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In Robert Frost's famous poem "The Death of the Hired Man", Warren the farmer says the oft-quoted lines, "Home is the place where, when you have to go there,/They have to take you in." His wife Mary replies, "I should have called it/Something you somehow haven’t to deserve." Old Silas the hired man has come to their farm to die because, inexplicable as it seems, their place is his only home; not his wealthy brother's house, but the farm folks who hired him to do the haying, year after year.
Do you know where your home is? Not just the place you leave from in the morning and come back to after work, the place where you eat and sleep. Do you know where or what is the place where, when you have to go there, they have to take you in? I see people online speak of "unhoused people" rather than "the homeless", but a man sleeping over a sidewalk vent, a knapsack for a pillow and one dirty blanket over him for cover, must surely have no place to go where they have to take him in.
I have rented my current apartment for five years. I've been a good tenant, and I am content here; my neighbors are okay, and the building is near my work, pharmacy, clinic, bank, bus lines. But there is little necessity to my being here. The building owners don't have to let me stay. I don't own anything, my refrigerator, my stove, the washers and dryers in the basement laundry room.
Nevertheless, I have found this year that I do have a home. Where my home is seems as inexplicable to me, sometimes, as Warren and Mary's farm being the home of their hired man. Because it turned out to be the church where my late ex-husband was the organist, where our marriage slowly went to pieces. It turned out to be the Episcopal Church. It turned out to be the Anglican tradition, and Christianity.
I sat in the rectory parlor one day with the current rector of the church, a man around forty years old who was installed as the priest in charge back in 2017. At that time my ex-husband had just died, and as he no longer lived in the city where we both grew up, I did not get to attend his funeral. I looked at young Father P. (young to me, younger than the former rector whom I had so disliked), and said, "There was a time when I thought I would never want to set foot in this place again."
"And nobody would have blamed you," he replied. He already knew something of my history and connection with the parish.
That parish, its former rector, and the attached school, which my ex served as music teacher, worked my ex-husband to death. It demanded of him two full-time jobs for less than the pay that one of them deserved. It offered little by way of health insurance; the school was constantly changing providers, something my ex was often too careless to keep up with. The former rector, now deceased, had as far as I could tell no skills for the job; he was useless as an administrator, clumsy as a liturgical celebrant, a shallow and disorganized preacher, and I would sooner have made my confession to a stray dog than to him. I don't think telling the truth about someone counts as speaking ill of the dead.
It's no wonder that with the ties of marriage cut, and my ex-husband looking for work elsewhere, I ceased to have any connection with the place. It's no wonder that I experimented with other spiritual paths and practices during and after my ex's career at the parish. What was a wonder was to come back for a service of Lessons and Carols at Christmastime and find people happy to see me--just me, not my ex, not my former stepdaughter, not my in-laws, just me, and a friend from work, whom people were pleased to meet. I had been holding a grudge against the place, but no one there seemed to have any bad feelings about me.
The parish was more than happy to have me come back. Strangely, so was Jesus, who had seemed so distant for so long. So were the saints whose lives and writings I had never stopped loving--Julian of Norwich, Hildegard of Bingen, St. Benedict, Perpetua and Felicity the martyrs. It wasn't so much that I had to go there, as that being there was something I didn't have to deserve.
Home is something you haven't had to deserve, Mary says to Warren. You may not deserve it, but you get it anyway. This is also a definition of grace--a gift from God that doesn't have to be deserved. I don't feel like I deserve to be at home, back in the Church, in touch with Jesus--but thank God, deserving has nothing to do with it. Home is grace. God's grace is home.
I wish a blessed Holy Week and Easter to those who are celebrating with me. I also wish a happy Ostara, a blessed Ramadan, and a jolly Purim to everyone observing those holy days. Peace to all.
Rembrandt's wife is Merri-Todd Webster