Carolyn McDade wrote her song "Coming Home" for the November 1980 “Women and Religion” continental convocation of Unitarian Universalists.”[i] She reflects that she and the other organizers were searching for “new and inclusive symbols and rituals that speak to us of our connectedness to one another, to the totality of life, and to our place on this planet.”
We're coming home to the spirit in our soul,What does it mean to come home to the spirit in your soul? What does it mean to come home to yourself?
We're coming home and the healing makes us whole;
Like rivers running to the Sea.
We're coming home, we're coming home.
In her book, Traveling Mercies, Anne LaMott shares a story about a friend who got lost as a little girl. “The little girl ran up and down the streets of the big town where they lived, but she couldn’t find a single landmark. She was very frightened. Finally a policeman stopped to help her. He put her in the passenger seat of his car, and they drove around until she finally saw her church. She pointed it out to the policeman, and then she told him firmly, ‘You could let me out now. This is my church, and I can always find my way home from here.’”
LaMott picks up on the metaphor and says, “That’s why I have stayed so close to mine – because no matter how bad I am feeling, how lost or lonely or frightened, when I see the faces of the people at my church, and hear their tawny voices, I can always find my way home.”[ii]
I tell you, back in the spring of 2020 I felt like that the words of that old spiritual “a long way from home… a long way from home.” Even though I was, most of us were, stuck in my house pretty much all the time. It’s not just hardship that takes us away from our soul home, it also happens that we get distracted by the way of the world, by the needs of others, the expectations of our school, our job, even our church. So one of the jobs of religious community is to remind us to come home to ourselves.
It's okay that we leave home- like how we leave our house to learn new things, to connect with others, to do our work, to have adventures. But it can feel so good to come back home- a place where we are accepted, a place where we are safe, a place where we are free to be our own wild selves. We go away, we come back. Clarisa Pinkola Estes has a beautiful description of this process of coming home to the soul, writing: "Every animal I know has a place or places like that – even migrating animals have places they come back to." [Estes p. 268]
But this song is also about the community- “we’re coming home” those women sang together, and we sing together. One of our most noble aspirations as a congregation is to be a place that feels like home, a place where we are accepted, where we are safe, where we are free to be our wild selves. And, I’ve noticed over the years that communities have their own spirit, their own heart. I was trying to explain to Rev. Douglas the other day what the spirit of Athens feels like, and what the heart of Cortland feels like, because each has a unique spirit I have come to know and love. It was really hard when we started to meet together on zoom and we had trouble feeling that spirit, but over those weeks and months, we did begin to feel that spirit of community, even over the internet.
And it was hard when we came back together in our buildings, and it didn’t feel like it did in the fall of 2019. But I have felt it since, our spirit, our heart. We are coming home.
Like the lost princess in today's story*, we might forget our true self, we don’t know how to get home. This is why we gather in community, to listen for the sound that calls us home. “something stirs deep, deep within us, and we long to return to our true home, the home of the soul.”
That feeling of soul home is elusive, when we are away from our soul home for too long our heart aches. We feel thirsty for it, dry, parched. But it is there inside us, like the well of living water. Let us set our hearts on that journey each to our own soul home deep inside us, and let us set our hearts on our collective journey, toward the heart and spirit of our community’s soul home, the living waters that quench spirit’s thirst deep inside.
[ii] Paraphrase from Soul Matters
* Gordon-Zaslow, Debra “The Journey of a Lost Princess” Chosen Tales: Stories Told by Jewish Storytellers. Northvale, NJ: Jason Aronson, an Imprint of Rowman & Littlefield, 1995. pp. 126–131.
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