Where do you live?

Our Savior invites us to find our true home in him.

Bishop Edward B. Scharfenberger

Any lost child is best prepared to find the way home, if he or she can answer this simple question: where do you live? Before the age of smartphones and chips — oh how well kids have learned to bribe their parents for a new phone by selling its safety features (“Mom, don’t you want to be able to find me if I am in trouble?”) — one of the first things almost every child learned was how to recite their home address. Of course, that presumes that every child has a home. Tragically, there are children of all ages among us who do not have the luxury of a stable place called home.

I say “children of all ages” to include not only those literally under 18. Many homeless teen­agers and pre-teens are worse off than those in decades passed consigned to orphanages. They do not have a place where when they knock on the door someone has to take them in — a definition of “home” I like. No, there are other “children” on the streets, many with what we call “mental illness” who have become so disoriented by their shiftless, uncertain paths through life that they can hardly think straight. All the medication in the world may not bring them back to stability, in fact, it may be the medication (or drugs, the less sanitized term) that leads them there. Yes, medication by alcohol (legal) or some other substance (illegal) may have led them further away from sanity, whether prescribed or not. So many homeless, children and adults, are castoffs from drug-infused environments where they can hardly be sure each day of where they will eat or sleep, if at all.

Recently, I had attended a seminar for our administrative teams about “trauma informed” leadership. Such sessions can help those who meet marginalized persons in all of life’s settings, in commerce, education and social service. One example the presenter gave is the plight of a high schooler (or any student, really) who finds it difficult to concentrate in class. Typically, young people who do not have the security of knowing where they will eat or sleep — and there are many — cannot easily activate the front part of their brains into which most classroom-style knowledge is stored and processed. They “live” literally in the back part of their minds, where the “fight or flight” psychic mechanism is lodged. Living in your head means that it is difficult to see the world outside of the cast or color of what one most fears, basically, a place where at any moment you can get hurt, even destroyed.

Survivors of abuse, physical and/or sexual, are often “triggered” by persons and events that remind them of past trauma which leaves, as it were, emotional scars, like tattoos on their brains. The presenter described how well-meaning teachers or social workers, even those who volunteer not in a profession capacity, are often shocked themselves when a person with whom they feel they have been making “progress” in a relationship suddenly cuts them off, turns against them, or takes a move in the opposite direction from which they seemed to be reorienting themselves. What may be seen as lapses or relapses can also be deliberate devices used by the traumatized person to accelerate a process they have been accustomed to think is inevitable: the death of the relationship. A person who has experienced so much hurt and betrayal may come to believe all relationships must come to this eventually, so why not just “get it over” now. This is the push-pull over experience by anyone who seeks to accompany a person who has suffered addictions or serious emotional trauma. Spiritually, as physically at times, they are never really “at home.”

Not all stages of homelessness come to this ultimate kind of dysphoria. The process of stifling addiction to hopeless wandering may not begin with drugs or extreme violence. It can start on any screen, cell phone or laptop, in any kind of toxic environment surrounded by those who live without a sense of purpose other than just getting through the day or night. Sports itself can be such an addiction, or whatever preoccupies the mind most of the time. Certain websites, computer shopping, the ubiquitous games that keep popping up as ads on every site. It is possible to say that those sites and preoccupations actually become the place where we find ourselves living. Or partly living.

Any wonder that the world’s Savior invites lost and wandering souls to a home that really offers them life and happiness? “I am the way and the truth and the life” (Jn 14:6) Jesus said to a questioning Thomas who sought a route map to where he was going when preparing his disciples for the road to the cross and resurrection. He did not promise them a pain and suffering free path, but that by making him their stable place or home, they would not perish. 

This ancient longing for an eternal home that we can always feel welcome in is perhaps best expressed in the lyrics of the hymn, “Jerusalem, my happy home,” with which we may be familiar. Many people find a sense of peace when entering a quiet church or place of meditation. Most churches want to present themselves these days as more “welcoming” than “judgmental.” Without doubt, the intent is to offer safe space and comfort to everyone, born of the awareness that there is a wanderer in everyone of us, fear of not belonging or being accepted. Jesus himself spent most of his public ministry seeking out the lost, those rejected or relegated to the margins of society as useless, hopeless, possessed or obsessed, or — to use the most generic biblical word — sinners.

The universal call to salvation is from the heart of a Savior who sees us all as sinners, never really “at home” in the world, or even ourselves. He invites us to find our true home in him. In fact, not only is being home in Christ a spatial reference, but an offer of lasting friendship, sacramentally, in “the breaking of the bread.” Recall that moment the two wanderers on the road to Emmaus recognized the Lord (Lk 24:30). Not only is Jesus a home for us to find welcome in. He IS our food itself and resting place that sustains us who enter him. He feeds us with himself and becomes our life. If Jesus himself is where we live, when we believe in him and share him, we ourselves become home to our neighbor. Doing this together is the meaning of ecclesial communion, which we sometimes call “church.” It is not just a place or building, but a way of being.