I find it interesting that if you ask me where my hometown is I would reply Chicago. Yet if you ask me where my home is I would say Asheville. 

On the one hand, Chicago is where I spent the first 17 years of my life.  It is the place full of those early primary memories: first year of school, first summer camp, first bike, first sport team, first kiss, first time having your heart crushed, first day driving. It is full of those sites that give you a sense of place and tell you who your people are; those places which speak to your depths when you return - your house, your school, parks, places in the city, not to mention Wrigley Field in my case. Not all the memories are sweet, yet overall I feel a deep visceral pull every time I come into the Chicago area even though I haven't lived there for 37 years.  It is as if the city has been awaiting my return.

On the other hand, Asheville is home.  It is where I live my present life.  In very different ways than when I was growing up I learn anew about place at this point of life.  I learn anew who my people are.  Those notions are ever expanding as I realize our place and people are not static, fixed sites or groups.  We are a people of the planet whose place is all of creation and whose people are every person who has, is and will ever live.  Yet even as I grow in this understanding, I now get that deep visceral pull every time I drive up the mountain on my return to Asheville.

I think this may be the paradox, the vexing reality of 'home'.  We hear in the scriptures we are a people who have a home, a people who are on a journey to our home.  We also hear the Son of God has no place to lay his head and those who follow him will share the same reality.  We hear we are sojourners. "A wandering Aramean was my father," the Hebrew Scriptures tell us.

As well, if our memories of home are not of a welcome place, not of a refuge, not of a place that affirmed us or gave us a sense of place and people, we will unconsciously bring those unmet needs to our spiritual community.  We will push that community to make up for what we did not receive.  We will find it can not meet those needs and is not 'wired' to do so.

So what are we to do with all of this, these conflicting realities, these images affected by our own memories?  On Saturday, October 9, Lauren Winner will be present for The Zabriskie Learning Series.  She will both discuss and engage us in pondering the notions and experiences of place and home.  Rather than suggest an answer to these questions of home, she will invite us to reflect upon and live into these paradoxes.

In the W. H. Auden text found in our Hymnal, we hear, "He is the way; follow Him through the land of unlikeness... you will come to a great city that has expected your return for years."  We find home through unlikeness? As well, if he is "the way", does the sojourning ever stop?  Paradoxes abound.

Peace,

Todd Donatelli