What's to Like About Babylon?

I promised to write a few more words about my first home. What good is Babylon? What good was it? These are a few of my favorite things….

1. West Babylon Junior High School, in my mind, is the flagship of our public schools (http://www.westbabylon.k12.ny.us). It is a model of discipline and enthusiasm. Its teachers steer hundreds of children through the first perilous years of adolescence with wisdom, humor, and firmness. My sister, an art teacher here, now gives back what she was most generously given by the school. (Historical footnote: Walt Whitman taught school in West Babylon in the winter of 1836-1837.)

2. On the strength and creativity of volunteers of all ages, the James Street Players (http://www.jamesstreetplayers.org/) consistently produces some of the best community theater on Long Island. The Babylon United Methodist Church has hosted the company for 40 years.

3. Main Street, which runs through Babylon Village, is one of the most convivial places to congregate in this town. Sure, the shops and restaurants are a little more expensive here, but you know that you’re somewhere, and you feel like you are someone. That is to say, when you’re hanging around Main Street, you’re not anonymous, nor would you want to be. Here, you forget that you live in the suburbs. For more about Babylon Village:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Babylon_(village),_New_York

4. Belmont Lake State Park (http://www.longislandexchange.com/parks/belmontlake-statepark.html) is a hidden gem in my own backyard, North Babylon. Here, my dad took me on a rowboat ride once. My sister the shutterbug has taken her finest pictures here. My brother and I have gone here for long walks. If I don’t spend more time here in the future, I will regret it profoundly.

5. The Terrace Diner, located off Sunrise Highway. My idea of an all-American restaurant: a menu with something for everybody, generous portions, and low prices. A place like this reveals the glory of working-class dining. This place was great before its renovation several years ago, and is simply the finest eatery of its kind today. Check it out: http://www.newsday.com/entertainment/localguide/119188,0,1886739.venue

6. West Babylon Public Library (http://wbab.suffolk.lib.ny.us/), established 1983. I got my first library card here in 1985. I grew a lot in mind thanks to this institution.

7. Our Lady of Grace Roman Catholic Church (http://www.ourladyofgrace.net), for personal reasons. It’s my first faith community, my place of refreshment, and my sanctuary. A lot of what I needed to know about being a Christian I learned here.

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A few more thoughts on Babylon and home:

Sometimes this place will surprise me. Sometimes the television is actually turned off. Sometimes there’s no traffic charging down the street. You can turn your head all the way around and not see advertising. The only sounds are your breathing and the birds tweeting nearby. We can surrender our distress, and the disquiet of the day gives way to stillness. Possibilities present themselves.

Sometimes you’re not mimicking the small talk on the radio. Sometimes you discover to your amazement that you haven’t been gossiping after all, and the conversation is still enjoyable. There are pauses, and they feel proper, victorious, earned. In those moments lie prophecy.

Even in Babylon, you can still dream during the sunsets. You can marvel at the full moon sagging low on the horizon and looking larger than you ever imagined.

It’s easy to slow down here. All you have to do is walk.

Lord, have mercy on those Babylonians who work 45 hours a week, hurtling themselves to and from a corporate high-rise or “park” by locomotive or automobile. Have mercy on those who rise before daylight, work in concrete fortresses where light never comes in, and return home in darkness.

Babylon, I pray that even in your thin, gravelly suburban soil, a more indigenous culture may yet take root, and a community of memory and deep ground may emerge. The Spirit calls your children forth, and they leave, but will there be any who stay? I cannot say, but for the young I hope that your land may one day be a place for living as well as leaving.

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.

Babylon as Exile

God is everywhere, even among the concrete ribbons of Babylon. But I am not here; that is, when I am here, I am not being. I am not supposed to be here anymore, maybe never again. Babylon is my hometown; it is not my home.

Home now is Boston. Once it was Baltimore. Once it was Ithaca. Once and again it was Long Island. One day, maybe, none of these places or any other in this world will be home.

Any place can become a home and later cease to be a home. Homes change, even if the places do not. Homes change, even if the people you know in those places do not. All it takes for home to change is a change in the person led to wander. A person can have a home in many places or in none at all. Both may be true at the same time for some persons. You call such persons nomads, pilgrims, or sojourners. If you believe some people are meant to be sent away from every and any home to every and any home, you can call them apostles in a secular sense. Or maybe you just call them homeless.

Babylon is a home for many others, but it is no longer the place where I belong. Living here in Babylon, I am immobilized. I have no car and I do not drive, and public transportation is shamefully inadequate. You cannot live in community when you cannot easily reach out to find your community. The immobilization is thus also figurative and spiritual. Few friends do I have left here in this neighborhood. There are three places left for me here in which the presence of the holy dissolves the barrier between sacred and profane: the church, the library, and (believe it or not) the public schools, which I visit from time to time. But one does not live in these places; the home must also be such a place, and if it is not, you wither, because the rest of these places cannot sustain your being. In my parents’ home, secularism prevails, and I suffocate whenever I visit. Other homes my brother and I have visited in this neighborhood are little different. I am pessimistic about the prospect of making an independent home for myself anywhere on Long Island that uncovers the presence of the holy that I have realized in experiences elsewhere. In his own way, my brother, newly graduated from Ithaca College and returned to Babylon, is apprehensive about the project of living authentically, dodging Scylla and Charybdis while sailing on the brackish waters of the stinking suburban seas.

Three times I have moved out of Babylon, and each time I left, I left less of me behind me. Twice I have returned, and I each time I stayed, I felt like I was losing more of me. Even to visit for several days, as I do now, is to feel increasingly constricted every day. It is time to go for good. So long, Babylon, and hello, Boston.

This post demands a companion piece, lest I come across as ungrateful toward the place that was a home for twenty years and more, and the people who made that home. Though I have grown out of Babylon, I grew up in Babylon. Of those formative years in the home that was Babylon before it became a place of exile, I hope to write more later. Until then, happy new year, friends.