All of us are trying to find a way home.
Written by: Rachel Tulloch
“All of life is a coming home,” Robin Williams begins in the famous prelude to Patch Adams. “Salesmen, secretaries, coal miners, beekeepers, sword swallowers, all of us, all the restless hearts of the world, all trying to find a way home.”
For some of us, home has been a place that offered us a degree of safety and family bonds we could count on. Home was where we could let down our guard and be ourselves, where we were known for who we are, where we played and laughed and fought and cried. It was where we first learned how to share space with others, those given to us, for better and sometimes for worse. For others, the memories of what should have been home are mostly painful, because it was a place that harmed us instead of holding us. But whatever our early experiences of home were, all of us are longing for something more than what home in this broken and often brutal world can ever be.
Although we usually hear the word “homeless” used to describe people without housing, homelessness is a problem that runs deeper than our emergency housing crisis. In our world today, many people of all backgrounds and levels of privilege feel increasingly lonely, without the bonds of family and community that make us feel held in this world. Many of us are seeking these bonds, looking for those people and places that make us feel that we are in this life together.
Some friends in our community who have been living rough for years panhandled with a cardboard sign that read, “Houseless but not homeless,” a clever way of reminding us that having a house is different from having a home. You can have a mansion and still not have a home. You can be deprived of an adequate dwelling place and still find a way to forge the bonds of belonging, familiarity, mutual care, responsibility, and family that form the beating heart of what we mean by home anyway. I am continually amazed by the genius of those in our community when it comes to domesticating outdoor spaces, finding ways to make public places meet needs that we usually reserve for private ones: makeshift showers, welcome mats outside cardboard structures, furniture arranged like a cozy living room, art hung on a fence.
One summer day a couple of years ago, I walked into an alley and recognized a friend from our community. She was reclining on an old mattress, with her few belongings carefully arranged around its edges. She patted the empty space on the mattress, and I flopped down beside her. For the next hour or so, we chatted about life. She gave me advice, and we laughed together. Even hospitality is possible without a house.
And yet, we all know that people should not have to resort to homemaking under such difficult conditions. The precarity of life without shelter or warmth does not provide the safety or stability a home should offer, and there are few, if any, spaces in our city where people are allowed to stay without having their homes quickly dismantled and being forced to move on.
In the midst of all this, while we work and long for a world where everyone has a place to call home and people to call family, our little community at Sanctuary works to create a sense of sharing life together. We do this by offering, in small ways, some of what a house provides: an address to get your mail, a safe place to lie down for a few hours, a shower, somewhere to come in from the cold. We also seek to become home for each other: making memories, eating a hot meal around a table, building lasting friendships, holding each other while we cry, dancing to good music, walking together through whatever struggles life throws our way. And together, we dream and hope for the world God promises is coming, one where we are all truly at home.