"If we truly listen to the Beatitudes, we will hear them as a call for us to recover the integrity of our own faith and its lived expression. But if we only go through the motions of our religion, while closing ourselves off from its real meaning, if we do not discover that the kingdom of heaven is our only true home, the place that defines our most essential identity, we will be lost in the wilderness of decayed traditions and vulnerable to the domination of modernity's suicidal infatuation with power, the exact opposite of the Gospel message. Our greatest contribution to the world is, with God's grace, to try to be who, as Christians, we are. That will never be easy and will probably bring upon us rejection and even persecution, but it will also make us exceeding glad"
— Robert Bellah, author of Habits of the Heart
What does it mean to “discover that the kingdom of heaven is our only true home”? I have been thinking a lot about this, finding our home in the vision of God’s kin-dom. What exactly is our “home”? I ponder this, especially as I witness young families buying and building their dream home and older persons selling that home to move to a smaller apartment. Does the home go with them, is the home a concept, a state of mind, or a physical place we manifest in certain ways? One question I ask people as they create this home or seek continuity as they move from one place to another is “what do you require to make your home a home?” Some might answer “the people”, meaning the immediate family members. Thus it is less about space and more about the persons involved. That is likely a given but for many others the addition of certain kinds of space make a house a home.
I have not seen one but I am told that TV programs that focus on people renovating, building and decorating their homes are hugely popular. People seem obsessed with creating a space that reflects them and their personalities and values. No one seems to have paintings or photographs any more (except for photos of the couple and their children). Instead what we see are generic prints, not images, just colours meant to flatter the colour scheme of the matching furniture. The values are presented in “Live, Laugh, Love” framed prints that adorn the walls. The irony here is that after spending all of this time and money to create such a personalized expression many of these houses look identical.
What I pay close attention to are the values persons live out in community, that sense of building the kin-dom in our midst. In a real way the values we seek to embody are the true “home”, the best expression of our living space. In that sense whether we live in an apartment or large scale house we have opportunity to live out a way of seeing, hearing and acting that pushes back on systems of thought that undermine unconditional grace love, an openness to forgive one’s self and others and a disciplined love that brings peace, justice and mercy to whomever needs it. Many street persons I know carry their photo albums with them, the letters that meant so much in their pockets, the mementoes of a lifetime that instantly carry meaning in a bag. Together this is their home. In our culture more is more but when we are forced to have less it focuses our attention on what we need to remind ourselves of “home”.
What do you need to remind yourself of “home”?