Finding Home by Rev. Mary McKinnon Ganz, Sept. 27, 2009

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Finding Home by Rev. Mary McKinnon Ganz, Sept. 27, 2009

         People leave home for all kinds of reasons. The novelist Jeanette Winterson left home as a teenager because, giddy in love with a girl, she confessed to her evangelical Christian mother, and the response made her know she could not spend another night under that roof and keep her soul intact. As she walked out the door, she wrote, her mother asked her, “Jeanette, why be happy when you can be normal?”

         Winterson spent a few years sleeping in cars, on friends’ couches, in a teacher’s storage room. During those times, she had many occasions to ponder her mother’s question. From the relative stability of the teacher’s storage closet, she saved up and bought herself a tiny rug. “From then on, wherever I found myself, even in a doorway, I put down my little rug, and I began to feel calm,” she wrote. “Better than calm, I imagined myself free.”

         And isn’t this what “home” is to all of us? – whether it’s in a doorframe or a castle, when we can look about us and see something that reminds us of who we are, a bulwark, however fragile, against the forces of fear and fraudulence that lurk everywhere? As human beings, we are always asking ourselves, “Can I be myself here? Can I be free?”

         Can you be yourself at your house? How about at this church? Is it home to you? – is it a place where you can be “authentic, evocative, and true to the moment?” Those are words I copied down from the side of a styrofoam cup they served coffee in at a Best Western motel that was once my shelter for a few nights on vacation in Oregon. How can anyone be true to herself in a culture where authenticity is marketed on the side of a Styrofoam cup of motel coffee?

         Lately I’ve been musing on the histories a place carries, histories that are unseen and unspoken, largely unknown to the conscious mind. This summer I read Home, a novel by Marilynne Robinson, her second about a small Iowa town called Gilead. In this story, set in the 1950s, ghosts are everywhere – whispering the unspoken conflict that can brew deep inside the happiest of families, and also whispering the lost histories of the town – first as a hotbed of the abolition movement, then as a place where hooligans started a fire in the town’s single African-American church and drove all the people of color to move away. “

         People inhabit these homes and towns, unaware of these histories but affected by them anyway.

         When I used to do street retreats in the Tenderloin District of San Francisco, I would spend hours of every day walking on concrete, which I can tell you is exhausting to the body and to the spirit. Crossing UN Plaza, built to commemorate the founding of the United Nations 64 years ago, I would sometimes imagine back to a time when there was no concrete on that site, a time when all of it was forest and the feet that crossed those lands were Native feet. I imagined I could hear their spirits calling to me from under the concrete, and that was deeply disturbing. At the same time, crossing the Plaza with me were other ghosts – homeless men and women who have no piece of ground to call their own, who are, in that way, unattached to the earth.

         What does it mean to lose your home? These are the words of political science professor Padraig O’Malley: “… you are without the reference point to which you instinctively turn to define who you are in relation to the larger order of things … you are deprived of your sense of place and privacy, your sense of belonging, of rootedness and community, of being part of a social configuration that gives context to your aspirations and purpose to living …. To lose your home is to lose part of yourself, of the meaning in your life; it induces a profound sense of loss and the grieving that inescapably accompanies loss.”

         This is not about housing alone, of course. Think of the Jews wandering homeless in the wilderness for 40 years. In the holiday of Sukkot, the Jewish community celebrates that time because a faith stance toward the world tells them that they are covered by God’s Sukkah of Shalom, God’s care and safekeeping, every day and every night, no matter where they lay their heads. And – on the other side of it -- I’ve known many people who still live within their four walls but who have lost any reference point to which they could turn to define who they are.

         Sometimes I think we as a culture focus on “the problem of the homeless” so we don’t see the homelessness in our own hearts. Those of us who live in homes, like the townspeople in Marilynne Robinson’s Iowa town, can fail to notice the ghosts that populate our histories, and that have something to do with who we are and why we are the way we are today. Just as we make homeless people invisible, we can move through life without confronting our own sense of rootlessness. For some of us, this is true.

         That we have homeless persons in our communities does not mean our system isn’t working, however. On the contrary, what I am afraid it means is that it is working very well. We live in an economic system that works by throwing people into homelessness, and this is one of the reasons – just one – that we all should be out working for meaningful health insurance reform. So many of us are just one catastrophic disease away from living on the streets ourselves.

         What do I mean when I say, “our system works by throwing people into homelessness?” Well -- I have money in the stock market, and I suppose many of you do as well. Before the Wall Street collapse a year ago, during all those years of steadily increasing gains, I noticed something: when the unemployment rate went up, the S&P index went up too, and I got richer,. It did not make me happy to see this, but I did think of it as one of the more visible ways people like me could be reminded that when we benefit by our economic system, inevitably somebody else loses.

         When those of us who are domiciled walk right by a homeless person and don’t see him, our blindness spares us from confronting this reality that about the system by which our bread is buttered.

         In San Francisco, of course, with as many as 15,000 homeless persons on the streets and in shelters on any given night, homelessness is not invisible, at least not if you go down by City Hall, by UN Plaza, or just a block from the glitzy stores at Union Square.

         I was living in San Francisco in the summer of 1977, which was a year I remember very well – and not because Elvis died. I was working for the Associated Press, and the big story of that summer was not Elvis but a drama happening on Kearny and Jackson Streets, where Chinatown met the Financial District. That was the location of the International Hotel, a $50-a-month Single-Room-Occupancy structure where 110 people lived, mostly single men, mostly elderly, mostly Chinese and Filipino.

         By the mid 1970s San Francisco had begun to see itself as an international city, not because of the people who lived there as much as for the international finance that was beginning to flow toward it from the emerging global economy. The International Hotel wound up in the hands of a multinational corporation, after a local financier decreed the property “too valuable to let poor people park on it.” It was decided it would be torn down and on that property would be erected – I kid you not – a garage, for the cars of not-poor people to park on.

         But the tenants of the International Hotel were the beneficiaries of community organizing, and they were not going to go without a fight. It’s a long story, a story of hope and despair, and it ended one August night when the sheriff and his deputies broke down the doors and led those old men into the street, blinking in the lights of the television cameras that were there to record this moment in history.

         Three decades later, the faces of those old men still haunt my dreams.

         People leave home for all kinds of reasons, but that was a moment that should never have happened. Soon after, homeless people began to be visible on the streets of San Francisco, and though it is impossible to make a direct connection, it seems to me that the International Hotel tragedy occurred at a moment in history when we, as a nation, began to look the other way.

We live in lonely with the rent due.

You don’t know me. I don’t know you.

Lost chance blues. Hurt by a glance,

Pretend not to see. You don’t know me.

         The first step toward healing may be this: knowing that these are, indeed, blues for all of us; knowing that we are all connected. That we are homeless when others are homeless.

         So this morning we take as our symbol of hope the Sukkah, a simple hut built of four types of branches, including the willow which adds nothing -- not necessarily anyone’s first choice of a building material but on whose inclusion the integrity of the structure depends. Until we build an economy that can shelter us all – until we see that our safety and our wholeness depend on this, we are all unearthed, rootless, homeless. Like the Jews wandering in the wilderness, may we build a shelter that creates a space for reconciliation, a space for imagining that it can be another way. Then we can all come home.

BENEDICTION

More About Sukkot

• Building a Sukkah

Video

• Watch Rabbi Steve Greenberg Talk About Reconsiliation

• Rosemary Haughton, Song in a Strange Land: The Wellspring Story and the Homelessness of Women
• Marilynne Robinson, Home
• Arthur Waskow, “The Sukkah of Shalom,” in Paul Loeb, ed., The Impossible Will Take a Little While
• Jeanette Winterson, “The Idea of Home”
• The work of ASPAN, Arlington Street Peoples Assistance Network, and the Faithful Fools Street Ministry in San Francisco
• Suzy Augustyn, member of the UU Jewish Awareness Group of this congregation, for help with the Sukkah