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Think of the first place that felt like home now this might not be the first place you lived at and it might not be the place you grew up but imagine it. Imagine the color of the door, the texture of the floor, the sounds in the kitchen.
But not just seeing it, what did it feel like? How did it feel walking through that front door? Who met you on the other side? When did you walk the floors? Are you pacing, waiting for news? Waiting for someone to come home? Were you about staying a baby who wouldn’t get to sleep? What were the feelings as you walked the floors?
What were the feelings from the sounds in the kitchen? Was it your mother cooking a meal filled with love for a family holiday that first with joy? Was it your constant cat companion screaming at you cuz they’re both empty you are their caretaker? Is the music you played to give you energy while you filled meals with love for yourself or your loved ones?
Places aren’t just what we see and can touch the sensations, but the feelings and the impact and who it has made us.
We are created out of place. Cole wrote, “God makes a home for things before God makes the thing. Not the fish first but the sea. Not the bird first but the sky. Not the human first but the garden. I like to think of God hunched over in the garden, fingernails hugging the brown soil, mighty hands cradling mud like it’s the last flame in a windstorm. A God who says, Not out of my own womb but out of this here dust will I make you. Place has always been the thing that made us. We cannot escape from being formed by it. ”[1] Cole will go on to write that she is made up on the Pittsburgh dirt and air of her childhood and the apple trees growing on the land she now lives on. We carry the places that form us in us. Maybe Dorothy was wrong and we can’t go home again, but we do carry home with us.
We are formed by our creation and we are formed by the places of our ancestors. Research is discovering and affirming that trauma lives in the body and is passed on for generations, changing the DNA of whole people groups. And I want to believe if that’s true, that maybe grace and love and place can be passed on, too. That there can be in our in our DNA a recognition of place. (I imagine it’s why Jeannie keeps going “home” to Ireland)
And we are formed by the place where we are going. I don’t know what the dirt is like in the yard of the home that Jesus prepares, but I believe things grow there, there is life. That maybe we can be rooted in the eternal while we love the world here, on this plane, and care for those upon it with us. Cole wrote. “I hope God really is preparing a place for us. When God talks about getting her house ready, is she expecting us all at once? Does she have a gate, does she keep it open all through the night? Maybe she will tell me the secrets of where I came from. She’ll pull me into the kitchen just before grace and whisper all the secret things once stolen from me. All the places that I’m made of and don’t yet know it. There I will learn the site of my soul. And we’ll saunter back to the banquet fuller and more whole than I’ve known.”[2]
Sometimes what makes a place for us is the people. The person on the other side of the door or standing in the kitchen or you’re holding in your arms; but we’re making a distinction between the place–the walls, the floor, the dirt, the trees–and belonging. Belonging is the people, the community, it is each other.
Last year, U.S. Surgeon General released a report on the US epidemic of loneliness and that lacking connection can increase the risk for premature death.[3] Loneliness is connected to a greater risk of cardiovascular disease, dementia, depression, and anxiety. “reduces task performance, limits creativity, and impairs other aspects of executive function such as reasoning and decision making.”[4]
Brene Brown: “We experience loneliness when we feel disconnected. Maybe we’ve been pushed to the outside of a group that we value, or maybe we’re lacking a sense of true belonging. At the heart of loveliness is the absence of meaningful social interaction–an intimate relationship, friendships, family gatherings, or even community or work group connections.”[5]
Brene Brown: “Love and belonging are irreducible needs for all people. In the absence of these, there is always suffering.”[6]
We were made for relationships. Whether it is at stories of creation when God makes companions for the earth creature, or Jacob bring brought into a family, or David and Jonathan’s… friendship… the Bible is full of stories of people for whom it is better that they are not alone.
Like being thirsty tells us to drink and hunger pains tell us to eat, loneliness tells us we need social interactions, we need each other. And we need each of us to be fully who we are, in all that we are rooted in. “True belonging doesn’t require us to change who we are; it requires us to be who we are.”[7]
Cole writes about how we can’t even see our own faces–a mirror is a reverse image attempting to show us who we are, but it is only in and with each other that we can be fully seen and known. Not because others define us but because sometimes they see the beauty or the dark places even before we can. She writes, A community… can also mean a group that knows your name, people who know you and know about the ugly parts of you and stay.[8]
See, that what the church is, or ought to be, a place where we are seen, known, the beautiful and even the ugly bits, and you still belong, just as you are. You have a place here because honestly, we are all just piles of beauty and ugly bits in a messy pile.
Theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrote, In a Christian community everything depends upon whether each individual is an indispensable link in a chain. Only when even the smallest link is securely interlocked is the chain unbreakable. A community which allows unemployed members to exist with it will perish. And not unemployed as in a job but as in a role, a part, a calling, a place in the church family, whatever that may be. But we’ll look at calling next week.
We at Emmanuel are a church that loves and welcomes people. It’s one of the UCC’s taglines and we/I say every week no matter you are welcome. But what more could it be if we were to tell each other you belong here? You belong here in this place, here in this community, here in this life. Cole writes,“We don’t just welcome you or accept you; we need you. We are insufficient without you.”[9]
What if we lived as if we are insufficient without the person sitting next to you? Or the person you sat next to last week who is not here? Or the person you haven’t seen in 6 months? How do we tell people, remind people, make belonging a reality? How do we increase our vulnerability so that others can be vulnerable so we can all be seen and known and still loved? That is the call of the church–to see the good and the bad, the beautiful and the ugly, the messy and the… less messy and live as though it all belongs… You belong here.
[1] Cole Arthur Riley This Here Flesh pg 18
[2] Cole Arthur Riley This Here Flesh pg 23
[3] Juana Summers, Vincent Acovino, Christopher Intagliata America has a loneliness epidemic. Here are 6 steps to address it www.npr.org/2023/05/02/1173418268/loneliness-connection-mental-
health-dementia-surgeon-general
[4] Brene Brown Atlas of the Heart pg 181
[5] Brene Brown Atlas of the Heart pg 179
[6] Brene Brown Atlas of the Heart pg 159
[7] Brene Brown Atlas of the Heart pg 158
[8] Cole Arthur Riley This Here Flesh pg 71
[9] Cole Arthur Riley This Here Flesh pg 72