Hi Friends - This month The Porch is about a more whole vision of home.
It’s about a home that can feel as magical as Disneyland or Narnia, just because it’s a bit brighter than the one we came from.
It’s about looking for home in a place where the external signs of safety on which you once relied may seem absent.
It’s about making a home where you can participate in or even host a feast that welcomes everyone.
It’s about living in places, going to places and returning to places that form us, and which we form, and along the way how we can grow and emerge into a deeper understanding of self and others.
And it’s about what’s going on in “the world”, and what our relationship with “the world” should be.
It starts with letting yourself be shaped and reshaped by the movement of home upon the soul. If your literal home was a safe, compassionate, affirming one this may be easier than if it was risky, judgmental, and rejecting. But whatever the light or shadow of the home you grew up with, I believe there is a home at the center of each person that cannot be stolen or destroyed.
Some of us have been so damaged that the home at our center was sealed off as a way of protecting it. Someone - a wise elder or medicine person - should have been there to help us melt the seals, open the door to our most home-felt selves, let some air in, and some more of us out. But that often doesn't happen. And whether traumatized or not, most of us live in a culture that doesn’t recognize that there is a deeper center than the persona we usually show to the world (or that the world seems to prefer us to show), never mind teach us how to connect with it.
However there are time-honored practices that will help us discover home within our own being. We can get really complex and grandiose about such practices, but that’s not necessary. It’s mostly just a matter of learning to breathe more slowly, and joining with a small circle of people committed to a conscious journey of repairing breaches and contributing with every part of ourselves to making a world of heart and shelter. It’s simple and complicated, easy and difficult, it can happen right now and it takes a lifetime to learn.
And it’s what we’re here for.
It’s what will sustain us when everything else feels like it’s falling apart or can’t be trusted. Home may not be a perfect word to capture what it is. Maybe presence is better. Or maybe it’s the presence of home within. Whatever you call it, when you feel the ache for the suffering of people, the fear that things will never change, the hopelessness of what it might take to make a difference, that’s when it’s calling to you.
So please, just breathe.
Consider forming a Porch Circle to connect with others on a similar path.
Join us at the online launch of Cory and the Seventh Story this Thursday evening.
Come to the Porch Gathering next March.
Or dip into the essays by Trent Jones, Shan Overton, Rachel Pennington, and Kevin Varner that we’ve just published at The Porch.
Most of all, know that there are many people like you who sometimes feel homeless.
But the presence of home exists inside you, and we can help each other find it.
In the spirit of a better story,
Gareth
PS: The fascinating and really helpful essay film J.E.S.U.S.A. (directed by Kevin Miller) about religion, violence and non-violence, spiritual activism and transformative storytelling is now available to watch for free on YouTube. I’m in it, along with a motley crew of wonderful people with ideas about how to transcend “us” versus “them”, and to replace the myth of redemptive violence with creativity, courage, and community. You can watch it by clicking here.
