Babylon, Home, and the Kin(g)dom of God

Home is a “whole in the ground.” It is where we go to become complete. It is where we live most deeply. For Christians, “kingdom of God” is the ultimate expression of home, and while it is utterly unlike any home we have known, I think it is the ground and measure of every real home we have encountered. Any home we know is on the way to the ultimate Home prepared for us by God and to which we are guided by Christ and speeded by the Holy Spirit. So we are moving from home to Home.

I think that the kingdom of God is like a homecoming, only this is a traveling festival that comes out to meet you where you are. Here you find all the people are your kin, and you meet your many, many brothers and sisters, and all the maternal and paternal figures, too. Wherever Jesus went, there was the kin(g)dom of God, and all his brothers and sisters were with him, as well as his mother and father, much to the confusion of even his natural kin. Home, the ultimate Home, is where the Sacred Heart is.

Today, the Spirit, not Jesus in the flesh, finds us where we are and brings us from home on to Home. That spiritual journey need not be a literal peregrination, but it has been for millions, and that includes me. And this is where I may say with some pride, and a little irony, that Babylon was the origin of my pilgrimage toward the kin(g)dom. What I find lacking in this community today cannot diminish the wealth of what I received when I was younger and not far along in the process of becoming.

And what riches! I got educated. I discovered reason. I acquired morals and a conscience. I was given responsibilities. Again, the Spirit finds us where we are. It may be the mind or the heart or the hands, wherever our being is centered. My family taught me to learn, and the home that Babylon once was prepared me to think. Therefore, the Spirit that stirred my spirit first touched me by the mind.

But no person is merely a thinker. Sometime, somewhere, we’ve got to feel and experience. The Spirit wants to be—has to be—in our heart and hands, too. Living in Babylon, I could never develop a discipline of the heart and the hands, and the Spirit was not going to touch me in those parts of my being there.

And so the Spirit moved, and it moved me out of Babylon.

Living and studying at Cornell University, I honed the discipline of the mind, struggling with questions that life in Babylon only barely foreshadowed. Having thought my way past unbelief, God opened another way, and the mind gladly gave way to the discipline of the heart. And for the first time I called Ithaca my home.

But I was untimely ripped from Ithaca when I graduated, prompting a spiritual crisis. When I returned to Babylon, I claimed faith and the faith tradition mislaid by my family years before. Now I fought my way past the dead end of cynical irony, and, for a time, by force of will, Babylon became a home again. This time around I found men and women of faith willing to walk slowly, with wonderful patience, with the person dying to become a new being. Nobody knew or cared if I was smart or intelligent. They looked at my heart, beating like an infant’s.

Yet for all their nurture, I could not shed my tough shell, I could not flower among them, and I could not join their community of natural hearts. Instead, I lived in contradiction, with one eye on the will be and the other on the was. Too often I found myself breaking rocks, expecting to find living springs within them, only to find devils and dust. When I was not looking, my own heart continued to petrify. Left to my own devices, I could not keep myself from being hardened. I prayed to be lifted out of the quarry and planted into fertile soil.

I thought that soil would be a seminary or a friary. It turned out to be a ghetto.

Living and teaching in the inner city of Baltimore, I honed the habits of the heart. I loved and hated and praised and envied and rejoiced and sorrowed more deeply than I thought myself capable. With more fecklessness than wisdom, I claimed Baltimore as my home.

But after two years of so much feeling without an equal knowing for my moods, the Spirit left me, and my spirit was emptied. Determined to live in poverty in Baltimore, I got all the banal wretchedness I wanted, but it was not pleasing to God’s children and of no great significance to God. And I was wasting all my talents. Living in Baltimore, I could never develop a proper discipline of the hands.

The Spirit moved me to consult experience a little more seriously, and it moved me out of Baltimore, but not before I had a little epiphany. Providentially, it happened one weekend in Ithaca, during my college reunion … a homecoming. Here, where all my cares were taken from me, I realized it was time to integrate the disciplines of the mind, heart, and hands: to think, to feel, to act, to experience all at once! Theology was the answer to a question it took so long to ask correctly, and the signposts pointed to Boston, the epicenter of American Christian theology.

Knowing I was destined to move on, I returned to Babylon for a short time to prepare for this new journey. These thirteen months felt like exile. Looking back on yesterday’s glories in Ithaca and Baltimore while my eye was training on tomorrow’s possibilities in Boston, I neglected the present moment. In Babylon, I was merely a boarder on the border of a transformation. In light of the present, I hope all has been forgiven.

Living, studying, and serving in Boston, I think that for the first time I am honing all three disciplines in good measure. Thanks be to God, and forgive my faults, kind reader, because it’s certain that my thoughts sometimes go astray; my heart isn’t always in the right place; and my deeds fail to meet the promise of my words.

It should not disturb you or me that Babylon or any place that was a home becomes not a home. The Spirit wanders, and we with it. Besides, none of these present homes are the Home that is symbolized by the phrase “kingdom of God.” They reveal and occasionally manifest what that Home is like, but that Home is yet to come. To find the kin(g)dom of God, you must first leave home.

I remember this distinctly. Once upon a time, when I was still a high school senior on the verge of starting college, the superintendent of our hometown’s public schools told me in words to this effect, “You’ve done all you could possibly do in West Babylon, and West Babylon has done all it could do for you. Now it’s time for you to move on.” He said more than even he knew.