And So the Young Are Taught

There was a child went forth every day;

And the first object he look’d upon, that object he became;

And that object became part of him for the day,

or a certain part of the day,

or for many years,

or stretching cycles of years.

 

The early lilacs became part of this child,

And grass, and white and red morning-glories,

and white and red clover,

and the song of the phoebe-bird

(Walt Whitman)

I spent last week with children and grandchildren, breathing in blue sky and birch trees and moss and hemlock. We paddled around a quiet lake, naming the little coves and landings: “Boulder Bay,” “Forest Fort.” We hiked some trails along running water, freed a fish caught in a rocky kettle.

I’ve been thinking about Whitman’s notion that what we look on and respond to as children becomes inextricably part of us. Maybe even part of our children, and their children. Recent study of the brain seems to support this: childhood trauma can cause lasting emotional, cognitive, relational harm. Exposure to violence, even in very young children, can yield symptoms of  post traumatic stress disorder, including hyper-vigilance, anxiety, inability to focus, aggression, anti-social behavior. 

There’s a generational aspect to brain development and mental health: we’re shaped by those before us, and we pass on what we’ve been given.

Yet there’s some choice in this, some ability to redirect, rebuild, re-channel.

If what we do as children builds connections in our brains, strengthens some regions, by-passes others, then surely it matter where our children turn their attention, and the time we spend helping them to see beauty, health, kindness and joy can shape the adults they’ll become.

I grew up with a grandmother who paid attention to nature.  Squirrel antics, bird calls, unfamiliar wildflowers, strange cloud formations: she treated the small occasions of nature like personal treasures. I can remember going to visit when she was in her seventies and eighties. She’d have things to show, discoveries to share: a new groundcover blooming behind her metal shed. An unusually shaped tomato, warm off the vine.

Those gifts of attention stay with me and shape the way I view the world. I remember the afternoon, back in the sixties, when she pulled her Chevy convertible to the side of the road to stop and see where the mockingbird was: she hadn’t heard one since her childhood in Oklahoma. And there it was, on a telephone line, singing its unmistakable song. I still think of her whenever I see, or hear, a mockingbird.

I’ve done my best to share that attention with our kids. They accuse me of dragging the family to “squirrel  museums,” and laugh that I signed them up for “nature tots.” I confess to both accusations. Now there’s another generation to pay attention to, and with. We prowl through Black Rock Preserve, searching for fossils, or poke sticks in the Black Rock pond, looking for fish. I’m regularly presented with unexpected gifts: a painting of a backyard bird, a well-preserved snake skin, a fragment of an abandoned nest. We investigate the contents of our decades old “nature bowl,” sharing stories of some of the more intriguing specimens.

My grandmother also taught me to pay attention to need: to look beyond myself and see the pain of others. There was nothing easy about her life, and yet I don’t remember hearing her complain. Instead, I remember her calling attention to the generosity of others, and insisting on kindness toward those in need around us. Skippy, an odd boy years older than us, mentally challenged in ways we didn’t understand, was always welcome in our yard. And if he invited us to his house, a block away, to see his monkey, or swim in his pool, a glance from Grandma would quiet our objections.

A multitude of pets helped me learn to pay attention. So did younger cousins. Children who have nothing to care for, no smaller living things to attend to, can miss the joy of empathy. Learning to make a cat purr, taking time to tame a parakeet, facing my own fear of the dark to go out at night to reassure an anxious duck, entertaining cousins while the grownups talked on and on: those were skills of attention I’m thankful to have learned.

And so I look for ways to pass those skills on to others. The parakeet and duck are incidental, but the ability to see what pleases another creature, and then provide it, seems essential.  The ability to see what’s needed in a situation, then finding a way to offer it, doesn’t come naturally. It comes through the trial and error of caring for a smaller sibling, friend, or cousin, the afternoons spent cutting and pasting to make a card or gift or other offering for someone sick, or sad, or lonely. It comes from helping to plan and prepare for a party or celebration, thinking about what might please the guests, then feeling good when everyone has fun.

Attention to words was another gift I was given. God’s word, primarily. My grandmother kept her Bible open on the kitchen table, wrote notes in the margins. “Read this!” she’d say with quiet excitement. “Then look at this! What do you think it means?” Surface interpretation wasn’t what she was after. She saw such riches in the words I found myself memorizing passages, puzzling over them myself, carrying them through life like a treasure. Holding the health of certain passages against deep hurts and turning my attention toward a story far beyond me.

My husband grew up with a tradition of bed-time questions, and I learned a similar practice of reflection at a camp where I worked: What did you learn today? What was a thing of beauty? What are you thankful for? Quiet conversations at bedtime can prompt attention throughout the day. There are always new things to be learned, new beauty to celebrate, gifts to be thankful for, if we take time to pay attention.

It’s easy to focus our attention on the burdens of the day, or to allow our thoughts to be clouded by the loudest voices around us. Easy to turn our thoughts to difficulty and pain and what we wish and what we never had.

Yet, when my attention slides in harmful patterns, I hear my grandmother’s voice:

“Whatsoever things are true, whatsoever things are honest, whatsoever things are just, whatsoever things are pure, whatsoever things are lovely, whatsoever things are of good report; if there be any virtue, and if there be any praise, think on these things.”

I am thankful that I was taught to think on, attend to, celebrate the beauty and grace of the world around me, the things of good report, words of health and goodness.

I’m thankful to spend time with the next generation, and the next, shaped, and continuing to be shaped by choices of attention in the generations before us.

We are people of open water and small boats, birch trees and birds, quiet conversations around blazing fires. Attentive to each others’ needs. Thankful for God’s kindness.

   I tremble with gratitude

   for my children and their children

   who take pleasure in one another.

   At our dinners together, the dead

   enter and pass among us

   in living love and in memory.

   And so the young are taught. 

                       (Wendell Berry)

[This is a revision of a post from 2011, Paying Attention, Next Generation. I'm reworking some earlier posts this summer, as travel and time outside limit my time for blogging.]

Please join the conversation. Your thoughts and experiences in this are welcome. Look for the "__ comments" link below to leave your comments. 

God's Green Grace

 When despair for the world grows in me

and I wake in the night at the least sound
in fear of what my life 
    and my children's lives may be,
I go and lie down where the wood drake
rests in his beauty on the water, 
    and the great heron feeds.
I come into the peace of wild things
who do not tax their lives with forethought
of grief. I come into the presence of still water.
And I feel above me the day-blind stars
waiting with their light. For a time
I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.

 (The Peace of Wild Things, Wendell Berry)

I wrote last week about storms and stones,about the unsettling weather we've been having, unsettling headlines and conversations.

In the days since, I've been busy advocating for a moral Pennsylvania budget, one that restores deep funding cuts to education and prioritizes people and communities over the largely unregulated shale gas industry. I've forced myself to learn Twitter. Even worse: forced myself to read proposed budget line-items.

It’s easy to get caught up in the burdens of our day, easy to start the day uneasy, to hurry from appointment to task to challenge, and fall into bed at night still carrying that sense of unease, that feeling of modern malaise.

In the last decade, sociological and scientific research has validated a cure as old as the psalms: time in nature, “green time,” time spent in “the peace of wild things.”

Frances Kuo, a strong advocate of “green time”, published a major study documenting the importance of trees, grass, natural beauty, in calming the heart and easing the mind:

An article in Science Daily summarized the findings:

• Access to nature and green environments yields better cognitive functioning, more self-discipline and impulse control, and greater mental health overall.
• Less access to nature is linked to exacerbated attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder symptoms, higher rates of anxiety disorders, and higher rates of clinical depression.
• Greener environments enhance recovery from surgery, enable and support higher levels of physical activity, improve immune system functioning, help diabetics achieve healthier blood glucose levels, and improve functional health status and independent living skills among older adults.
• By contrast, environments with less green space are associated with greater rates of childhood obesity; higher rates of 15 out of 24 categories of physician-diagnosed diseases, including cardiovascular diseases; and higher rates of mortality in younger and older adults.

While it is true that richer people tend to have both greater access to nature and better physical health outcomes, the comparisons here show that even among people of the same socioeconomic status, those who have greater access to nature, have better physical health outcomes. Rarely do the scientific findings on any question align so clearly.

I know for myself, in times of stress an hour spent weeding the moss path in my backyard can return me to quiet calm. When I’m angry or troubled, a short bird-watching jaunt around nearby Church Farm pond can shift my focus, realign my priorities, bring unexpected delight.

During my teen years, hovering on the edge of depression, I found myself taking long walks down unknown roads, finding grace and calm in the hills around my home, finding hope in the budding trees, the bright spring flowers, the feel of wind ruffling my hair. In my senior year of high school, during a very dark time, I would sit on the grassy bank of Lake Gleneida, watching the sunlight move across the ripples, finding rest, even joy, in the dance of sparkling water and sudden silky shadow.   

Outdoors I have experienced, more times than I can count, the truth of Psalm 23:

     The Lord is my shepherd, I lack nothing.
     He makes me lie down in green pastures,
     he leads me beside quiet waters,
     he restores my soul. 

I worry about kids who have no experience of green space, who can’t imagine spending an hour outside alone. In youth ministry, camp ministry, scout work, I tried hard to get kids outside, playing Ultimate Frisbee barefoot in the grass, reading under a tree, paddling a kayak on a little mountain pond, sitting around a campfire counting shooting stars.

An amazing grace from my childhood was summers spent at a camp in the Catskllls. I still remember with great thanks the view across the valleys, the green grass of the baseball field sloping down the side of the mountain. I remember sitting by the little hidden waterfall, down across Sutton Road, and feeling the cool of the mist, the soothing song of the water, soaking in the grace of God’s beauty. I’d arrive at camp every summer feeling ragged and a little lost; somewhere along the way, swinging in the sun with the world below my feet, hiking up through the pine grove with whippoorwills calling, I’d notice I was strong again. Happy again. Healthy again.

In Last Child in the Woods: Saving Our Children from Nature-Deficit Disorder , Richard Louv describes the forces that have kept our kids inside, creating a dangerous disconnect between children and the natural world. Our kids would be healthier if they spent more time outside. Their view would be clearer if they spent less time in simulated worlds and more time in the world of seasons, weather, bird song, soaking up God’s green grace.

But the same is true for us as adults. I have neighbors who only come outside to mow the grass and unload their groceries from the car.

I’m reminded of the Gerard Manley Hopkin poem, written more than a century ago.

The world is charged with the grandeur of God.

    It will flame out, like shining from shook foil;

    It gathers to a greatness, like the ooze of oil

Crushed. Why do men then now not reck his rod?

Generations have trod, have trod, have trod;

    And all is seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil;

    And wears man's smudge and shares man's smell: the soil

Is bare now, nor can foot feel, being shod.

And for all this, nature is never spent;

    There lives the dearest freshness deep down things;

And though the last lights off the black West went

    Oh, morning, at the brown brink eastward, springs —

Because the Holy Ghost over the bent

    World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings.

We are “smeared with toil,” hurrying to get what we need, worrying about many things. Yet, for many of us, a place of refuge is just steps away. God’s grace is there, waiting to fill us, as it filled David, out in the wilderness, on the run for his life. As it filled Elijah, weary and despairing. 

I’m puzzled, and saddened, at Christians who seem alarmed at the idea that God can meet us in nature, that He can use his creation to soothe and heal us.

It’s His, right? His gift to us. There’s nothing pantheistic, new age, spiritually dangerous, about finding God’s grace at work in his world.

As David said in Psalm 65:

The whole earth is filled with awe at your wonders;
    where morning dawns, where evening fades,
    you call forth songs of joy.

David repeatedly mentioned awe and joy in his experience of nature. When I think of times I’ve spent exploring creation, digging in the dirt with small children, wandering waterways with kids of all ages, celebrating spring in all its glory, awe and joy are the emotions that come to mind: a good foundation for mental health, and a gracious reminder of God and his goodness.

One evening last week I took  my kayak and a sandwich to nearby Marsh Creek Lake, paddled up a little bay, then floated as I munched my meal and listened to the Red-winged Blackbirds squawck. A strange call prompted me to paddle closer to the marsh grass, and out flew a young Great-horned Owl. Then another. Then another.

I sat a long time, watching them, three large young birds calling for their dinner.

By the time I paddled back to my car, my heart was full, my mind at rest. 

I’m heading outside now – to check what’s blooming, to see what’s happening in the nests around our yard.  

I hope you have time outside as well this weekend, and this summer, enjoying God’s green grace.

[This is a revision of a post from 2011. I'll be reworking some earlier posts this summer, as travel and time outside limit my time for blogging.]

Please join the conversation. Your thoughts and experiences in this are welcome. Look for the "__ comments" link below to leave your comments. 

Bird Yard #7

Our yard was bird yard #7 in Pennsylvania for October, 2014.

Not impressed?

Let me explain.

We live on a half-acre lot in a suburban neighborhood, minutes from several major highways and a regional mall.

When we moved here, almost twenty years ago, it was the first single-family home my husband Whitney and I had owned, the first I’d lived in since I was 13.

We’d been living in townhouses for over two decades, first in the city, then a planned community, so we had lots of ideas about what to do with a yard.

One of mine was to attract birds.

I put out a bird feeder, and no birds came.

None.

I’d watch squirrels race around on the mismatched fences that edged the backyard, but rarely saw them set foot on the grass. We lived in a dead zone: no birds, no squirrels, no butterflies or lightening bugs.

The previous owners had tried to grow lawn all the way to the back fence, despite a grove of locust trees, a big white pine, a basswood, a maple. And they’d apparently used plenty of chemicals to help the cause along.

We turned the back third of the yard into a shade garden, stopped using chemicals, watched for the birds.

A few robins appeared. Some blue jays.

A few years ago I read Bringing Nature Home, a treatise on using native plants by entomologist Doug Tallamy, and started trying to understand how natural environments work. Leaf litter feeds bugs and soil, fallen trees provide winter cover for insects, berrying shrubs offer winter food, well-constructed twig piles offer nesting sites places for butterflies to hide cocoons. A great blog by some local gardeners, Backyards for Nature, confirmed and expanded what I was learning. 

Since then, I’ve let bird and squirrel-planted seedlings grow, collected baby plants from the woodlots of friends, frequented native plant sales at places like Jenkins Arboretum, consulted with the owner of Redbud Nursery, a small local business crammed with plants essential to birds and bugs of the mid-Atlantic region. 

And I’ve worked to learn more about birds: what they eat, where they like to hide.

Bluebirds, for instance. They like bluebird boxes that face east, preferably facing open space. But in the winter, they’d rather have a deep hole in a tree, somewhere high and not facing the wind. They don’t like birdfeeders, but a pile of crumbled suet on an old stump will make them happy on a wintry day.

Carolina wrens like piles of sticks, the looser the better, and suet with seeds.

House wrens like houses. The more the better.

Nuthatches like dead trees, and safflower seed.

So: bird yard #7. There’s a website called ebird, run by the Cornell University Department of Ornithology. The idea is to crowd-source study of bird behavior. Bird watchers record what they see, the data is collected, then information shared about migration patterns, population trends, local sightings of unexpected birds. The site lists top birders by county, state, country, but also has a feature listing top yards according to number of species seen.

In 2009 I started keeping track of birds seen in my yard. That year, there were 36 species.

The number jumped to 60 in 2012. Part of the shift was my improved ability to identify birds. But part was better bird habitat as new plantings grew and began to bear fruit.

This year, so far, the number is 83, with two months yet to go. And in October alone, my best month ever, I saw 50 species of birds in the yard, 7^th best bird yard in Pennsylvania. (You’ll have to take my word for it – on the first of each month, the count starts over, and the stats for the last month disappear).

My yard will never be first – for that I’d need a yard with a pond, or a wetland, maybe a field or two. 

For a suburban half-acre, 7^th is an honor.

Writer and farmer Wendell Berry has written of the task of making the abstract particular: it’s not enough to say we care for the earth if we don’t have a specific corner we tend; it doesn’t work to advocate for children if there are no particular children we’re helping to thrive.  In essays like “Think Little,” published in the Whole Earth Catalog in 1969, or The Agrarian Standard, published in Orion in 2002, or his speech in Washington, DC in 2012, Berry has insisted that many problems our nation faces are a result of “thinking big”: looking for grand solutions, trusting in large-scale corrections. For half a century, Berry has been lamenting our industrialized, machine-driven, one-size-fits-all world that flattens landscapes, levels communities, drives people into cities, a world dominated by "The Way of Industrialization":“Big Ideas, Big Money, and Big Technology.”

In opposition to that, he celebrates small, particular, intricately connected. He describes the kind of stewardship deeply rooted in 

the commonplaces of the Bible . . . the admonitions that the world was made and approved by God, that it belongs to Him, and that its good things come to us from Him as gifts. Beyond those ideas is the idea that the whole Creation exists only by participating in the life of God, sharing in His being, breathing His breath. “The world,” Gerard Manley Hopkins said, “is charged with the grandeur of God.” Some such thoughts would have been familiar to most people during most of human history. They seem strange to us, and what has estranged us from them is our economy. The industrial economy could not have been derived from such thoughts any more than it could have been derived from the golden rule. 

There are things I can't change. Not alone. Not soon.

I can vote (and did).

I can boycott (and do). 

I confess, I want big solutions: fair wages for workers here and elsewhere, happy homes for children near and far, just laws, honest legislators, clean air and water, safe food.

I’ve been reading Andy Crouch’s Playing God: Redeeming theGift of Power, and it occurs to me that Wendell Berry’s deep concern about big ideas and industrialized solutions has a great deal to do with the misuse of power.

Power can be used to make things happen in a way that benefits the one in power.

Or power can be used to make people and communies thrive.

In a response to the Nietzschean will to power that sees life as a zero-sum battle for more, Crouch offers this vision: 

All true being strives to create room for more being and to expend its power in the creation of flourishing environments for variety and life, and to thrust back the chaos that limits true being. In doing so it creates other bodies and invites them into mutual creation and tending of the world, building relationships where there had been none: thus they then cooperate together in creating more power for more creation. And the process goes on. 

I’ve been playing God in my yard: tending my garden, pushing back chaos, trying to create a flourishing environment full of variety and life..

So here’s what I puzzle over, while I'm tending my seedlings, or weeding my moss path:

How do I use my small sphere of power to create room for more?

More birds, more bees, more butterflies.

But also – More contentment. More integrity. More patience. More beauty.

And how do I take what I learn in my yard, and apply it in other ways?

How do I dream big, while thinking little?







This isn't the first post about life in my yard. Here are a few others:

Generative Grace, October 13, 2013  Imagining Wholeness, September 29, 2013  Consider the Sparrows, April 6, 2014

As always, your thoughts and comments are welcome. Just click on   __comments below to see the comment option.    

Running the Race

During our travels in Greece, our Biblical Tours guides spoke of the Isthmian Games, biannual competitive events held the years before and after the Olympic Games. Scholars believe Paul was in Corinth during the Isthmian Games of 51 or 53 AD,  since Paul was in Corinth for 18 months, ending during the term of Roman Proconsul Gallio. The "Gallio Inscription," identified in Delphi in 1903, offers a historical record of Gallio's term, dating it to 52 to 53 AD.

Archaeologists have found remains of several stadiums and a hippodrome in Ishthmia, on the narrow isthmus between the mainland of Greece and the Peloponnesian Peninsula. Although the games were miles from the center of Corinth, there have been no discoveries of housing in Isthmia adequate for the crowds that converged to participate and watch the games, which would explain why tentmakers Priscilla and Aquila, and Paul himself, were able to find work in an urban center like Corinth.

As a tentmaker, Paul may have had an economic interest in the games, and there’s a strong argument that he timed his visit in Corinth to coincide with the games, but he also saw in the games metaphors for a purposeful life. He spoke of “running the race," "fighting the fight,”  "winning the prize."

Beyond that, he saw what could be accomplished through physical discipline, and was willing to exercise physical discipline to accomplish spiritual ends. I had seen those little maps in the backs of our Bibles: “Paul’s Missionary Journeys.” But seeing those miles unfold in the real terrain of hilly, rocky Greece, we quickly realized that Paul would have needed to be a fit, active, tireless man, able and willing to face hard conditions and long dusty miles to accomplish the goals he pursued.

I wonder how many ministers today consider physical fitness an essential attribute for the life of ministry?

And how many of us are fully convinced of the Latin aphorism: “Mens sana in corpore sano” ("Healthy mind in healthy body”)?

Our church has been considering the interplay of faith, food, fitness, friends, and focus as small groups work their way through The Daniel Plan, a program created by Rick Warren of Saddleback Church to address his concern about the trend toward obesity in his own congregation. 

The Plan offers insight into diet and exercise, stresses the need for accountability and partnership in meeting goals, and puts physical health into context with emotional, spiritual, even social health.

I’ve been watching a version of this in my own small circle of friends.

Kate Alleman, Finish Strong NSC

Two years ago, I attended my first reunion of women I’d worked with at a girls' camp back in the seventies. One of those women, Kate Alleman, has packed several careers into the intervening years: four years in the army, 21 years in the FBI, and a new direction as personal trainer. When we talked two years ago, she noted politely that many of us weren’t in the same good shape we'd been in during those long, activity-filled days at camp years ago. And she wondered why it's so easy to be neglectful of our physical health.

We talked then, and again this weekend, about the dangerously fractured view of the world so pervasive in our current culture. We divide physical health from spiritual health, emotional health from economic health, in ways that are themselves symptomatic of our deep dis-ease. 

Reading Paul’s letters, I see his certainty that health is never realized in division. We are part of one another, old and young, rich and poor. Spiritual health is demonstrated in economic generosity; physical health is necessary for accomplishment of spiritual goals.

In an essay entitled Health is Wholeness Wendell Berry laments:  

From our constant and increasing concerns about health, you can tell how seriously diseased we are. Health, as we may remember from at least some of the days of our youth, is at once wholeness and a kind of unconsciousness. Disease (dis-ease), on the contrary, makes us conscious not only of the state of our health but of the division of our bodies and our world into parts. . . .
 In the present age of the world, disintegration and division, isolation and suffering seem to have overwhelmed us. . .  . 

Kate’s response to the question of division was to invite our group to see physical health as part of wise stewardship of the days we’ve been given. She invited us to prepare for a 5k or 1 mile reunion run, offering long-distance coaching and encouragement.

In the past two years, members of our reunion group have lost over two hundred pounds, begun walking or running our way to better health, and are learning what it means to offer support and encouragement to one another in the quest for a broader view of stewardship. 

That's me on the left, and Beth, mother of six, on the right

So yes, I did participated again in Kate’s 5K event, running most of the first mile and half, encouraged on my way the last mile or so by another very fit new/old friend, Beth.

But I need to do better. 

Much as I hate running, I need to find some way to keep myself in shape so I have the energy and endurance to finish strong.

I just downloaded an app Kate recommends: Myfitnesspal.com.

And I’m exploring The Daniel Plan website, thinking about ways to re-frame my thinking, retool my menus, and re-prioritize my time. 

I’m puzzling over my relationship to both food and fitness, trying to sort out the messages I've absorbed about nurture, food, bodies, love, value, health, wholeness.

And wondering about this notion of Wendell Berry's: that health implies membership in both community and creation. I think he might be right. 

I take literally the statement in the Gospel of John that God loves the world. I believe that the world was created and approved by love, that it subsists, coheres, and endures by love, and that, insofar as it is redeemable, it can be redeemed only by love. I believe that divine love, incarnate and indwelling in the world, summons the world always toward wholeness, which ultimately is reconciliation and atonement with God.
 . . . I believe that the community - in the fullest sense: a place and all its creatures - is the smallest unit of health and that to speak of the health of an isolated individual is a contradiction in terms. (Wendell Berry, Health is Wholeness)

This is the seventh in a series, Texts in Context, revisting two formative weeks spent in Greece in March 2014. Earlier posts: 

Texts in Context: Yassas!

Mysteries

Proclaim Freedom 

Covering Shaven Heads
Life Lesson from Lydia
Fragments on Philopappos Hill

As always, your thoughts and comments are welcome. Just click on   __comments below to see the comment option.  

Advent Three: Redefining Home

The Synchroblog topic this December is “The Kingdom of God and Home":

 “What does Coming Home mean to you this season? Is it practical, spiritual, emotional? What does “home” look like or feel like in the kingdom of God? Do you have a “coming home” story that you’d love to tell?” 

“Home” is one of those words I sometimes stumble over. I had lived more places than I know by the time I landed with my grandparents just before I turned two.  The year of ninth grade I lived in three different households, went to two different schools. My senior year of high school that pattern was repeated: a new school, three new addresses.

Between the age of twelve and twenty-eight, I lived in at least fifteen different places, sometimes for weeks or months, at most two or three years. Apartments, old-subdivided houses, dorm rooms, camp cabins, attic bedrooms with families I hardly knew.

I’ve lived now in the same place for more than sixteen years. This place is a gift. This life is a gift. If I have a choice, I’ll stay right here a long, long time.

But there’s more to home than houses. More to coming home than finding a safe harbor, putting down roots, painting a room whatever color I choose.

More, even, than the great gift of a sturdy marriage, a warm and loving family, a garden I’ve tended now for a decade and a half.

I’m three weeks into my Advent observance, and this week’s passages all speak to me about this question of “home.”

Isaiah 35:1-10 sings of a time of rejoicing, when the redeemed will enter Zion, “and those the Lord has rescued will return.” That theme continues in Psalm146, a song of praise to “the Lord, who sets the prisoner free.” And in Mary’s song in Luke 1:46-55: 

He has brought down rulers from their thrones,
   but has lifted up the humble.
He has filled the hungry with good things
    but has sent the rich away empty. 

I’m reminded, as I read these passages, that until we all have a home, we are not yet home.

photo by Ruth Fremson, 2013

A New York Times series this week featured a homeless girl, Dasani, struggling to navigate the streets of New York City. In my own smaller world, I’m in prayer for two I love whose homes no longer feel safe, or healthy. 

Recent headlines announce record numbers of homeless children in my state of Pennsylvania. In the US, the estimate is that 1.6 million school age children are homeless: living in shelters, motels, cars, campers, sleeping on the floor in someone else’s apartment.

Yes, I know some of those kids. The boy whose mother remarried and moved, leaving him to fend for himself. The kids whose mother couldn’t find a job and moved from man to man, three teenage kids in tow. The families that fell behind in the rent, couldn’t manage the heating bill, couldn’t make it on one parent’s minimum wage. The friend who perches anxiously on the edge of other people’s lives and homes, doing her best to shield her small children from evidence of addiction, violence, mental illness.

The New Testament readings for Advent Three remind us that we live between: between promise and fulfillment, between vision and reality.

A reading in James 5 urges “Be patient, then, brothers and sisters, until the Lord’s coming.” Some days patience is hard, as we seem to move backward: less generous, less compassionate. Less funds for the education that might offer a door of escape. Tighter, harsher rules on everything from medical assistance to funding for food to support of mental health.

The final Advent Three reading, Matthew 11:2-11, has always troubled me: John the Baptist, imprisoned and soon to be beheaded, sends word to Jesus: "Are you the one who is to come, or should we expect someone else?”

I understand John’s question: Where is this kingdom we’ve been promised? Why is Herod still in control? Why am I in prison, when I’ve been faithful to my calling? Why does it look like nothing's changed? 

Jesus replied, “Go back and report to John what you hear and see: The blind receive sight, the lame walk, those who have leprosy are cleansed, the deaf hear, the dead are raised, and the good news is proclaimed to the poor. Blessed is anyone who does not stumble on account of me.” 

What does Jesus mean when he says “Blessed is anyone who does not stumble on account of me”? 

It's comforting to see that there’s no reproach in his answer to his cousin John. He concludes, “Truly I tell you, among those born of women there has not risen anyone greater than John the Baptist; yet whoever is least in the kingdom of heaven is greater than he.”

And what does that last statement mean? “Whoever is least in the kingdom is greater than he.”

Some days I tire of mysteries. I want those straight paths right about now. Streams in the desert, homes for those without them. 

But there’s even more to this question of home than the injustice and loss I am helpless to repair.

As a teen on the edge of homelessness, I listened often to the Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young song: “Our House”:

Our house is a very, very, very fine house
With two cats in the yard, life used to be so hard
Now everything is easy, 'cause of you. 

The song described an idyllic moment in the affair between Graham Nash and Joni Mitchell, and captured the hope so many of us have in a house and life where everything is easy.

But that moment in their lives didn’t last, and as I’ve learned, the dream is illusory.

In the Problem of Pain, C. S. Lewis wrote: 

The settled happiness and security which we all desire, God withholds from us by the very nature of the world: but joy, pleasure, and merriment, He has scattered broadcast. We are never safe, but we have plenty of fun and some ecstasy. It is not hard to see why. The security we crave would teach us to rest our hearts in this world and pose an obstacle to our return to God: a few moments of happy love, a landscape, a symphony, a merry meeting with our friends, a bathe or a football match, have no such tendency. Our Father refreshes us on the journey with some pleasant inns, but will not encourage us to mistake them for home. 

Returning to this theme of “home” in a sermon not long after, Lewis spoke of “ this desire for our own faroff country.” He described the “inconsolable secret,” the haunting longing, that we sometimes call beauty, or nostalgia: 

These things—the beauty, the memory of our own past—are good images of what we really desire; but if they are mistaken for the thing itself they turn into dumb idols, breaking the hearts of their worshippers. For they are not the thing itself; they are only the scent of a flower we have not found, the echo of a tune we have not heard, news from a country we have never yet visited.

That longing doesn’t go away. In fact, the more certain I am of what it calls us to, the more deeply I long for and confidently live toward that faroff country and home I’ve never visited, where every child is wanted and every person finds a home. 

We come at last to the dark
and enter in. . . We come
to the space between ourselves,
the narrow doorway, and pass through
into the land of the wholly loved.
  (Wendell Berry, Given, Sabbath Poems, 2002)

Other Synchroblog posts on this topic:

• Christine Sine - Is There Room for Jesus to Find a Home In Your Heart?
• Jeremy Myers - It Sounds Like Christmas
• Nathan Kitchen - Coming Home
• Michelle at Moments with Michelle - Home 
• Mallory Pickering - I’m Kind of Homesick 
• Bobi Ann Allen - Coming Home 
• J.A. Carter - Going Home 
• Glenn Hager - Where the Adventure Begins 
• Marta Layton - Can You Ever Come Home Again? 
• Peggy at Abisomeone - Abi Has Finally Come Home For Christmas 
• Amy Hetland - Coming Home 
• Coffeesnob - Home 
• Liz Dyer - Advent 2013 The Way Home 
• Harriet Long - The Body and the Sacred: Coming Home 
• Edwin Pastor Fedex Aldrich - Who I Was Made to Be 
• Emkay Anderson - Homemaking
• Anita Coleman - At Home in the Kingdom of God
• Kathy Escobar – Mobile Homes (Not That Kind) 
• Jennifer Clark Tinker - My Itinerant Home 
• Doreen Mannion - Heart is Where the Home is 

Other Advent posts on this blog:

• Advent One: Rethinking Portfolios, Dec. 1, 2013
• Advent Two: Resisting Idols and Injustice, Dec. 8, 2013

• Advent One: How Do I Know? Dec. 2, 2012
• Advent Two: Outsiders In Dec. 9, 2012
• Advent Three: Question. Fruit. Dec. 16, 2012
• Advent Four: Sing Alleluia, Dec. 23, 2012

•  Advent One: What I'm Waiting for, Nov. 26, 2011
• Metanoia,  Dec 4, 2011
• Voice in the Wilderness,  Dec. 11, 2011 
• Common Miracles,  Dec. 18, 2011
• The Christmas Miracle, Dec. 24, 2011 

• Advent Two: John the Baptist,  Dec. 12, 2010
• Marys' Song,  Dec. 19, 2010 
• Christmas Hope,  Dec. 24, 2010