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By the waters of Babylon, there we sat down, and we wept when we remembered Zion. In the midst of it all we hung our harps upon the willows. They that carried us away captive required of us a song. They wanted us to sing of joy. “Sing to us,” they demanded, “one of the songs of Zion.” But how shall we sing the Lord’s song in this strange land? If I forget you, O Jerusalem, let my right hand forget its skill. If I do not remember you, if I do not hold Jerusalem as my chief joy, let my tongue cleave to the roof of my mouth.— Psalm 137: 1-6

Home, we are told over and over, is where the heart is. And I think there’s something for us in that.

Psalm 137 dates from the Babylonian captivity, somewhere in the sixth century before the Common Era, a very important moment in history. What we have is a small community of intellectuals and craftsmen from that mix of people in what we today think of as Israel and Palestine who had been carried away to Babylon. Who they really were is complicated, but let’s call them Judeans.

It’s hard to say how much they thought of themselves as a people separate from their neighbors before this time. But during that captivity and exile something happened—a spiritual alchemy, a distillation of ancient fables and stories into a holy book containing a more or less coherent history and, even more important, a promise. During those years much of what we would think of as Judaism came to birth, all brought together in a dream of home, of separation, of exile and a promise of returning to that home.

And that’s our story, isn’t it? Do you notice that in your heart? Do you have that sense of dislocation, of your heart’s longing? It seems most of us are not settled, are not at home. We have different ways of saying this. Somewhere within our hearts there is always a knowing of our home which whispers, which calls to us in our dreams. In the midst of whatever conditions we’re caught up in, we feel this urge, this need, this longing of our hearts.

Last year I was visiting with a liberal Congregational minister. Good person, smart as a whip. I really liked her. As happens for people in any shared trade, eventually we began to talk shop. She said how she saw her job as ultimately reminding people that we are resident aliens, that this place we find ourselves in is not our home. Rather, she said, she calls the people she serves to remember they are in fact citizens of heaven. And here, well, here they—we—are just passing through.

This really bothered me. And while I hadn’t thought of it in quite these terms before saying it, I had to respond that I couldn’t disagree more. My mission, my work, is to recall people to the fact that our home is here. In a larger sense we are citizens of this world. And, more intimately, our knowing is found in this body. This place here, this place now, this being and nowhere else, is our true home.

What this speaks to is a fundamental difference in approach to matters of spirit and how we should engage life. Of course, people who believe their home is somewhere else don’t always ignore this place where we actually live. In fact, they often do good work, even great work to alleviate suffering and to care for the world.

But it becomes a dividing of the heart. And this split, if not watched carefully, can be dangerous. There are two additional lines in that Psalm which we usually don’t quote, where in their longing and despair the Judeans wish the most terrible fate for their captors. We need to be careful, missing where home is, lest we wander forever, as the 18th century poet Hakuin described, “like someone in the midst of water, crying out in thirst, like the child of a wealthy home, wandering among the poor.”

While this is our home, we usually need to wander, to travel, to seek in order to find it. Weird, maybe. But it is the way things are. So, I don’t disparage pilgrimage and wayfaring. But it is to a purpose.

There is a story, attributed to various Jewish sages, of an honest and godly but poor young man, who lives in a small ramshackle house in Kiev. The young man dreams of a treasure buried by a lamppost near a bridge. He takes off on his pilgrim way and wanders until he finds the location in his dream.

But, shovel in hand, he is stopped from digging by a watchman. When he confesses his reason for being there, the watchman laughs at him and says he himself has dreamed for years of a hidden treasure buried in a poor man’s basement. But he wouldn’t be bothered to look for it. It’s just a dream. The young man realizes that the basement the watchman described is his very own back in Kiev. He returns home, digs and finds his treasure.

So here’s the message. This very place is heaven. This very heart is the mind of God. And these very hands are made to do the work of the divine.

By James Ishmael Ford, Minister, First Unitarian Church in Providence, Rhode Island