Lakay (home)

 The suitcase that contained very little during the flight I took last week, is now filled with pants that my congregation has purchased for children at the orphanage.  My days in New Orleans have filled me with a sense of joy, and a deep appreciation for the sisters in my congregation and for many friends that I have here.

In reflecting upon the Christmas story, I think about Mary and Joseph being so far from home, essentially homeless when Jesus was born.  On Saturday I had the opportunity to attend a rally here in the New Orleans in support of welcoming Syrian refugees into the state and country.  Very moving stories were told.  Leaders of various faith traditions spoke using different words to express the same message of compassion and love, and our call to welcome the stranger.

I found myself again reflecting on the concept of "home."  There are many different places I refer to as home, sometimes even in the same sentence.  I might say something like, I need to go home and pack so that I will be ready for my flight home.  One minute I refer to New Orleans as home, the next I might be thinking of Haiti, or Rhode Island.  There are so many places where I am welcomed, where I am comfortable, where there are people I love, where I am at home.  I think of Mary having to give birth in a place that could not have felt at all like home, and was not intended to house humans.  I think of the children at the orphanage, some were happy to go to visit their relatives, but a few did not appear to me to be.  I think of the refugees around the world, no longer feeling safe or unwanted in their original homes, and feared and unwelcome by so many.  I am privileged to have so many homes.  This is not a privilege that I have earned; I am no more deserving of it than the child whose relatives only reluctantly allow him into their house for school vacation, the homeless people I see wandering though the New Orleans'French Quarter or of the refugees staying in my previous congregation's mother house in Germany.  My my desire that everyone everywhere have at least one safe adequate place to live deepens as does my gratitude for the various places that I consider home.      

There is a paradox in this for me though too, which is the reality that when one has multiple homes, when one has been influenced and formed by various cultures, places and peoples while one can have many homes, at a different level no place is really a prefect fit, no place is perfectly home. At times I feel this, but ultimately my sense of gratitude is much stronger than fleeting feelings of loneliness.  Perhaps this should be a separate blog entry for another day, because right now I need to finish packing so I can say my farewells to the sisters who are home, before I begin the next part of my journey to another place I call home.  

Merry Christmas!  Many blessings!