirituality, spirituality in regard to art.  He did so as a way of explaining how art overwhelms what he considered to be the spiritual darkness of Marxism.  Whether or not one believes in God, Kandinsky observed, we all benefit from the spiritual benefits of art.  In art, we feel hints of transcendence, intimations of things we cannot easily fathom, emotional insights that we do not experience otherwise.  We look into another world, a world of light, real or imagined, a world that eclipses the rigid (and often absurd) materialism of the Marxist worldview.
     Kandinsky's art reflects his words aptly.  It is highly abstract and difficult to fathom easily, but that's the point:  spirituality isn't supposed to be simple.  If it were, it would be no more than another product of our material human whims.

     Yesterday was Epiphany.  The "last gasp" of the Christmas season, Epiphany (a word meaning, literally, the manifestion of a divine being), reminds us of the faith of a group of travelers from Persia in the Zoroastrian and biblical prophecies which they had encountered in their studies.

     After much examination of these texts, these magi ("wise" men) concluded that the world was on the precipice of a momentous event:  the birth of a new king.  And, they understood, this king would be unlike any other.  In contrast to other royalty, this king would emerge from humble circumstances, a stable outside Bethlehem, a tiny and forgettable village in southern Palestine.
     This king would be, these scholars realized, human and divine.  In him, the magi saw, God would really come to earth.  Small wonder that they made the arduous journey over the Zagros Mountains, across the arid expanse of Arabia, and onto the international trade routes that coursed through the Levant.  Who would have imagined such a thing?
     And that's the point:  who would have imagined God would be born as a human being?
     But he was.  Epiphany demonstrates that only when we let inklings of the divine into our hearts will we understand what the world is really all about.

     As we move ever more fully into the New Year, we think about the stories we hope to write, the narratives we hope to create.  We think about the little moments, we think about the big ones.  And we wonder how it will all happen.  I offer today another essay from the art show in which, as I said some weeks ago, I participated last month.  This is about home as narrative.

Home as Narrative

There’s narrative, and there’s metanarrative. There are little stories, and there are big stories.  And bigger stories still.  One long story we are, a story of promise made glorious, a story of challenge won and journey found, a tale of joy and wonder.  Aren’t we here?

It’s too facile, I suppose, to call home a narrative. Of course it is.  Indeed, home is story.  Home marks beginning, the beginning of our narrative, the place and time where our stories commence.  It’s a fount of adventure, a wellspring of dream, a spring of existence in all its remarkable, and always unfathomable, heartaches and pathways of truth, insight, and meaning.  Whatever forms or paths our narratives take, in, out, up, or down, we cannot dismiss the fact of where they began:  home.

Whether home is a mansion, manger, carriage, war zone, hut, or toilet stall, it will always be, forever and ever, distance and memory notwithstanding, the beginning, the start of our narrative, our story, our story of life.  Moreover, whatever this home may—or may not—be, home as beginning and home as end, it is ours.  It is ours to own, ours to live out, ours to end.  It’s a book waiting to be opened, a painting to paint, a puzzle to decipher and unravel:  a song of ourselves, a song of life.  And regardless of the permutations, metamorphoses, and conjurings our home may take, its song, to borrow a phrase from Robert Page and Jimmy Plant, “remains the same.”  It’s home.

A number of years ago, when my daughter was not quite two years old, Carol and I took her to California, to camp and hike in the Tuolumne Meadows region of Yosemite National Park.  Fifty miles by automobile from and 5,000 feet higher than the Valley, Tuolumne Meadows is a welcome respite from the frenetic activity that often characterizes its lower, and far more visited, counterpart.  Surely one of the most beautiful places in all of the Sierra, an astonishingly verdant and heavily flowered undulating expanse stretching across several miles of a glacial basin set beneath a ring of peaks, peaks with names like Lemert, Unicorn, and Cathedral, Tuolumne is a jewel of jewels to behold.  I’ve been there more times than I can count.

A couple of hours after we arrived at the campground and set up camp, we were joined by my mother and youngest sister Kathleen.  Even at sixty-seven, Mom was still willing to sleep in a tent in one of her favorite mountain haunts!  As the four of us reconnoitered about our campsite, talking, looking, Megan trailing beside us, we paused for a moment to look at our tent. A North Face VE-25, a tent built to withstand every possible obstacle weather could throw at us, winter or summer, it stood resplendent, a gold and white geodesic dome (thank you, Buckminster Fuller) in the afternoon sun.

Megan, however, understood our tent differently. And it had nothing to do with functionality or aesthetics.  Lifting up her pudgy little hand, her blonde hair sparkling in the light, she pointed at the tent, and said, “Nite, nite.”  We were very far from Megan’s “home” in Chicago, very far from everything else she had, to this point, known.  Camping in high mountains was a narrative entirely new to her.

Somehow, however, Megan knew she was home. Somehow she knew, knew in the center of her little but growing rapidly mind, that our tent was her home.  She knew that our tent was her refuge, her place to go when the stars came out, the place out of which she would emerge the next morning, ready to begin another day, another day of story, narrative, and song.

On Megan’s dresser, she keeps a photo that Carol took of her and me as we watched the Lyell River, the river that flows into Tuolumne Meadow, a few days later.  There we sit, side by side, basking in the sun, with Megan placing her arm around my waist, pals forever.  It’s a touching photograph.  As she had with our tent, Megan was acknowledging, in her little way, that she was home.  Her and Daddy.  And her narrative would continue.

As Martin Heidegger would have it, we are “thrown” into this world, our beingness a random happenstance and blip, a plop on a canvas of billions of other plops.  We mean very little.  Most religions would say the opposite, that we are designed and created with love and purpose, that we have unique and special meaning.  No matter.  Though there may well be a “what” or “why” to further ponder, what is most at stake at this point is that, regardless of how we got here, we’re here.  And we are narratives; we are narratives that, foremost, begin at home.  The consummate story.

In the many years I’ve lived, I have lived countless numbers of stories.  I’ve had many homes, too, some physical, some intellectual, some of spirit and heart. I haven’t loved them all; some have been bitter and rife with pain.  As I look back, however, I appreciate them all.  I appreciate the narratives they grounded, the tales they sparked, the return and recovery they presented to me.  I love the life they have given me, I treasure how they have molded my days on the planet.  I would not trade one among them.

As an old friend of mine once told me when she was on the cusp of fifty, “There’s so much I still want to do.  I’m not ready to pack my life up.”  Who would?  Sherrill had many more homes, many more homes to find, many more narratives to create. And now, at the age of sixty-three, she continues to do so.  As should we. We can rejoice in ourselves, we can sing our stories.  We can rejoice in being creatures of narrative and value and, consciously or not, deliberative and rational sentient beings.  We can love our homes.  All of them.

Yet do we know anything else?  Not really.  It’s hard to see through a mirror.  I do know, however, that when I try to unpack the exchanges between my narratives and my homes, the many upon many stories that have birthed and made me, I am overwhelmed. How can I measure my narrative, its form, its ways, its value, its place?  Will I ever really be home?

As I was driving to work one day some years ago, I picked up a hitchhiker.  His long hair and lengthy beard reminded me of me many years before.  Why not help him out?  He seemed harmless enough.

And he was.  But he was odd.  He said very little in the ten minutes we rode together (I picked him up on a ramp going onto the interstate, then dropped him off at my exit ramp).  Just stroked his yellow brown beard.  And looked at me.  When he got out of the car, he turned to me and said, “You don’t know me, you don’t know you.  You only know you are you.  But you are never you.”

Well.  Where did this leave me?  As I continued driving and eventually pulled into the parking lot of the school at which I was teaching at the time, I thought about his words.  If I am just a narrative, just one more narrative or, as the slave holding father-in-law told his idealistic abolitionist son-in-law in David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas, “Just another drop in a vast and endless sea,” then yes:  I probably do not know my “you.”  How could I? 

Is there really a point?

Home is a narrative, sure, a collection of stories around which we build our lives.  But it’s also a metanarrative, a master narrative, a narrative in which other narratives, all the other narratives of our lives, are collected, subsumed, and find substance, place, and end.  Even if our home is nothing more than ourselves, it comprises.  It comprehends.  It births meaning.  Even if home is a place and time in which we don’t know our “you,” it still absorbs who we are (whoever this is), it still takes up who we become.  Though as a youth I traveled far and wide, rarely visiting my parents’ home, I knew that even if that home vanished without a trace, the locus it gave my narratives would remain.  My home, my warm and inviting childhood home, is a metanarrative that will be with me all my days.  I walk in it every moment.  I fall into its patterns, lapse into its ways.  Unconsciously, I breathe and express it, constantly touching and breathing it, never knowing how or why.

Just like the song, the metanarrative remains.  Do you like rainbows?  I love them.  Biblical and Irish allusions aside, I see a rainbow as a sign of hope and potential, of new light and vision.  I see it as a series of arcs, curving and sublimating into things greater, seen and not. A door to more.  Wrapped in a rainbow, I travel, voyaging through the planets of my life, tapping into ellipses of point and trajectory, riding the waves of destiny.  I make a story, I write a poem.  Though it is not always a poem I know and understand, it is a poem that inhabits and fills my life, a poem that makes my life.  Even if, as Ecclesiastes would have it, “there is no remembrance,” and even if, as many a cosmologist would insist, one day there will be nothing but nothingness, this poem, this poem of home will always be my “you.”

My metanarrative of home.

After all, a never home is a home, too, a story that cannot help but begin, and a story that, as life is, cannot help but end.  It’s not dark matter, it’s not anti-energy, it’s not quantum fluctuation.  It’s home.

And all that we, narrative upon narrative, need.

Christmas 1983.  Four months before, my wife and I had left the glitter of north Dallas for the concrete jungles of Chicago.  But Carol missed her parents terribly.  She wanted to be home.  She wanted to return to where she had begun, her father’s farm on the levees of the Red River in southern Arkansas, and the house in town in which she had been born, the house in which her stories and narrative had commenced and found space and form.  She wanted more than a random moment, more than a disjointed poem.  She wanted home.  Where we were in Chicago was a very minor narrative in her master, a very short thread in her larger metanarrative of life and home.  At this point, she needed the beginning far more than the end.  She needed the creative—and regenerative—soil of home.

Some years ago, I wrote a book, a book in which I described my spiritual journey.  I talked about how after growing up in the Catholic Church and one day deciding it had nothing for me, I began to wander, spiritually, intellectually, and politically. I roamed for many years, roamed through my mind, spirit, and heart.  I was looking for something, looking for something I wasn’t finding in the quotidian affairs of everyday existence.  Although I eventually found it, eventually came upon an insight into God that would change my life forever, that’s not the point.  Writing my story made me reflect, reflect deeply on my narrative, reflect on all the homes I had established and left, all the homes I had found and later let go.  All the homes of my metanarrative.

And I realized that like cairns on a mountain trail, every one of these homes remain, landmarks, signal points and demarcations along my life path.  Nothing ever really goes away forever.

In my stories of home, I learned the story of home.

     Strolling through an art show earlier this year, I came upon a work which, as I reflect on it, captures, for me, the essence of the moment, this New Year and the liminality with which we deal every day.

     This work featured a row of trees stacked atop a hill, a vista of cloud and sun lying beyond.  We all seek vistas, don't we?  We all seek dreams and meanings to fill the years of our lives.  And we all come to see, eventually, that the roads to such things are often filled with tangles of difficulties that we frequently do not expect or anticipate.  Eventually, however, joy comes.  It's life, life in the world God has made.
     We live in a tenuous moment, a moment perched between what has been and what will come.  And we never fully understand either one.  On the other hand, unless the world offered the recondite and intrigue, it would not be much of a world.  Though we often loathe not knowing, we remain aware that without it life would not be the experience it is, a mystery, a beautiful, glorious, and vexing mystery, a mystery grounded in the infinite--and personal--presence of God.
     As this New Year comes upon us, rejoice in the hiddenness and incomplete, the opaque implicit in the meaningfulness of existence.  Embrace the liminality of the divine activity intrinsic to humanness.  And step confidently into what is to come.
     Happy New Year!