Home Is Where The Heart Is

The Reverend Anne Treadwell

As you can guess, my talk today has an especially personal slant, since I'm in the process of making my home here after living in Kingsville for five years and before that in Quebec for two years and before that in the same house in Ancaster for twenty-four years! The move here has brought me back closer to family and old friends and for that and many other reasons I already feel quite at home here.

That’s a good feeling. But this morning I'm going to suggest that while it's pleasanter to be "at home" than to be "homesick", we're not at our most human -- that is, not stretched to our fullest, until we're "home free", which is perhaps just a positive way of saying "homeless". Let's look at what it means to be "at home".

My first visit to a Unitarian Church was in 1978 when I went, almost by chance, to a "sharing service" -- a kind of talent show -- in the Hamilton congregation -- and I felt immediately at home. That was a comfortable feeling and I wanted more of it, so I went back. It was partly a sense of familiarity, that this was something I was quite used to, not too different an experience from others I've had. Most church services are more formal than that sharing service, and the room was smaller and less churchy than most, because at that time the congregation was in a converted house, very much like the old Unitarian House here, but I've certainly been to lots of meetings and social occasions which had a very similar atmosphere. It was a bunch of people being interested in each other's doings and ideas -- just like a group of friends or family. Like family, it was familiar; that was a big part of my feeling at home.

Another part was the sense of freedom I had there, a freedom which is basic to the Unitarian Universalist way. In that sharing service, and in my later contacts with the church, I felt relatively free from rules about the way I must think and the way I must behave. You know the difference between being in your own home and being in someone else's: at home, you do what you feel like doing, when you feel like doing it. when you're a guest, you eat meals at the time the hosts decide, watch the T.V. channels that they choose, take your shower at the time that fits their schedule. In that UU congregation I felt more that I was at home than that I was a guest. Just like in the family, the underlying rules which do exist are so clearly understood, so familiar, that they don't feel like rules at all. You know -- things like the words for the chalice lighting, or having coffee after the service, things we take for granted.

I also felt accepted by those who were there before me. There didn't seem any doubt that I was welcome, let alone any question of whether I'd be allowed to stay. You know the Robert Frost poem which says that "home is the place where, when you have to go there, they have to take you in"? The church felt like home to me in that sense: if I had to go there, they had to take me in.

And at home, we're known. We may be able to impress the people we only see occasionally, when we're on our best behaviour, with the perfection of our personalities. Even at work, where we're usually fully-clothed, awake, functioning, we may be only partially known, but at home where we sleep and get up and stumble around half dressed, and let down our hair and our defences, we're known for who we really are. Of course we don't feel quite that way in church; at least, I don't. The Hamilton and Lakeshore and Olinda congregations have seen me in a few of my unguarded moments, but you haven't, yet; I don't know how they or you would react to the whole truth. But at least I feel, and I hope you all feel it, that there isn't anything we specially have to hide from each other. I feel very little need to wear a mask in church, or to pretend to be other than I am. And when I look at the people around me, I feel that it's the real person I'm seeing. I don't know most of you very well yet, but I can trust my perceptions, by and large, because we have no need to hide from each other.

When we feel at home, we have a sense of being in tune with those around us and with their general orientation to life. This doesn't mean that we never disagree among ourselves, but that we share a basic approach to living. If our ways were too different, too discordant, we'd leave home and go it alone or move elsewhere. We sometimes refer to this sense of being in tune when we describe what brought us to the Unitarian Universalist movement: "Here I find people who think like me", we say. "The people here have the same ideas I do." Often it's a huge relief after feeling out of tune with another denomination or tradition.

And home is a safe place in most of our minds. Who doesn't remember, as a little child being in a strange place, frightened and lost, and then being taken home where we felt safe again. As older people we find it easy to identify with that old song, "It's very nice to go travelling, but it's so much nicer to come back." I can echo that quite heartily after my travels this summer. When you come home, you feel immediately at ease, comfortable, secure, relaxed. Here, the only dangers which threaten us are so well known that they're not perceived as dangers at all. We're so used to the worn place on the rug, or the rickety step, that we never trip over it; we understand so well what sets off our spouse's temper that we're able to avoid pressing that button most of the time. Knowledge is safety.

Finally, at home we're contributing members of a unit. No matter whether we constitute a one-person household or we= re one member of a large family or of this church: if it's our home, we know what our role is. There are duties we have to fulfill, money we must provide, bread that must be put on the table. In return, we receive the benefits of other people's caring and the right to participate in decisions, but it's what we give as much as what we get that makes the place home. We contribute and thereby we feel involved and therefore we're moved to give more by our sense of responsibility. At home, we're participants.

Now let's look at the flip side of this coin, at what it means to be homesick. It's an interesting word, I think, not at all like carsick, or seasick, or even lovesick: they all express too-muchness, getting sick from something. We're homesick when we don't have something, when we don't feel at home. Firstly, when we don't find things familiar to us, when they're not family-like. Often, missing our family is what we really mean when we say we're homesick. It's not the places that we miss so much as the people, and the things symbolised by the places -- the familiar ways of doing things, the traditions which often date back to our childhood when our sense of home was first formed. The first Christmas I ever spent away from my childhood home was when I was nineteen or twenty, at a boyfriend's place, and his mother served mashed potatoes with the turkey. Now, I like mashed potatoes, and the woman was a good cook, but oh, was I homesick for the roast potatoes that my mother always cooked for Christmas dinner. I craved the comfortable familiarity of home. Unless we were really desperately unhappy as children, and sometimes even then, we all tend to yearn at some level for the old family home. Perhaps, ultimately, we're homesick for that first familiar place, the warm womb of our mother.

Most of us would rather live in our own home than be for an extended time in a hotel or someone else's house, however luxurious and comfortable. We become homesick, not so much for anything tangible but for the freedom of home, the not needing to ask permission before we change the T.V. channel or do a load of laundry, the freedom to express a spontaneous opinion without wondering first about whether we should. We're not at home when we feel tense and tentative about our actions, when we can't relax.

We're also not at home when we're not accepted -- or when we fear we may not be accepted. This can happen even in the place we've thought of as our home, even among our own family. It's perhaps the most poignant kind of homesickness -- homesickness not for a place or people or a culture or familiarity, but for acceptance. If "home is the place where when you have to go there they have to take you in", what happens when they won't? That means you're homeless. We're all aware of the very real plight of the physically homeless; the plight of the spiritually and emotionally homeless is not so well-known but it can be devastating. I think this kind of homelessness also happens when we find ourselves not accepting someone who has been close to us. It's not only when we're rejected that we find ourselves homeless, but also when we do the rejecting. There's a terrible sadness in finding that we can no longer welcome into our lives someone who's been a dear friend, or a spouse, or even our child. It leaves us not at home, as well as them.

"A friend", they say, "is one who knows the best and worst about you and loves you just the same". What a wonderful dream of home that is, and how homesick we are when we're not known, or when we dare not be known, or when we realize that we don't know our friends or our family. Sometimes I look at a baby and think longingly of what it would be like to be again so at home in the world that I could happily reveal everything about me -- the hunger, the pain, the tears, the curiosity, the puzzlement, the dirt, the lack of control, the anger -- show all that to everyone who sees me, without the slightest concern about what they think. If only I could be fully known, and if only I could know you, without our having to put on an appearance, how at-home we would be. But in fact we cover up a huge amount of ourselves, even here, out of politeness and consideration as much as anything. We are no longer fully at home in the sense of being fully known, and we probably have never fully known another human being.

The sense of alienation, or estrangement, or feeling out of tune with ourselves or with others, has a lot to do with homesickness. We sometimes express this as not being able to identify with a person or a group, feeling that we must assert our separateness. And when we find we keep doing this, keep distinguishing ourselves from the other person or people, because their ideas or values or orientation are different from our own, we recognize that there's alienation and we yearn for the opposite -- for feeling in tune, at home rather than estranged. Perhaps this too is a yearning for how it was at the beginning, when there was no distinction between me and my mother or between me and the world, when nothing was foreign because it was all one? Now we are different, we are separate, and we're homesick.

The world doesn't feel safe anymore. Well, perhaps it never did. Even as tiny babies we reacted with something like fear to loud noises and to falling. And later we felt unsafe in our mother's absence, or at a strange new school, or when we first tried to swim without our water wings -- or when we first drove in the city. But in between times we felt safe, secure, at home. Who can feel secure now? We lock up our houses, and try to have only safe sex, and drive defensively, and warn our children about neighbours and even family members as well as strangers, and after all that we have to face the threats of economic collapse and environmental disaster. No wonder we're homesick for that brave old world, the little house on the prairie where we all took care of each other. Who can be at home here in the late-twentieth century, when change is the only certainty?

I think many of us feel some homesickness even about our role in our family or our workplace or even in the church. I often look back on the years when my three daughters were little and I was at home with them and think how clear everything was then. My role was to take care of them and to cook and clean for them and for my husband and to do volunteer work in the community and sew dresses -- you know the kind of life, the whole domestic shebang. And then I went and stepped into another role, student, and began to feel more at home in a different setting. Chaos and confusion! No longer could I feel the hominess of doing capably what was clearly appropriate for me to do. Now I had to constantly ask myself what I really wanted, whether I was abandoning my duty, and whether I ought to be feeling more guilty than I did. And I hardly ever gave myself good answers to those questions. I was homesick for the old Anne, for the role which fit me like a glove, for the rewarding sense of contributing responsibly to a recognized family unit. I must admit I'm still a bit homesick for those things.

But I believe that while it's pleasanter to be "at home" than to be "homesick", we're not at our most human and real when we're completely "at home", but rather when we're "home free". By this I mean, when we're free of the need for any particular home, when we're able to say in the words of an old song, "Any place I hang my hat is home", when we have that sense of being at home in the universe or (to go even one step further) when we know that our real, true home is somewhere beyond. "Somewhere over the rainbow", perhaps. Somewhere that transcends the world of the senses, so that we're never completely at home in this particular, limited, everyday world.

This isn't a new idea, of course, although as Unitarians and Universalists we've always fought against the belief that this world and this life don't matter as much as another world, another life. But at its deepest and purest, the idea of "somewhere beyond", an idea very precious to Universalists, recognizes that the human spirit can't be bound by limitations of time and space. "Reach for a star". "Follow your dream". In religious language: we are but pilgrims here; our souls are restless until they find their rest in God; lay not up for yourselves treasures on earth, but lay up for yourselves treasures in heaven, for where your treasure is, there will your heart be also. Home is where the heart is.

Remember the Pierre Berton book from the sixties, The Comfortable Pew? It pointed out how dangerously easy it is to be comfortable in a church, so much so that we doze off and miss the message, so much so that we never feel moved to venture out from the church and into the world. It’s dangerous to find things too comfortably familiar, to be lulled into being lazy. Perhaps the church here is potentially most helpful for those who find it little jarring, a little bothersome and inflexible and reminiscent of uncomfortable past experiences.

Away from home we sometimes feel constrained, on our best behaviour, always having to be mindful about what we do and say. That might not be a bad thing. Perhaps our liberal religious emphasis on freedom of thought, freedom from guilt, freedom from rules, could stand to be balanced a bit by some disciplined thought, some awareness of ideals to be lived up to, some mindfulness of the consequences and implications of what we do. Relationships between people who live together can often be enhanced by acting a bit more like guests and a bit less "at home". I mentioned to a friend one day that I'd been amused by myself at about 2 o'clock one morning when I woke up with something like a Big Mac attack and decided to make a sandwich. I found myself creeping around the kitchen taking care not to rattle the dishes, even though there was no-one else in the house to be disturbed. I thought it was kind of absurd, but my friend pointed out that it's a good idea to keep up the habits of consideration for others and not act as if we have only ourselves to think about, even when we do. In our congregational life , let's not be so at-home that we lose our mindfulness about what we're saying and doing.

At-homeness is feeling accepted, knowing you can count on being let in. Away from home, acceptance is a chancy business and the world is a potentially unfriendly place. One of the biggest questions of life is whether the world is ultimately homey or hostile. Our religious tradition includes deep respect for the Universalist conviction, which I= ll talk about more in a couple of weeks, that all people will finally be saved, accepted, welcomed home. Those with a different perspective see the probability of destruction, of universal damnation brought about not by God, necessarily, but by ourselves. Can we ever be truly at home in this universe, or are we really homeless, displaced people, displaced from an innocent, natural, animal at-homeness to which we can never return? I don't know the answer; I think that for us humans, acceptance by the world and each other is at best questionable. But then, questioning is one of our greatest strengths as Unitarians!

Away from home, we flounder among the unknown, the hard-to-understand, the inexplicable and mysterious. And we're continually misunderstood. But this is the setting for the great human adventure. It's not at home, among the well-known, that discoveries are made and new countries explored, but among the strange and mysterious. There's a German word which describes the world of newness which is so worth exploring, as "unheimlich", un-homey or uncanny. It's where we're not quite at home. It's a fascinating and wonderful place to be.

There's a deep yearning in most people for in-tuneness, for re-union, for being merged rather than alienated. The oceanic feeling, some call it, or a sense of oneness. And yet it's also true that becoming grown up in every sense, coming of age as a human being, means emerging, e-merging as a personality, developing an identity, taking a unique and separate shape. At death, perhaps, we merge again with the earth, but while we live we're individuals, that is, in division, only fleetingly joined with others in body or spirit. This congregation might be the setting for some of the sweet moments of unity; I believe it's also vital that it provides for the recognition, the worth and dignity, of each separate person.

Insecurity, danger and uncertainty make us homesick for the safe haven that we once knew. But life's a risky business, and the only people who can feel fully secure are babies who don't know about danger and those who fool themselves into thinking that they can make their little world safe. We all do this to some degree, of course; we buy insurance to minimize financial risks, we take proper care driving and crossing the road, we don't jump into commitments without some thought. But heaven forbid we should kid ourselves that we can really be safe. If we understand that living is essentially a risk, we're likely to keep a bit more perspective than the people who give up all adventure because of the riskiness of human contact or trying new things. If we recognize that nothing, not even our inner security, the home that we carry within us, not even that is failproof, against chance and change, we may be more realistic about just how much locking up, and warning our children, and avoidance of lonely places or dangerous activities, makes sense. I hope this church is not only, or always, perceived as a place of safety, but also as a place of adventure and risk and the courage to face the one thing against which we're helpless in the end, our mortality.

Away from home, among strangers, we must continually rediscover and re-disclose who we are and what our role and our contribution is. In our society, we allow teenagers the luxury of trying to find themselves, but by the time we're of voting age we're supposed to have begun to settle down and be at home, with ourselves and our role. It's unusual for someone to see the search for self as a lifetime endeavour -- unusual and difficult, but worth encouraging. I hope this church can be the setting for each of us to find out who we really are and what we can contribute to the world.

In the end, the concept of home is, I think, rather like the idea that we'll wake up tomorrow morning. "Live each day as if it's your last", the wise ones say. But we know that we must also live in the expectation that tomorrow will come and must be planned for. Similarly, we need to know that home is a fragile and fleeting thing, never to be counted on completely, and at the same time we need to make homes for ourselves and each other where we can rest in the familiar, the free and easy, the feeling of acceptance, of knowing and being known, of safety, harmony and participation. Then we'll be stronger to move out into the unfamiliar, the difficult, the uncertain and unknown, the dangerous, strange and unclear universe. Home may be where the heart is now, but let it not be where the heart stays too long. I'd like to adapt that line from the poem and say, "Home is the place where, when you need to leave it, they encourage you to go". May this place, this fellowship, this congregation, be just such a home for us all.