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!