Coming Home

Where is home for you?

This came up last night in a discussion with our beloved neighbors. We were reconnecting after a crazy busy week, and somehow they got to talking about the ends of their first marriages, and he said he knew he was in trouble when he just no longer wanted to go home.

So his wife asked me -- having read my blog post last week about that feeling of coming home to Shaw -- where home is for me; did I feel good about coming back here after having been there? It was lovely to be able to say yes: there are wonderful things about being there, and being part of that community, but there are also wonderful things about being here, and part of this community.

That was especially fresh in my mind as we talked last night, because I had just come from a truly amazing contemplative worship service. Years ago a group of people -- including the minister -- from our local Presbyterian church went up for some summer courses at the Vancouver School of Theology. While there, they studied under Lynn Bauman and Cynthia Bourgeault, and they brought back with them a new vision of faith and a deepening respect for contemplative prayer.

They brought Bauman, and Bourgeault, and other people with similar interests -- like Richard Rohr -- to the island to speak, and gradually a community of like-minded people began to grow. So now we have these contemplative worship services every 3 months (hopefully we'll soon be increasing the frequency of the meetings), and they are wonderful.

We gather at the home of a couple at the south end of the island who have a large room that makes a lovely worship space. We share dinner and conversation, and then we sit in a circle, open with a prayer, a psalm or a poem, and conduct a sort of non-denominational service that includes more psalms and poems and readings, communion, and a healthy dose of silence -- 3 or 4 10-minute periods of silence.

Last evening we were doubly blessed: Lynn Bauman was in town to help lead us through the service, and we were treated to a beautiful communion liturgy from his book Invocations, a resource for contemplative prayer and for leaders of contemplative prayer gatherings which you can order here. There were some 50 souls gathered in the room, mostly active members of several different churches and denominations around the island and beyond, and there I sat, blessed by a communion of friends, good food, and silence. We chanted from some psalms, and the man and woman on either side of me had beautiful voices so the three of us were inventing lovely harmonies together, even though I'd never met the man to my left before.

And as I sat in the deepening silence, while the music and the sound of the bell died slowly away, I could feel the wings of my heart take flight; feel the oneness resting quietly in the spaces in my heart and cells and in the hearts and the room around me.

This morning in Soul Without Shame I am reading about Value: "At some moment, you have encountered the distinct flavor of feeling worthwhile, feeling that you matter, that something in your very existence has value... It arises in the heart as a sweet, velvet liquid like a luscious, amber nectar...When experienced, this quality gives you a sense of home and a feeling that you have a right to be here."

That's what I mean when I say I feel like I've come home: it's really not a place somewhere else that you go to, it's a sense that you are here, and now, and you belong. And then I read this in Rumi this morning; It's called "The Bright Core of Failure:"

Sometimes you enter the heart.
Sometimes you are born from the soul.
Sometimes you weep a song of separation.
It is all the same glory.

You live in beautiful forms,
and you are the energy that breaks form.
All light, neither this nor that.

Human beings go places on foot.
Angels, with wings.

Even if they find nothing but ruins
and failure, you are the bright core of that.

This, I think, is what Jesus' words in the Gospel of Thomas have to tell us, and this, I think, is the vision of a contemplative faith: that it doesn't matter where we are or what our circumstances may be, there is some bright core of value that lives at the center of things, of us, of the people we encounter, and of our lives. And if we can take the time to open to that, the space to feel it, and the silence to listen for it, that will always be our home -- and we will find ourselves at home wherever we are.