This year, we will be introducing monthly themes. At the start of each month, Rev. Sarah will offer a reflection which will be posted on our website and here on our Facebook page. We invite everyone to share resources and ideas and reflections of their own! This month’s theme is HOME.
When you live somewhere for a long time, you tend to know the ways to arrive at that place. The long approach from over a particular bridge, the way it suddenly appears in your field of vision as you round a particular bend, maybe even the way its lights look shining below an airplane racing through the night sky. When a place goes from being a place to being a home, you find that a certain feeling comes over you as you tread the familiar paths to it. That feeling, the one you get when you go home– not when you go to your house, but when you go HOME– is special. A sense of familiarity, of safety and security.
Not everyone has a home, and not everyone has a house. I mean that there are folks with a house to live in, but without a home that fills them with warmth and hope. And there are folks without a place to live. Both of these are tragedies, to my mind. These are justice issues that we will return to later this month.
But it is also the case that home need not be a house. Home can be that river we love to sit beside; the library that transports us, through story, on our most treasured adventures; that forest path on which we do our best thinking.
And home can be a community to which we belong. It can be the person or people to whom our heart is tied (think of that old aphorism, Home is where the heart is). That word, Home, hold so much. At its best, our home is the place we feel fully seen and fully heard and fully known as us.
Where is your Home?
One of my most favorite songs that evokes that sense of home, and the longing we feel, is the classic Simon and Garfunkel “Homeward Bound”. Click here to listen.
Throughout September, we will be adding resources (music, poetry and articles) on the theme of Home to our website. Click here to view the page. If you have resources to share, please email them to Chandrika at usr.secretary@gmail.com
— Rev. Sarah
