When you’re not home, home has a way of finding you. I’m not referring to home as the place you live, the house, condo, concrete box in the sky in our bigger cities though that may be home for many. I’m talking about home as the place we belong, an emotional space, a holy place, a God space.
I was sent to fill in for a couple of sick guys on Vancouver Island a few years ago and ended up, after a while, in Nanaimo, the city I was born in. And, unlike my brother and sister had clear memories of being just old enough than they were to remember the place. And to have a deep attachment to it.
For years I wondered why, in spite of telling myself that I belonged in and to Vancouver I never really felt that I was. It’s one of the most beautiful cities in the world. There are things I do love about it but it was never really home. Any place you have to convince yourself is home simply isn’t. When you’re not as comfortable in the place you live as you are in another town or city or place, the place you live in not home.
It was in that time that I was loaned out to Nanaimo that it hit Home that Vancouver Island was where I belonged. My God space. My home. I was assigned a job in Alert Bay where I’d never been before. I sort of knew where it was but I can’t say had any idea of how to get there or what to do or where to stay once I got there.
After consulting with my co-workers I packed up for, at least, a night in a town called Port McNeill near the northern tip of Vancouver Island and away I went for a 4 and a half hour drive.
It was minutes after turning north on to what we call the Parkway that bypasses Nanaimo to the west, perhaps moments. I don’t remember which. I was peacefully driving then I glanced over to the right side of the road and saw a rock formation. It was then that I was struck by the certainty that I was home. The rock had been gently folded over the eons as the complex dance of plate tectonics pushes the east coast of the Island under the North American plate. Not much, really. You can find these formations all over the east coast of the Island and I had seen them many times before this bit of rock.
What happened next was something I hadn’t experienced before. There was a moment of overwhelming peace, followed by excitement and then longing.
I was home. Again, not home as in a building but Home as in the place my body and soul belonged. The longing was that I would have to leave soon to return to Vancouver where I didn’t belong.
The closest I can come to this is what’s often called “conversion experience” where everything suddenly changed all at once and permanently. Similar to Saul on the road to Damascus shortly before he became Paul. While this experience didn’t result in a religious conversion it did result in a sudden change in my life. I stopped denying that my longing to return to Vancouver Island was mere childhood memory and resentment at being torn away from a place I loved to a reality. A spiritual reality. A God moment.
In 2005 I returned to Vancouver Island. It would be nice to report that everything has gone spectacularly well since my return but it hasn’t. Well it has and it hasn’t.
In 2006 I was rushed into Royal Jubilee hospital for a heart condition that was threatening to kill me and operated on to fix a valve problem I’d had since birth. Any time your heart is traveling on at 186 beats per minute you have a problem! Worked on, I need to say, by some of the finest doctors and nurses in this field anywhere in the world. So here I am, pacemaker, mechanical valve and I sound something like an old grandfather clock!
In 2009 I had a seizure while driving on the Island Highway between Port Alice and Port Hardy and ended up snapping a 100 ft utility pole in two and a broken back. I almost took the power out in Port Hardy, too! Well, my truck did!
Now I have chronic pain, officially disabled and kind of pushed into retirement from a job I loved and now being forced to move because I can no longer look after a house and property I love.
For someone who relapsed into alcoholism so often between 1991 and 2002 you’d think I’d have taken refuge there but not again. For whatever reason, I haven’t had so much as an urge to. This May I’ll celebrate 11 years clean and sober by the grace of God and my guardian angel.
The past three years have been a series of God moments. The past month the same as I’ve had to retire, face the move and found myself more in love with my family than I’ve ever been.
All of which has done nothing but confirm to me that God is not distant and off in this far away place called heaven. God, or at least the spirit of God, is present and here all around us. The spirit of God is in everything around us, in the landscape of this Island that nurtures me. In the plant life that is reappearing after a dreary, dark depressing winter. In my cats who are always there when I need a kitty cuddle or purr. In the people I know in the buildings, or physical plant in modern speak, that make up my Church and the people in it. Even in my moments of pain and doubt. There to remind me that I’m a child of God, as are we all, every human on this planet. As is all life on this planet.
Jesus, in the Gospels, insisted that the Kingdom of God was breaking through if only we had the eyes to see, the ears to hear and the willingness to see it. It’s always been here. It only has had to break through human stubbornness, denial, busy-ness and narcissism.
I’ve seen it, when my mind is quiet and I’m in a garden tending to the plants and life there. Flashes of it, at least. I’ve felt it in my moments of greatest pain and in the presence of my guardian angel when I’ve had my seizures. In the company of my family.
God moments. Those moments of peace, clarity and humility. Those moments when I can say “thank you” or “I love you” with a generous, humble and genuine heart. Those moments when I’m what God wants me to be.
Me.