Coracle news

Men’s group: Home

Posted Saturday 15 October 2011

Home and the vision of wholeness

Home is a powerful motif.  While many of us dream of home as a place of sanctuary, retreat, warmth and nostalgia, home can sometimes be a place of horror and nightmares, fractured relationships and hidden violence.  We’re on the edge of breathtaking changes globally and in the UK.  Huge shifts in the Middle East, famine, flood and the impact of global warming; and at home seismic change in welfare benefits, cuts in legal aid, assualts on pensioners and the “feckless” unemployed.  In this book The Longing for Home, Frederick Buechner writes, “No matter how much the world shatters us to pieces, we carry inside us a vision of wholeness that we sense is our true home and that beckons to us.

Our 2011 theme Dreams of Home, offers a moment to explore those contrasting experiences of home, this vision of wholeness and our yearning for a sense of true home.  (Greenbelt Festival guide 2011)

Luke 9
As they were walking along the road, a man said to him, “I will follow you wherever you go.”  Jesus replied, “Foxes have dens and birds have nests, but the Son of Man has no place to lay his head.”

What does home mean to us?  Does an image come to mind?

What and where is home?

Home is where the heart is.  It stands for the sure centre where individual life is shaped and from where it journeys forth.  What it ultimately intends is that each of its individuals would develop the capacity to be at home in themselves.  This is something that is usually overlooked but it is a vital requirement in the creativity and integrity of individual personality.  When one is at home in oneself, one is integrated and enjoys a sense of balance and poise.  In a sense that is exactly what spirituality is: the art of homecoming.”  (John O’Donahue, Benedictus, 2007, p.99)

John 1
The next day John was there again with two of his disciples. When he saw Jesus passing by, he said, “Look, the Lamb of God!” When the two disciples heard him say this, they followed Jesus.  Turning around, Jesus saw them following and asked, “What do you want?”  They said, “Rabbi” (which means “Teacher”), “where are you staying?”
“Come,” he replied, “and you will see.”

How at home are we?

The domain of home

Hebrews 11
By faith Abraham, when called to go to a place he would later receive as his inheritance, obeyed and went, even though he did not know where he was going.  By faith he made his home in the promised land like a stranger in a foreign country; he lived in tents, as did Isaac and Jacob, who were heirs with him of the same promise.  For he was looking forward to the city with foundations, whose architect and builder is God.

Sometimes people describe church as their spiritual home - how does that image feel for us?

Is there also a gender issue here?  In some cultures for instance, the home is the female domain, while men exist in the public sphere.

Compiled by Pete Edwards