Home, revisited.

From a letter I received upon returning to Portland,

"Is home just an idea? Is it just a feeling? Is it an actual thing that can be tangibly felt? Or is it tangible at all? I once thought that I was satisfied just believing that home would only come when heaven did but that's not satisfying at all. Another time I convinced myself that home is where there are friends and food. But that leaves the impression that home can never be stable."

 They were perfect words to go to sleep to because they gave names and faces to many of my emotions having just left one home to return to another.

In reading Radical Hospitality, I am beginning to wonder if home is not much more easily defined as space. Space to breathe and be. Specifically addressed in the book are the areas of people, of ourselves, even of God that remain mysteries. Homan writes,

"There is a gentle hospitality with the self that most of us fail to practice. You know that moment you look in the mirror and see a stranger staring out those eyes? We don't accept the stranger within. We dread the regions of ourselves we don't understand. By learning to value the otherliness of the actual stranger, we honor the mystery within us, too. ...Not only is there a stranger in your skin, there are several in your home too. The essence of hospitality is receiving the stranger while letting them remain a stranger."

He continues on talking about the importance of making room for who people actually are instead of who we want them to be, elaborating on God in the stranger and our inability to ever understand God... how He is always a bit of a stranger. Already, however, I have copied enough words to keep me occupied the rest of my life. I could spend the rest of my life just trying to "receive the stranger while letting them remain a stranger"; and I am sure that it will take months if not years of trying before I begin getting it right often enough to see any progress in myself. While this is profoundly overwhelming, I digress in my pursuit of words to address home.

I do not think home in the truest sense is possible without great endeavors toward hospitality. Home is that space where you can be greeted for the similarities you have and the sense you do make, but your mysteries and tangles are welcome to come inside and rest too. A space where it is safe to grow because no one and nothing are trying to force it.

I will not fully understand myself at the end of my life and life is so much easier to handle if I am not expected to. If I am free to take in hand one mystery at a time and let them rest in a safe place, I may yet learn and grow. I can hardly do that if I must hide the irrational and non sequitur from view, much less the bent and broken.