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.
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