Home

We have survived another election. The housing crisis, a rise in interest rates for home loans, the bushfires and floods which  aggravated the housing shortage, those without homes, people seeking refuge and asylum, are some of the factors that dominated the election wars. Issues such as cost of living are closely related to being at home in the world. For many, but especially younger voters, our broader home, the environment is a key consideration.

 Home. What does the word home or housing mean to you? Safety, belonging, thriving, limitlessness, a space to be oneself, a refuge, a space to be rejuvenated are words that describe home for some. For others home is a place to escape from, a place of threat and the violence of abuse, addiction, and control. Home is either a space of expansion when home is safe and nourishing or contraction when home is violent. Between these two points of safety and violence is displacement; a lack of a home because of homelessness or forced migration or the ‘Stolen Generations’ being severed from their land, their home.

 Home is closely linked to identity. Who I am and who you are is largely shaped by where home was and is. Identity is shaped by what home was and is. The close link between the place of home and identity is one of the reasons it is so stressful when we move home or when home is threatened. In 21 years of marriage, we have lived in seven homes, in 6 towns, in 3 provinces, 2 states and 2 countries. Moving home is as stressful as experiencing death, psychologists tell us. Maybe it is because home is closely linked to identity. In moving home, a person’s identity shifts too. Some parts of who we are die.

 The empty caves that line the streets of Woodburn, Broadwater and Lismore were once homes to families whose prized possessions now litter the once flooded streets. What trauma! Our compassion for their loss opens us to vicarious trauma when some of their pain stains our souls, but these are Christ’s wounds, and we carry them willingly hoping that it sucks out the poison of their suffering.

 Mutual indwelling

The over brief consideration on the word ‘home’ illustrates some ways that ‘home’ captures the whole range of human emotions from trauma to safety to flourishing. The point of the scriptures especially in John is how God’s plan is that God makes God’s home within us even as we find our home in God. God’s plan is a process of mutual indwelling – God making God’s home in us and us finding our home in God. To illustrate this process of mutual indwelling the book of Revelation uses the image of God as a city – to live in God is to live in a city where the city itself is God. If God were a city what would God look like? Since the whole city is God, there is no visible temple, because oneness with and in God is the reality of the God city.

 The book of Revelation describes us living in God. The Gospel of John describes how God dwells in us: John 14:23 ‘Jesus answered him, "Those who love me will keep my word, and my Father will love them, and we will come to them and make our home with them.”’ Here, the translation ‘word’ refers to Jesus’ new commandment to Love. When God makes God’s home in us, God doesn’t come as a guest but as a partner, a Beloved. There is no need to vacuum and tidy the house – there is no need to prepare a lavish meal. God makes God’s home within us regardless of the state of our home - whether our lives feel like the homes wrecked by floods, or if our lives are ordered and perfect enough to appear on “Better homes and Gardens.” “The word became flesh and blood and moved into the neighbourhood” according to Eugene Peterson’s translation of John 1:14. What does this tell us about God? It says that the Creator doesn’t just let God’s creation exist. God commits Godself to creation. God in Christ enters into it himself, so as to live in it; and that means to come to rest in it, and to remain there.

 Difficulties

There are at least three difficulties people may experience in accepting an invitation for mutual indwelling. The first difficulty relates to an inability to resonate with metaphor; a lack of imagination and an over literal interpretation of God as a substance, an object, a noun, as a Someone, usually an old man with a beard. If we insist that God is an object, a noun, a Someone, we will never grasp how God makes God’s home in us, and how we make our home in God.

 God is love and those who live in Love live in God (1 John). What makes God God then is not the nodes of identity – father son and holy spirit - but the energy of love that unites father to son and son to father. Teilhard believed that this love energy was at the heart of the Big Bang.  Love emerges in evolution and there is a rise in consciousness as creation becomes aware of itself. From the big band we emerge out of a long, cosmic process we call evolution. But evolution is about deep relationality, about the energy of love and it is this force of love that pulls us forward and onward in continued evolution.

 The second difficulty then in accepting mutual indwelling is that we have become closed systems, unnatural and detached. Our separation from God, from each other and from creation is overemphasised. God is “up there” and we are “down here” and there is a line of separation. We are separated from each other when we over invest in our descriptors – I am I and you are you and I am not you and you are not me. We are therefore not at home in this cosmos. We are not at home in nature, and we're not at home with one another. We are literally lost in space.

 Religion often perpetuates the disconnect between God and creation. Religion does not move people towards connection with God, each other and creation, a new level of consciousness, but rather, divisiveness. Religion should be making us conscious of how we are in God, how God is in us, how we are in creation and how creation is in us, and how we are in each other.

 A third difficulty in accepting mutual indwelling relates to not knowing how to receive it. Jesus says, “I will be IN you” (Jn 14:17, 20). The Apostle Paul says, “Christ lives IN me” (Gal 2:20). How can I experience God’s presence in my life in a meaningful way? How do I connect with God personally? We are created for union

with God. The mystery of the Divine Indwelling is the life of the Trinity living within us but how is this real for us?

Mutual indwelling, surrendering to God who makes God’s home within us, is consenting to God’s presence and action within. It is based on the format for prayer that Jesus suggests in Matthew 6:6. If you want to pray, enter your inner room, close the door, and pray to your Father in secret. Then your Father who sees in secret, will reward you. In other words, to live the reality of mutual indwelling is surrendering to silence, surrendering to the inner cave of the heart where God always is. A concluding quote from the mystic Elizabeth of the Trinity serves as an illustration

 If I look at things from an earthly standpoint [wrote Elizabeth] I see loneliness and even emptiness, for I cannot say that my heart has not suffered; but if I keep my eyes fixed upon Him, my shining Star, then all the rest vanishes and I lose myself as a drop of water in the ocean. All is calm, all is soothed and all is so good; it is the peace of God of which St Paul speaks, the peace that ‘surpasseth all understanding’ (Phil. 4:7). 

Let us live in close union with our Beloved and be wholly given to Him as He is given to us ... Let us commune with Him all the day long, since He is living in our soul ...