On Setting Out and Coming Home
Podcast: Download (Duration: 11:02 — 25.3MB)
Subscribe: More
Matsuo Bashō, the late 17th century Japanese poet, speaks of a strong desire to wander, as if it’s the essence of who he is. In the opening lines of his travel sketch, The Narrow Road to the Deep North, he says: “The gods seemed to have possessed my soul and turned it inside out, and roadside images seemed to invite me from every corner, so that it was impossible for me to stay idle at home.” Throughout all his travel sketches he seems always to be setting out on a journey, leaving home, leaving friends. We might call him, in those haunting words of the Sufi poet Rumi, “a lover of leaving.”
At the conclusion of The Narrow Road, Bashō speaks of a wonderful reunion with friends. “Everybody was overjoyed to see me as if I had returned unexpectedly from the dead.” But his homecoming is short-lived. Though filled with the fatigue of journeying, he sets out again, and offers this final poem:
As firmly cemented clam shells
Fall apart in autumn,
So I must take to the road again.
Farewell my friends.
In contrast to Bashō’s relentless journeying, I note the story of a friend’s 81-year old grandmother who returned to her beloved Scotland after 57 years of absence. Her homecoming, like Bashō’s reunion with friends, is joyous. It’s also a dramatic and heart-warming story: going back to the place of her birth, seeing long-lost family members after more than half a century. But where Bashō is always setting out, the grandmother’s journey is one of returning, coming home.
On your own spiritual journey, are you setting out or coming home?
Unitarian Universalists often say things like, “Our lives are spiritual journeys.” But we don’t always explain what this means. Where some religions offer specific paths toward specific goals (which makes the journey relatively easy to explain), others, like Unitarian Universalism, are more open-ended, with directions less specified and paths more numerous, with spontaneity, creativity and curiosity more valued than the discipline of sticking to pre-ordained rules.
This open-endedness does make the typical Unitarian Universalist spiritual journey more difficult to explain. (In fact, it makes the word typical more or less useless.) But even so, I think it’s important that we find ways of articulating what we mean when we say, “Our lives are spiritual journeys.”
For me, spirituality is fundamentally about connection. An effective spiritual practice connects us to some reality larger than ourselves: family, humanity, nature, the land, life, the planet, the cosmos, spirit, divinity, the gods and goddesses, the ancestors. When I speak of our spiritual lives, I mean all the ways we connect to whatever is of utmost worth to us, what we hold sacred and regard as holy.
When I speak of our spiritual journeys, I’m referring not so much to the full span of our lives, but to certain discrete portions of our lives: the journey of our young adult years, the journey of parenting, the journey of career, the journey into elderhood. I’m speaking of our journey through certain ordeals or challenges, such as losing a job, the break-up of a marriage, the death of a loved one.
What makes any of these journeys spiritual is that they enable us to deepen our sense of connection over time. But we don’t necessarily recognize this when it’s happening. At various points along the way, however, when we have a moment to pause and reflect on our lives, we might notice that we’ve completed some significant journey or that we’ve come through some uniquely challenging experience, and we’re not the same person we were when we started. We possess some knowledge about life and living we didn’t possess when we started, or we are wiser than when we began. Maybe we feel more whole, more at ease in the world, more comfortable in our own skin.
Perhaps, at the end of a journey, we realize we are better able to give and receive love; perhaps we are more compassionate in our treatment of others; perhaps we’ve discovered our gifts and are finally using them in service of others. We might have come to terms with a painful loss, or even with the reality of our own death. All of this suggests to me that through the course of our journeying we have deepened our connections to those things we hold sacred.
But we don’t always realize we’re embarking on a spiritual journey. More often than not our journeys begin with a twinge, a gnawing in the back of our mind or at the edge of our heart, a discomfort or dissonance, a low-level anxiety, a frustration; a sense that something in our life is out of alignment, a sense that something is lacking, or a longing we’re slowly beginning to recognize but aren’t quite sure how to fulfill. We may feel this way because some new situation has arisen—a baby has come, a job has been lost, an aging parent has moved in—and we more or less know our life needs to change.
Or it may just be a twinge with no apparent source.
That twinge, that gnawing, that longing—if it’s real—doesn’t go away. It begins to take on the quality of voice. It questions and cajoles, it makes gentle pleas and strident demands. The word calling is appropriate here. This voice, however we experience it, calls us toward a deeply felt passion, calls us to pursue some different, perhaps more noble purpose. It calls us to grow in knowledge and wisdom, to meet whatever challenge confronts us. We might hear it in the voice of a spouse or a good friend, a boss or a co-worker. We might hear it in the voice of our minister, or the voice of our doctor, or maybe in the voice of a total stranger.
We might hear it as our inner voice: that still, small voice of our most authentic self that knows what we really want for our lives, even before our waking minds know. We might hear it as a voice from without: a holy voice, a sacred voice, a divine voice, a spirit voice. We might hear it in our dreams, in prayer, in meditation, in the shower, while exercising, stretching, singing, dancing, creating. When we finally respond to the voice, when we finally start to move, I find we tend to move in one of two directions. Either we’re setting out, or we’re coming home.
We set out when we feel stuck where we are, when we need something new, some connection we’ve never had, some knowledge we cannot acquire by staying home. We set out when we feel constrained and need freedom, when we find it hard to breathe and we need the fresh air of the open road. The work of setting out includes experimenting, exploring, creating, searching. Setting out requires courage, curiosity, strength, nerve, an adventurous spirit, a willingness to take risks, even arrogance at times. Bashō’s travel sketches are a wonderful example of setting out. For him, home is a place of idleness. He goes stir-crazy. On the road he is alive and passionate. On the road he expects to catch glimpses of eternity and let it inspire his poetry.
I find a similar spiritual mentality in the 19th century American poet, Walt Whitman, who wrote in his poem, “Song of the Open Road:
Afoot and light-hearted I take to the open road,
Healthy, free, the world before me,
The long brown path before me
leading wherever I choose.
Henceforth I ask not good-fortune, I myself am good-fortune;
Henceforth I whimper no more,
postpone no more, need nothing,
Done with indoor complaints,
libraries, querulous criticisms,
Strong and content I travel the open road.
We come home when we’re longing for foundations, for roots, for love, intimacy, care and nurture. We come home when we’re yearning for community, for familiar faces and places, familiar food, smell, touch, land, seasons. The work of coming home includes listening, sharing, sacrificing, forgiving and building community. Coming home requires its own kinds of courage and strength, its own kinds of persistence and endurance. It requires vulnerability, humility, and a willingness to set one’s own needs aside at times to meet the needs of others
If you ask me about my spiritual journey, these days I lean towards coming home. Don’t get me wrong: I value setting out. It’s been very important in shaping my sense of who I am and what I value. But my instinct is that home is becoming more and more elusive in our era. I won’t rehearse the litany of ills that beset families or the social and economic conditions that make it increasingly difficult to build and sustain vital neighborhoods and communities.
Suffice to say, I experience many forces in the larger world that drive wedges between people who ought to be in community together, who ought to be encountering each other with loving, compassionate hearts, who ought to be working together for the common good, who ought to see beyond the narrow tunnel of their own self-interest. This is the source of my twinge, my gnawing, my low-level anxiety, my longing. The voices I hear—in my dreams, in prayer, in meditation, in the shower; while exercising, stretching, singing, dancing, creating—all urge me to come more fully home.
Wherever you are on your journey, whether you are setting out on a grand adventure or settling into the fullness of home, may you remember that we journey in a web of connections that support our setting out and our coming home.
- Transitions, Expected and Unexpected - January 1, 2017
- On Setting Out and Coming Home - November 1, 2015
- The Place We Require of Humans - September 1, 2012
