How to Get Home From Here
Life these past several weeks has felt like I’m sitting in a dark movie theatre. The screen is black and white question marks are floating across the screen. All the certainties, the familiar routines and rhythms of life, relationships and rituals, have been disrupted. Some of them have probably changed permanently.
When will we congregate again?
Sitting in solidarity at funerals, hugging each other in grief? When will we witness wedding vows and dance in celebration of new beginnings? When will we hand our graduates diplomas and pat them on the back with praise? When will we be able to grocery shop without a mask, to see each other smile hear each other say ‘hello’ as we pass on a two-way aisle?
In the same weekend, rockets were launched into space and riots erupted across the country. While Covid-19 levels off in some cities, the ICUs in my hometown are at capacity. How long will the downward spiral last? Where is the bottom? Not many of us seem to have the patience and fortitude for the long haul of unknowns.
It hasn’t helped that I’ve been studying the Old Testament and church history this quarter in seminary. There’s not a whole lot of good news or easy answers in those places either. “Disequilibrium” my OT professor called it. That point in the quarter when we realize that much of what we thought we knew - we didn’t. There were questions we hadn’t even thought to ask.
I was talking to my spiritual director about the disorientation of this current season. She told me a story about her husband when he was a small boy traveling with his parents. Instead of asking, “Are we there yet?” like most children, he would ask, “Are we going to know how to get home from here?”
That is my question this month: Am I going to know how to get home from here?
What things will we return to with vigor and gratitude and what things will we realize that we haven’t actually missed after all? That we can’t pick back up when this is over? That we are actually better off without ? That can be a frightening question for both individuals and institutions.
Are we going to know how to get home from here?
This morning I picked up my finger labyrinth. Walking or tracing a labyrinth is the best thing I know to combat disorientation. It mimics the journey of life, with twists and turns, forcing the body to incorporate the constantly shifting perspective. But the truth of the labyrinth is this: only the perspective is shifting. The labyrinth is solidly grounded and there is a defined path - one way to the center and out again. You will not get lost- no matter how lost you may feel as you walk it. What you feel as you walk a labyrinth is constant shifting and changing, but what is true is that you are safely held on the path and every step moves you closer to the center.
I’ve quoted Meister Eckhart on the blog before, but it’s my favorite quote and I need to repeat it to myself often: “God is at home. It is we who have gone out for a walk.”
Part of being human is the ‘going out for a walk’ - disconnecting from our fear, pain, loneliness, or hurt. We look for ways to distract ourselves from those floating question marks or to escape from the feeling of a downward spiral. But after our distractions, we feel even more lost and find ourselves asking, “Am I going to be able to get home from here? “
For me, listening to music, lighting a candle, praying the offices, walking Grizzly, sitting in silence, reading the Psalms, making a gratitude list, being outside in nature, talking to a soul-nourishing friend, tracing or walking a labyrinth, getting my head upside down in a yoga pose - these are pathways. They are invitations to come back home to my own body - the temple of the living God.
I chalked my doors on Jan. 6th ( Feast of the Epiphany) this year with Acts 17:28, “In Him we live and move and have our being.” The labyrinth is a picture of that- a solid center and a singular path. You cannot be lost, no matter how you feel in the moment. This verse is my prayer over my family, friends, all who enter our home and you, my readers. May we remember that in Him we live, move, and exist. May every inhale remind us of the indwelling presence of Christ. We are not lost. We are always at home in Him.
