I was about nine years old when I first went to summer camp at Camp Chaleur. I remember packing this humungous suitcase that was generally used by both my mom and dad when our family went on holidays. But you know how it is … you have this list of everything you’re supposed to bring to camp … rubber boots, flashlight, bathing suit and towels … a dozen changes of clothes so you’ll always have something dry to put on
And I remember being excited to be away from home on my own for a whole week … I was going to a familiar place, too … I grew up on the beaches of the bay of Chaleur …this was the place where our annual church picnic was always held … it was a place our family went for Sunday drives and summer swims … I knew it well.
And I had friends from my neighbourhood who were going to camp, too. I knew some of the leaders as well … they led our explorer and CGIT groups, too. But to my utter surprise, when my parents drove away and I was to be there for seven more days, I felt something I had never felt before …it was like the bottom had dropped out of my heart … and I had never felt so alone.
As I look back now … it was one of those formative moments in life … it was the first time I touched that perennial place of longing for home … an experience that I would revisit again in life as all do … the homesickness that comes as we keep leaving one time in life for another, one stage in life for another, one address for another, one generation for another …
I wasn’t far from home … in fact, as I would learn many years later … in a way … I was never closer to home … my birth family I would discover decades later lived just 10 miles down the road from Camp Chaleur and home as I knew and loved it was just 25 miles up the road … but it wasn’t really about distance, was it?? As life went on, I would learn, as we all have … that we can feel just as lonely in a room full of people as a child does away from home for the first time … we can feel homesick without ever having to leave home
Homesickness is not really about missing the place we’re from so much as it is about missing the place we’re for or we’re searching for … It’s not so much about the place we’ve left as it is about the place we dream of … it’s sometimes about what we’ve had and lost … but it is also about what we been looking for our whole lives … homesickness puts us in touch with knowing that feeling at home has more to do with a state of being than missing a particular place …
We hear the experience of homesickness again and again in the spiritual tradition we inherit from our Jewish ancestry. Much of what we have as the first testament in the collection of literature we have in the bible is born out of the experience of homesickness when the ancient land of Judah was captured by the ancient empire of Babylon and many Judeans were removed from their homeland and taken into exile in Babylon. Like any empire, Babylon wanted the brightest and best, the skilled workers and trades people, those with skill and expertise who could be of service to the ruling class …
In the poetry of these exiles, a single sentence captures a homesickness they experienced for several generations …
“by the waters of Babylon we sat down and wept … how can we sing our songs in a foreign land????” (Ps 137)
These are the words of intergenerational survivors … this is not the lament of those who were forced from their homeland … this is the lament of those who more than 50 years later are living more than 800 miles east of their ancestral homeland … they were born in Babylon … it is the only place they know … so …
How is it that they were so homesick for a place most of them had never been? It was the home of their ancestors … but they were born in Babylon and yet this place of their birth was a foreign land …
But I wonder if the homesickness we hear in the voice of that ancient poet, isn’t more of a longing for a place that doesn’t exist on our maps but that exists in the world of our stories … a place that is created by our hopes, our imagination, our longings … not for a place that was and is no more or place we had to leave but for the world as we wish it was … the same place Katherine Ozment’s son was homesick for … the place where we are all together in one place … all the people he loved together in one place … it wasn’t something that 6 year old had and lost … it was the way he wished life was … the way he wish his world was … it’s a cry to belong to life by belonging to a love that is bigger … wider … deeper … a belonging that isn’t dependent on geography
This week, I remembered that there are many ways to be together in one place … there are many ways to belong to one another … to be communitas, to be a caring community of common quest and vision.
Six years or so ago, several of us from SSUC met several individuals from MVU in Sk at a conference on progressive Christianity held in London Ontario. We recognized that we were exploring similar paths as spiritual communities. A few years later Chris and I had the opportunity to share in an annual conference they hosted called Celebrating Spirit which deepened our appreciation and understanding of each of our spiritual communities. Last fall several folk from MVU joined us for the ever Wonder conference we hosted .. some in person, others on line.
We discovered that we share a common history … we are both spiritual communities that began in schools, reached out to our respective communities engaging in social justice programs, eventually moving into a facility like this with the hope of better serving our community. Each of our communities has a DNA that bends us toward exploring questions, assumptions, traditions, rituals in ways that lead us to be spiritual communities that are rooted in the story we know best, the Christian tradition, but reaching for light in the many places we can find it.
Time changes all things and time led our friends in MVU to become a smaller but clearly focused community faithful to their visions and values. Their building was sold 5 years ago and over the course of the last year they came to a place of discerning that a faithful way to be community was to enter into a partnership with us as a satellite community gathering with us online and in person from time to time. We received their vision with joy and excitement about how we can build soil together that will allow all of us to flower.
This week 13 of us from SSUC gathered in the meeting place of MVU at St. Andrew’s college to plant those seeds of belonging with each other across the prairie miles. We have made a commitment to be explore a new way of being in communities … of belonging to a shared journey … of being together in one place … that isn’t dependent on geography but on planting seeds in solidarity and love amid our homesickness for a more fair and equitable world …
Whatever our emptiness, whatever our longing is to be and belong … we are better together … we are better with companions, compatriots … I don’t know if there is a more compelling reason to be part of a spiritual community than this … it is the best way I know … to be together in one place … to share the homesickness and the hope of our species … to be together in building soil in which we can each flower and in which we can grow alongside one another to seed a better world. In this silence we hold now with one another, let us consider how we can plant seeds of belonging to help us be more at home in our own skin, at home with one another and to make this world a better home for all of us, for all forms of life.
-Nancy Steeves
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