"Welcome Home."

Rev. Dr. Morris Hudgins.
September 12, 1999.

Introduction
Today we have called this service a "homecoming." What do I mean by this? A home is a place of shelter, a place of protection against the elements. Robert Frost once wrote (in "The Death of a Hired Man") that

Home is the place where, when you have to go there,
They have to take you in.

I would hope that a home is more than this. A home is a place where you want to be, a place that grounds your life and makes you whole. For years Universalist churches have had "Homecomings." For them it was a time when people came back together after a time of leaving. Many Universalist children were encouraged to leave their rural communities and move to the cities where they could find work. This was part of the reason Universalism in this country declined.

To have a Homecoming meant that you would return to your home community and be with people that were important to you. Homecomings are still popular in many Universalist churches. I have been invited to speak at such gatherings in North Carolina. There is an air of celebration. Unlike the Prodigal Son, these children of the farmlands went off to find a better life, more profitable if not more meaningful.

The return to a Homecoming was a reminder of where they came from and to whom they are still connected. These rural Universalist communities seem to have another characteristic: They have a close relationship to the land. Many Universalists were farmers.

When I was invited to speak a second time at the Red Hill Universalist Church in Red Hill, North Carolina, I said, "I would come back only if I can spend some time in the community." I told them I like to fish. A few days later I received a call from a member of the Church. They said they heard I like to fish and would come to speak if they took me fishing. They did. I did. We did. We caught a mess of fish in a small pond.

Each fall they would invite me back to their Homecoming. They wanted to know if I wanted to fish again. Unfortunately, my fishing friend had died, but I was welcomed to fish in his pond if I wanted to. I couldn't. It wouldn't have been the same.

This spring I learned that one of my colleagues, a minister in Evansville, Indiana has had a partner for over twenty years. Her partner has breast cancer that had spread to her bones. I told them I would like to visit them on my way back from visiting my family in Missouri. I learned they like to fish and play golf.

I spent a night in Evansville in August. We fished and we played golf. I did this in my new role as Good Offices Minister for the District. I felt honored to be in their home, playing golf on one of their favorite golf courses, sitting on the bank of a large pond with a fishing pole in my hand. On that day the fish won. We fed them our worms. They slept well that night. So did I.

I realized while I sat there on that pond, that it didn't matter if we caught any fish. This woman who was fighting for her life had found a refuge. When she was sitting on this bank, which she did most every afternoon, she was at peace.

The ducks would come by and visit. She had given each duck a name. She would talk to them. Again, I felt honored to be sitting their experiencing part of her world. I hope to return someday and sit by that pond with a fishing pole in my hand.

You can minister to some in a hospital and you can minister to someone on a pond or on a golf course. You can also be ministered to. As we sat there and talked I realized that I had not done this in Ohio. I said to myself: "How can you have a home and not a pond, a lake or a river to fish? To me this is part of building a home. You need to find such favorite places. I learned last year you can buy a house in a short time, but it takes time to build a home. Our Homecoming Service is a reminder that we all need a home, and a home is larger that our house.

Staying Put
Last year before I left Raleigh, North Carolina, one of my colleagues recommended a book, titled, Staying Put by Scott Russell Sanders. I think they suggested the book for two reasons. One reason was many of my colleagues were calling for me to stay in North Carolina. They did not understand why I wanted to move on. They did not know what was pulling me toward the Midwest.

A second reason my friend suggested I read this book is because it is about Ohio, though it speaks to all of us. It addresses one of the great issues bothering Americans at the end of the 20th century: Whether or not to pull up stakes when the luster of a job or a relationship ends, life goes stale, or in some cases conflicted.

Our culture encourages us to do just this. It is often easier and more inviting to move somewhere else instead of staying put. Sanders quotes the words of John Berryman who wrote a creed for our rootlessness:

Exile is in our time like blood. Depend on
Interior journeys taken anywhere.

I'd rather live in Venice or Kyoto,
Except for the languages, but
O really I don't care where I live or have lived.
Wherever I am, young Sir, my wits about me,
Memory blazing, I'll cope & make do.

According to this philosophy, it doesn't matter where one lives, where one comes from, or what your relationship is to the place where you are. Sanders would like to challenge this philosophy. He writes:

It is a bold claim, but also a hazardous one. For all his wits, Berryman in the end failed to cope well enough to stave off suicide. The truth is, none of us can live by wits alone. For even the barest existence, we depend on the labors of other people, the fruits of the earth, the inherited goods of our given place. In our interior journeys are cut loose entirely from that place, then both we and the neighborhood will suffer.

I agree with Sanders: Rootlessness and exile are the two greatest problems in American life. Listen to Gary Snyder:

One of the key problems in American society now, it seems to me, is people's lack of commitment to any given place—which, again, is totally unnatural and outside of history. Neighborhoods are allowed to deteriorate, landscapes are allowed to be strip-mined, because there is nobody who will live there and take responsibility; they'll just move on. The reconstruction of a people and of a life in the United States depends in part on people, neighborhood by neighborhood, county by county, deciding to stick it out and make it work where they are, rather than flee.

It is easy to argue with Sanders and others who want us to stay where we are. There are times when it is time to leave. Staying put does not solve all the world's problems. In addition we must be comfortable with where we are. Sanders argues with his own thesis:

But if you stick in one place, won't you become a stick-in-the-mud? If you stay put, won't you be narrow, backward, dull? You might. I have met ignorant people who never moved; and I have also met ignorant people who never stood still. Committing yourself to a place does not guarantee that you will become wise, but neither does it guarantee that you will become parochial. Who knows better the limitations of a province or culture than the person who has bumped into them time and again? The history of settlement in my own district and the continuing abuse of land hereabouts provoke me to rage and grief. I know the human legacy here too well to glamorize it.

We all know that story. None of our families came from here. America is a country born in displacement. We say America was discovered in 1492, but what about those people who were here when Columbus arrived in the islands that he called America? What about the native Americans who were here long before, who were displaced, exiled to another land, and then another, and then another?

This act of displacement, so basic to our history, set the tone for our nation just as did our displacement of the Africans who became our slaves. What about these people called the "Mound Builders," the tribesmen and women who buried their dead in mounds so they could look up to them and honor them. These were people who knew their place and had a good relationship to the earth.

The Indians had a different philosophy. I would say it is better. These people who lived on this land, but didn't believe they owned it, settled this land and flourished between 1,000 b.c. and 1500 a.d. We called them heathens and pagans. What they did was know the power of the earth, the sky, the rivers, winds. They respected this power.

The name of our river, the Ohio, came from the Indians, probably the Iroquois, who called it "Oyo." There are different interpretations of what it meant. The French translated it as "beautiful river" but scholars later would translate it as "great white river," "river of the white foam," or "bloody river." All of these could be true. And they would be. For our ancestors would come and find the water white, interrupted by rocks, and would make it bloody. As Sanders writes:

While engineers saw the Ohio as a problem in plumbing, and explorers and merchants saw it as a highway to somewhere else, and politicians saw it as an avenue for power, and speculators saw it as an investment, there have always been others who looked at the river and found that most intangible of commodities, fine scenery.

Thomas Jefferson called it "the most beautiful river on earth."

For those who have recently moved to Cincinnati, and those who have been here many years, you probably know the central role of the river in the development of this area. Sanders was born and lived all his life near the Ohio. He describes it this way:

The watershed of the Ohio stretches into fourteen states, including ones as far afield as New York, Maryland, and Alabama, draining an area that is roughly the size of France. The basin reached from the Appalachian Mountains in the east to the Illinois prairies in the west, from the Great Lakes in the northern to the Great Smoky Mountains in the south. Two sizable rivers, the Monongela and Allegheny, give rise to the Ohio at Pittsburgh, and before it empties into the Mississippi at Cairo, almost a thousand miles later, it gathers in dozens of tributaries, including the Muskingum, Kanawha, Scioto, Big Sand, Great and Little Miami, Kentucky, Green, Wabash, Cumberland, and Tennessee. Its wideth varies from seven hundred feet in the upper reaches to nearly a mile at the mouth. In low stages, it pours twenty-two thousand cubic feet of water into the Mississippi every second, and in flood it pours sixteen hundred thousand per second, an amount that would cover a football field to the heigh of a four-story building. Those flood waters can be as muddy as the Old Man's, but generally the Ohio is clearer, slow to mix with the "think and yaller" current of the Mississippi, as Mark Twain observed. Depending on the light, the season, and the stage of the river, the water can remind you of coffee with cream, the amber of tobacco juice, the green of moss, the lavender of lilacs, or robin's egg blue; or the surface can become a liquid mirror, doubling the islands and hills. (p. 63)

Conclusions
We all know this history I have described this morning. It is a history we can brood about feeling guilty. Some would like for us to just this. I choose another path. Remember, what my friends in North Carolina said to me. They advised me to stay put. What I had to remind them was that I was not running from somewhere, I was being pulled my somewhere else. I was not going away I was coming toward.

I was born in the Midwest. Those that take my Spiritual Odyssey class next month will learn that I crossed the Mississippi in 1968, went East, loved North Carolina, Virginia, Pennsylania and Florida. Several times the office of settlement asked if I would consider going back to the Midwest, but I always declined.

I always said to myself, when my children are out of college is the time when I will consider such a move. That time came a year and a half ago when my son, Darren graduated from Virginia Tech, married and moved to the Washington, D.C. area.

I contacted the UUA and said I will now consider such a move and looked primarily at the Midwest. When Northern Hills popped up on the list, I felt I had to take it seriously—the location was just too idea. During the search process I was pulled in other directions. I had always wanted a historic church. I thought I had to consider New England, our denominational home.

When the decision had to be made, I selected Cincinnati and Northern Hills. I have not regretted this decision for one moment. Living in Cincinnati allows Marti and me to drive to important places in one day. We can drive to St. Louis, the home of my birth and my mother and siblings, the home of Marti' parents, Chattanooga, to two of her daughters, and two grandchildren, in Columbus and Nashville. A third grandchild should be born in two weeks in Nashville.

When my friend suggested reading the book, Staying Put, I don't think he realized how much I would agree with the author. I longed for the "staying put" kind of life. I wanted to live in a place where I could settle and spend the rest of my ministry and maybe longer. Again, I quote from Sanders:

I wish to consider the virtue and discipline of staying put. I dwell here in company—with my wife and children, my neighbors, the people of my city, and with all the creatures that run and root and soar. I desire no home apart from this companionship. (p. xv)

This is exactly how I felt in moving to Northern Hills and Wyoming. I wanted a place to settle. I realized that a home is different from a house. I bought a house but wanted to build a home. I have spent the last year making our house our home.

This summer I made a trip to St. Louis where I met my daughter, Cara, and spent a few days with my family. While there I was pulled to visit the home where I grew up. I took Cara to that house. It was so much smaller than I remembered. My parents were part of the white flight in St. Louis County. They moved to a much desired larger house in an all white suburb and left a neighborhood that was becoming integrated. They had the land to expand their home but chose to leave. My mother has said many time: the neighborhood has gone down hill. I have never said: "I wish you would have stayed and improved it."

On this trip back home I stood in front of that house, and saw the owner who has done just that. He has just put new siding, a new porch on the front, and I imagined that he was proud of what he had accomplished. I took a picture and have sent it to my mom. I won't say what I have wanted to for years: "Our nation will never be united as long as people keep leaving their neighborhood for somewhere else."

I have not come this morning to tell you to stay where you are. This is your decision. What I have come to say is that we all need to care for the place where we live. We need to get to know this place, ground ourselves here. Even though we will not likely here the rest of our lives, like the people who came before us, we need to learn about this land, the hills, the valleys, the power of the river, the descendants who fought here for freedom, for themselves and others. We need to preserve the best of this area, meet the people who live here, make friends, involve ourselves in the community, have some influence while we can. Sanders writes:

The work of belonging to a place is never finished. There will always be more to know than any mind or lifetime can hold. But that is no argument against learning all one can. . .The wilderness I seek is always underfoot, and the power I seek flows in with every breath. We cannot lay hold of the sacred; we can only point toward it, say where we have glimpsed it.

The water you brought this morning, is part of that sacred life. It is my hope that you felt that sacredness wherever you were, and you will find it here in this place, with these people. You are on sacred ground. May we make it holy by our grounding ourselves here. With Sanders,

I believe we can only be adequate to the earth if we are adequate to our neighborhoods. At the same time, we can live wisely in or chosen place only if we recognize its connections to the rest of the planet. The challenge is to see one's region as a focus of processes that extend over the earth and out to the edges of the universe; to realize that this place is only one of an infinite number of places where the powers of nature show forth.

May we go forth and find those special places—a place to find solitude, peace, when troubles come. May we learn what we can, do what we can, be together, preserving, building, not conquering, but creating a home together, a place of refuge, a place of freedom, and love. Welcome Home.