Coming home...

One spiritual theme that is taking greater shape and focus in my life is that of coming home. I know that it is a nuanced part of radical hospitality - and it is clear that I have been energized by biblical stories like the Prodigal Son and Christ's invitation to rest in Matthew 11 for most of my adult life - but coming home is slightly different, yes?

(check out this SMOKIN' band: with Clapton and the whole Derek and the Dominoes crew!)

+ First, there is an awareness of being adrift - lost - at the very least unsettled within and confused about where to fit in and belong, too. Henri Nouwen speaks of this as an inner and outer loneliness. "Too often we will do everything possible to avoid the confrontation with the experience of being alone... Our culture has become most sophisticated in the avoidance of pain - not only our physical pain, but our emotional and mental pain as well - so we have become so used to this state of anesthesia, that we panic when there is nothing or nobody left to distract us." (Reaching Out, p. 17)

No wonder we try to multi-task. Or keep the television on just below the surface while guests try to visit. Or support cable news 24/7. Or all night supermarkets. First, we are called to be attentive and aware of our loneliness.

+ Second, God uses this loneliness as an invitation. When we stop hiding - or self-medicating - or distracting ourselves long enough to honestly embrace our aching and sometimes empty soul, we face a choice: do we want more of the same or something different? Like my friends in AA, "When we realize and accept that we are hurting, what do we want to do about it? If you always do, what you've always done, you'll always get, what you've always got." Precisely right!

I think of the psalms: be still and wait upon the Lord... as a hart pants for flowing streams, O Lord, so does my soul thirst for you. Or the words of Jesus in Matthew 13 when he says:

Whenever someone has a ready heart for this, the insights and understandings flow freely. But if there is no readiness, any trace of receptivity soon disappears. That's why I tell stories: to create readiness, to nudge the people toward receptive insight. In their present state they can stare till doomsday and not see it, listen till they're blue in the face and not get it. I don't want Isaiah's forecast repeated all over again:

Your ears are open but you don't hear a thing.
Your eyes are awake but you don't see a thing.
The people are blockheads!
They stick their fingers in their ears
so they won't have to listen;
They screw their eyes shut
so they won't have to look,
so they won't have to deal with me face-to-face
and let me heal them.

First the emptiness, then the awareness followed by acceptance: I really am lonely. Then and probably only then are we ready for the third understanding: salvation as belonging. The Benedictine monk, David Steindl-Rast, who has deepened the inter-faith work between Christians and Buddhists begun by Thomas Merton, puts it like this:

The message of Jesus is about God as the one who is towards us, who speaks to us, to whom we belong. To experience this mutual belonging is salvation. In that experience God's saving power is made manifest. In contemporary terms we might say that salvation means belonging...

For the opposite of salvation is alienation - estrangement from God, self and others - and we know what alienation means. Alienation means our utmost misery. That is why I say that the opposite of this misery is belonging... living in a way where you don't have to earn a place at the table... it is a given fact - the most basic truth of your life - so accept your belonging. Snap out of your alienation and don't hang on to your private little self. Open yourself to the gift of belonging for then all the joy of heaven is yours for the taking - no, for the giving of yourself. (Christ and the Bodhisattva, p. 104)

No wonder I have been exploring more and more tunes about welcome, returning and making connections! As that sense of belonging matures - as we challenge all the forces within and beyond that support alienation - hope and healing emerge. Like a friend at church told me last week: the BEST song about this whole process is "Message in a Bottle" by the Police... It starts out with a castaway at sea feeling lonely. So he sends an SOS to the world. A year goes by and nothing happens but a deeper loneliness. And then, out of the blue one morning he finds a hundred billion bottles on the shore EACH with their own SOS. "A hundred billion castaways looking for a home!"

Naming the longing, taking responsibility for the emptiness and embracing God's belonging - personally and in community - is how salvation happen, yes?
credits:
1) http://kyvoice.com/winchestersun/newerworld/?m=200906
2) alex shotov www.naturephotography.org.ua/landscape/loneliness.html
3) www.spiritweaves.com/rites-of-belonging.html