Where They Have to Take You In

A Worship Service by the Reverend Jonalu Johnstone

The First Unitarian Church of Oklahoma City

Sunday October 23, 2005

Readings

Psalm 137:1-6

In 586 BCE, the city of Jerusalem was sacked by the empire of Babylon and the elite and powerful of Jerusalem taken away into what came to be known as the Babylonian Captivity.   Much moving poetry and prophecy came from that time, including this Psalm, which you may know from songs that have adapted it.  “Zion” refers, of course, to the homeland of the Jewish people:

By the rivers of Babylon –

            There we sat down and there we wept

            When we remembered Zion.

On the willows there

            We hung up our harps.

For there our captors

            Asked us for songs,

And our tormentors asked for mirth, saying,

            “Sing us one of the songs of Zion!”

How could we sing the Lord’s song

            In a foreign land?

If I forget you, O Jerusalem,

            Let my right hand wither!

Let my tongue cling to the roof of my mouth,

            If I do not remember you,

If I do not set Jerusalem

            Above my highest joy.

From “The Wonderful Wizard of Oz,” by L. Frank Baum

Shortly after Dorothy met the scarecrow in the book:

“Tell me something about yourself, and the country you came from,” said the Scarecrow, when she had finished her dinner.  So she told him all about Kansas, and how gray everything was there, and how the cyclone had carried her to this queer land of Oz. 

The Scarecrow listened carefully, and said,     “I cannot understand why you should wish to leave this beautiful country and go back to the dry, gray place you call Kansas.”

“That is because you have no brains,” answered the girl.  “No matter how dreary and gray our homes are, we people of flesh and blood would rather live there than in any other country, be it ever so beautiful.  There is no place like home.”

The Scarecrow sighed.

“Of course I cannot understand it,” he said.  “If your heads were stuffed with straw, like mine, you would probably all live in the beautiful places, and then Kansas would have no people at all.  It is fortunate for Kansas that you have brains.”

Meditation & Prayer

“Pax,” by D. H. Lawrence

All that matters is to be at one with the living God

To be a creature in the house of the God of Life.

Like a cat asleep on a chair

At peace, in peace

And at one with the master of the house, with the mistress,

At home, at home in the house of the living,

Sleeping on the hearth, and yawning before the fire.

Sleeping on the hearth of the living world

Yawning at home before the fire of life

Feeling the presence of the living God

Like a great assurance

A deep calm in the heart

A presence

As of the master sitting at the board

In his own and greater being

In the house of life.

So may it be.  AMEN

Where They Have to Take You In

A Worship Service by the Reverend Jonalu Johnstone

The First Unitarian Church of Oklahoma City

Sunday October 23, 2005

“Home is where you hang your hat.”  Or “home is where the heart is, and hence, a movable feast.”

Yet the Chinese say, “A thousand days at home are a pleasure; an hour away from home is a trial.”  Then, there’s the song that pronounces:  “Home was made for coming from and dreams for going to…”

We speak of a heavenly home, of a home country, a home team; attend Homecomings and praise home-cooked food.  The allure of home is exceeded only by the avoidance of it.  Like Cher who said: “I would have gone home to my mother, but I’m not that crazy about my mother.”

That’s why I love that Robert Frost quotation about home:  “where when you have to go there, they have to take you in.”  It captures the mix of feelings, the obligation, and yet, somehow the appeal.  The quote comes from a poem, “The Death of the Hired Man,” a long dialog between a husband and a wife about not a relation – but a hired hand who comes to them not as family – in fact, he seems to be avoiding his own brother – but as home, a place where he knows he must go and they will accept him.  He goes there, it turns out, to die.  Ambivalence.

The truisms and platitudes about home match those that address any single other topic.  Yet they fall from separate schools of thought.  The misty-eyed idealist searching for the exotic place far from home is epitomized by daring wanderers like Marco Polo. 

On the other hand is the dewy-eyed romantic extolling the virtues of home, as in J. Howard Payne’s famous refrain:

’Mid pleasures and palaces though we may roam,
Be it ever so humble, there’s no place like home; 

When I find such potent feelings in every direction, I usually figure religion is intertwined in there somewhere.  I’ve generally found religion at the intersection of paradox. 

Someone once proposed that there are two kinds of people in the world – nomads and nesters.  Nomads are the wanderers, the friends whose names are in pencil in your address book, or who you just keep their email address because it changes less often than their snail mail.  I knew a nomad once who said that she always knew when it was time to move – when the windows needed to be washed.  These people blaze the frontiers and discover new horizons, at their best.  They get things done quickly because, by God, they’re not going to be there long. At their worst, they conquer and destroy.  Some simply wander, disconnected, lonely, and rootless, like tumbleweeds.

Then, the nesters, those who establish and maintain a genuine home, for decades, or generations.  They usually make it beautiful and functional, spend quality time there and invite others in.  They’ll stay where they are, often in a web of family, rather than relocate for a higher paying job or a new opportunity.  Better to stay where they are known and comfortable.  Where they are home. 

Sometimes, the place they stay is culturally distinct from anywhere else – New Orleans was like that, and may be again someday.  So is Appalachia.  I remember state government folks asking us in the mental health center in rural West Virginia why people didn’t just move somewhere where they could find jobs and services and better schools. 

All we could do was to stare in disbelief that they knew so little of these people’s values. 

Nesters are there for the long haul, not measuring time in months or even years, but in decades and in the changes that come to roads and rivers over time.  They give directions like, “Go to where the old saw mill used to be.”  They know the ancestral lines not only of their family, but of their neighbors.  At their best, they offer perspective, a long-term view, locating themselves in history and place.  At their worst, they are parochial and narrow, suspicious of strangers and outsiders.

Both approaches have challenges and advantages – just different ones.  I confess – I’ve been a nomad most of my adult life.  Virginia, Maryland, West Virginia, Massachusetts, Wisconsin, Oklahoma.  From time to time, I’ve found a place that felt like home.  That fit me like a cozy old flannel shirt, that suited me.  What I’ve found, like Dorothy in Oz, was that home wasn’t necessarily beautiful or exciting or colorful – it was simply home.

Comfort defines it, I think.  Could be the culture, the pace, the norms of social interaction.  These vary widely from one place to another and help you recognize when you’re home, and when you’re a stranger not quite fitting in.  We tend to equate comfort with goodness, but I want to push it a little deeper, maybe because I’ve read too much family systems theory.

According to that school of thought, we tend to gravitate to or even create the homes we grew up in – because that’s what feels normal, even if our brains and our therapists tell us otherwise.  This happens no matter what kind of home you grew up in where.  So, if your family of origin expressed anger freely, a raised voice may even feel like a sign of love; while someone else from a more restrained family might find the same tone terrifying.  Neither of you is right or wrong; you just define home differently. 

People even somehow show up in our lives, recreating the pattern of relationships we have had with our parents and siblings, taking us “home” whether we want to go there or not, sometimes when we least expect it.  I remember struggles I had with an authority figure – until one day I realized that he pushed exactly the same buttons that my mother did.  Once I knew that, I could detach from the feelings, and engage with the real issues he raised, not the complications I was dragging in from my past.

Take a more radical example.  It’s common wisdom to assume that someone raised in an abusive home will have a tendency to become either an abuser or a victim. 

You might say the abuser is acting out the anger and hostility that were turned towards her, or that the victim experiences a lack of self-esteem that sets him up to be revictimized.  Or you could say, we learn what normal is in our homes and families when we are very young, and that is what will always feel most comfortable to us, most normal.  Even when it is painful and horrible.

What does comfort mean then?  Is it necessarily good to be comfortable?  Comfort usually means familiarity – and there’s nothing wrong with that.  We desperately need the familiar when we are in pain, or grief; when we’re tired or lonely. 

There’s a reason that comfort is comforting.  We need the reassurance of what we are used to – comfort foods, cozy nooks, loving arms, reminders of goodness.  Yet, if we never venture past the comfort line, we slide into a rut.  The familiar will seldom challenge us, offer us new insights and meanings, or help us create a better life or a better world.  What’s more, as we’ve seen, the familiar, though comfortable, is not always the best we can hope for ourselves.  It may even hurt us.

How do we challenge our images of the familiar and reach towards something more?  We have to sincerely take the thorny path of closely studying and demystifying our family issues, learning from them, and changing into what we wish to become. 

Never can we completely leave home; always, it is part of who we are, how we have been shaped.  Yet, the better we understand the impact of our own home – our family of origin – the more fully we can live a life freely chosen.

This is relevant religiously, as well as psychologically.  The estimate is that 80 percent or more of Unitarian Universalists grew up in some other religious tradition – or no religious tradition at all.  Just a quick check by hand-raising.  How many of us grew up outside this religious tradition?  Maybe I should ask how many grew up within this religious tradition.  The challenge here is that we all bring those religious backgrounds with us.  Yes, we’re rejected some features of them – much of the creed perhaps, many of the practices.  Yet, whatever religious tradition helped to shape us – and that includes the UU tradition, or no tradition at all – we retain something of it, just as we hold onto something of what we got from our families of origin.  Even if we’re trying desperately to escape them.

I grew up in Southern Baptist churches – really, quite an array of Southern Baptist churches because my parents weren’t looking for the same details in a church – my father, raised American Baptist, wanted an eloquent and challenging sermon; my mother wanted people who were welcoming and friendly.  These aren’t difficult demands necessarily, but the differences meant that we attended an assortment of churches.   

A rural wood frame church where white gospel groups toured and the preacher turned red in the face and ranted about his conversion.  A great brick church with a robed, white-maned solemn studious minister.   A suburban church whose focus was children and youth, thick with programming throughout the week.   We even helped found a church –called a mission – meeting in a chicken coop the Methodists had renovated into a modest but workable church building.

What did I cling to from such diversity?  A sense of love as fundamental to religion.  I learned God is love when I was four years old; I still believe that.  A recognition that people bring a variety of needs and gifts to their churches.  It feels right to me for people to participate in church – because I grew up in a family that taught Sunday School and attended Business Meetings and led prayer. I learned that the people, guided by God, manage the church – not the clergy or the bishops or anyone else.

These are lessons that helped me feel comfortable and at home in Unitarian Universalist congregations.  I knew that it didn’t matter if it was large or small – I’d been part of both kinds of churches.  The architecture or arrangement of the service didn’t matter.  But I did run into ways that the UU church may never completely be home.  When I go back to Baptist churches and sing the old hymns, it feels like home.  I don’t like the words, they pierce my heart, in fact – still feels like home, though.  Still feels like home.

More and more, of course, I’ve grown to feel that UU churches are home, just in different ways.  There are hymns I can sing without a glance at the hymnal – hymns I’ve sung in countless other congregations – in part because I spent a few years as a church consultant traveling to many different congregations – wonder why that felt so comfortable to me?   And I can’t imagine going without the stimulation I gain from the kind of questions UU’s raise.  I’m home.

So, religiously, like many of you, I left my religious home, wandered around a bit, and reestablished a new home – one with a few characteristics of the old one, patterns I still appreciate, and other arrangements that are new, some in time, becoming familiar and comfy.

Yet, I’ve already raised a bit about the downside of comfy.  Sometimes, we simply respond positively to a place because it feels like what we know.  Like Dorothy, we didn’t particularly like home, but it was, after all, home.  Maybe some of the brilliance of Oz would brighten our lives and lend some excitement even if it is strange and distinctly uncomfortable.

In fact, we could even say that we have to get a little uncomfortable to learn – especially the kind of lessons that are religious lessons.  Because they require transformation – change.  Buddha left his royal home to live as an ascetic.  Jesus left his hometown with the words, “A prophet is not honored in his own country.”   Moses left his home in Egypt to lead his people back to an ancestral land they themselves had never known.  Abraham left his home to found a new people.  The Puritans left their home to seek the freedom to worship as they pleased.  We can’t always do what we need to do by staying home in comfort, but instead we have to branch out, living among strangers, venturing into the unknown, risking, to find what we were meant to do and be.

Sometimes, of course, migration is not by choice – it is exile.    Africans were seized as slaves and drug away from their homes, as the Jews were in the Babylonian Captivity.  Dorothy was exiled to Oz – she may have longed for it, at least in the musical where she dreams of “Somewhere over the Rainbow,” but she never chose the tornado. 

Even today, people leave unwillingly – New Orleans residents forced out by hurricanes, survivors of domestic violence who pick up and go, political and economic refugees spread across the globe.  In such circumstances, the longing for home can be so poignant that it prevents folks from finding attachments again.

And at some level, we must all detach from our place of birth.  Psychologically, to become our own person we need to get away.  Sociologist Robert Bellah described: 

“Leaving home in a sense involves a kind of second birth in which we give birth to ourselves.”

We hear it played out in a multitude of folk tales that tell about some kind of search – an exploration to lands far, far away – for something – be it treasure or wisdom or love – where the protagonist finally, exhausted of search, returns home to find what she or he has sought throughout the long journey.  The secret to the tale is that had the traveler never left home, they would have never learned the lessons they needed in order to locate the long-sought goal.

I relate to that protagonist.  Though I haven’t returned to my birthplace, I do feel I have made the circular journey of those stories.  Oklahoma is home to my extended family.  I find I can live here now in a way I would not have been able to fifteen years ago because of what I learned away from my family in that circuitous pilgrimage.  I can relate in a deeper way having detached and separated, discovering more of what is mine and what is theirs.  The deepening attachment, the feeling of rootedness is what is foreign to the nomad.

There’s a traditional story of a child made of salt who seeks throughout the world to find where she was born.  When she comes to the sea, she steps into it and begins to dissolve, and feels at home in a way she has never experienced before.  What would have happened if she had always been in the sea and never known the experience of land?

The Jews became a people not only because they had a homeland but also because they could remember having been strangers in the land of Egypt.  Dorothy learned how much she loved Kansas by wandering through the Land of Oz.

May each of you find your way home, the lessons learned that you need to experience it at its deepest levels.  May you help make the world more homelike, extending welcome and hospitality to those in need of it.  And may this gathering of people be for you a home that inspires, comforts, embraces, and stirs you to action.

So may it be.  AMEN.