This originally appeared as part of the Daily Sip, a ministry of St John’s Cathedral in Denver, CO
by Charles LaFond
Last night someone I love asked me
“where is home” for me.
I fought back tears like
a sailor holding back the
raging waters while sirens and
echoes off metal hugs and
red lights twirl and flash –
trying to secure the bulkhead-door
against a breach in the hull.
We want home, we humans do.
And to speak the lack of home
threatens, unnecessarily, to insult
those with whom
we live and move and have our being.
But it need not.
My home, with its dark,
old family woods
and its roaring fire is just a place
where I live with Kai;
where I massage his haunches
as he ages and aches
and as I do. As we do.
And my home is in God.
Hallmark called and wants its
trite truism back.
Everyone’s home is in God.
We need not know it
in order for it to be true.
God does not need to be believed in.
But it can sound so sappy.
And yet sometimes
we humans want a home.
And some people have them,
or think they do.
And some of us have never
really found one;
except the one
beyond this world, beyond
wood and glass and even fire.
Beyond honest or effective bishops.
Beyond gentle, kind clergy.
Beyond sneaky or dull bishops,
Beyond climbing clergy.
Beyond absentee or bullying leaders,
in mitres or oval offices.
Which is worse?
Bully or absentee?
Neither.Both.
But out there,
it seems
– when the light is just right
to catch a glimpse-
is a Great Soul which is God.
And in that Soul ours rests,
like a piece of kelp
floating vertically in the sea,
buoyed up by air sacks, keeping it
lunging, waving and leaning to the sky and sun
even as the currents
wash us to and fro;
and even sometimes in great
storms which rage far up on the surface
of things we no longer can see, but feel.
Nature; the life which teems
around us is pointing to this
One Great Soul
which surrounds and envelopes us.
It says to us,
“Your home is not to be found here.”
So why do we so long for one?
It felt like a trick.
We long for home because we have been
programmed, like a computer, by a scientist.
Our work is to try to remember
that our Programmer is Good.
That we are.
We live within a program designed to
propel us within that home
which surrounds us.
Within which existence is like
a planet in a cosmos
or rice in broth
or Aids in blood.
Night exposes reality if we look up,
and shut up.
We will work hard to make homes.
We will marry people trying to make one.
We will have children trying to make one.
We will build churches trying to make one.
We will ordain bishops, trying to make fathers
we do not need.
We will build bank accounts trying to make prestige
we do not deserve.
We will climb ladders, and be bowed-to, trying to make one.
We will build fires and serve tea or port
trying, trying, trying to make a home.
So much harder is it to realize that
the only home we will ever have
is within a God
whose shyness and woundedness
will always make The God hard to see.
God is like a fox.
Quiet.
Still.
Aching from that last sprint.
Waiting.
Deeply aware.
Orange.
Even homeless too.
The irony is that God’s home is
only, and has only ever been,
the presence of all life.
Us and all living things, within it.
Just as a good cup of tea
makes little sense unless,
within it, there are tea leaves.
That is God’s great, secret vulnerability.
God can exist as a mug of steaming hot water.
But God would rather, it seems, be a
cup of steaming hot tea.
We co-create.
Our co-creativity
is our only home.
Not where we live
but rather, how we abide.