What we need is here

This piece is a version of a speech I am entering for this year’s Henry C. Smith Peace Oratorical Contest. I will have to make some changes to this speech to make it fit into the parameters of the contest, and I thought this version was good enough to share with my readers as is. Enjoy.

And we pray, not
for new earth or heaven, but to be
quiet in heart, and in eye,
clear. What we need is here.[1]

The most basic human need, I would like to contend, is the longing for home.

Our novels and newspapers are filled with journeys and returns, exiles, refugees, and wanderers. Human beings are, as Aristotle recognized, “Social animals” with a basic need for community. Like bees need hives, we need each other. To this we might add the need to belong and care for a place, to cultivate the culture there, to pursue what Wendel Berry calls “membership” with the human and non-human creatures that make their home there. Our longing for home cuts deeper. Listen to the word… Home. What does it evoke? Rest. A long-contracted breath released. Tears of relief. Peace. I often come back to Homer’s description of homecoming at the end of the Odyssey, where Odysseus and his wife Penelope are finally reunited: “As welcome as the land to swimmers… their skin all caked with brine. Grateful to be alive, they crawl to land. So glad was she to see her own dear husband, and her white arms would not let go his neck.”[2] At the heart of so much of our anxious seeking, pounding running, desperate striving—at the heart of it all is a longing for home. This restlessness at the heart of our humanity, this primordial longing for respite points to what the theologians call a natural desire for the supernatural, or what Augustine says more poetically: Our hearts are restless until they rest in Thee.

The scriptures tell us that God in Jesus has made his home with us, come to seek and save the homeless. (Jn. 1:14) He comes as one scattering seeds which grow to be large trees giving shelter, shade, and food (Mark 4:26). He invites those who are anxious and weary to come and find rest (Matt. 11:28-30). Against our self-serious attempts to make something of ourselves and the world he announces: [pause] “it is finished” (Jn 19:30). In Jesus, God’s peace has arrived, it is here. He calls us home, into the joy of the world, for look: “the home of God is among mortals” (Rev. 21:3).  What we need is here.

The most basic human need is for home; but our condition in our North American technological society is one of homelessness. There are a myriad of ways this is experienced: The destruction of the natural world and the loss of habitats; the breakdown of rural communities and the disconnection from the land; the loss of a sense of cultural or religious belonging; the growing fragmentation and individualism; the escape into online bubbles and the Meta-verse. I have no doubt that my generation’s struggles with anxiety and depression—42% of us have been diagnosed with a mental health condition—are not disconnected from these realities.[3]

Our glittering world of power, speed, and efficiency has been constructed by what I will be calling a ‘homeless fantasy. The very things that make us feel joyfully at home in the world—a relational connection with place and community—are seen as the impediments to true knowledge, and obstacles to unlimited growth. For the ‘homeless fantasy, our creaturely bodies, and our imperfect communities, must be managed and smoothed out to allow for the free flow of production and consumption. We find ourselves rushed and anxious, out of sorts and discontent with ourselves and the world.

How can we find our way back home?

In Homer’s ancient epic, The Odyssey, the hero Odysseus is trapped, far from his motherland of Ithaca, on the goddess Calypso’s Island. The poem emphasizes the beauty of the Island, and yet, here in this utopia, Odysseus is withering away.[4] Odysseus is homesick. The goddess, trying to appease her miserable guest, offers him a choice: Would he like to stay with her and become immortal?[5] Or would he like to return to his wife Penelope, even though she cannot rivel Calypso’s immortal beauty?[6] Calypso’s argument seems irrefutable, inarguable—who wouldn’t choose immortality over finitude and death? Odysseus makes his choice: Even so, despite her iron clad logic, he wants to go home.[7] Martha Nusbaum, in her brilliant essay on this story, describes Odysseus choice’ as a choice for the joy of his humanity, and the vulnerability, boundedness, and fragile beauty that this entails. He is choosing, in the words of Nusbaum, “the form of a human life and the possibilities of excellence, love, and achievement that inhabit that form.”[8]

The choice expressed here is ours: Will we choose the homeless fantasy of Calypso’s Island, or will we make the risky and arduous journey to return home to the joy our humanity?

Calypso’s Island represents the fantasy that the limits, burdens, and difficulties of our creaturely life can be overcome; that, as L. M Sacasas puts it, the crooked timbre of our humanity can be straightened.[9] It is the fantasy of a world of ever-growing ease and efficiency which sees our creaturehood as an obstacle to this growth. We buy into this fantasy collectively with our capitalist economy of limitless growth, unchecked by human or ecological concerns. We—I—buy into it personally in a myriad of small ways when we choose consumption over repair and contentment; when we choose ‘fast’ meals over home-cooked feasts; or when we choose isolation over neighbourliness.

It is part of our homeless fantasy, that words like ‘health’, ‘support’, or ‘care’, are seen as the prerogative of ‘experts’ whose services must be purchased to unlock the benefits.[10] Or indeed that ‘politics’ has come to signify nothing more than the turning of a vast machine slightly more in the direction of the misfortunate. These words are not abstractions, their meaning is in our hands.

We buy into this fantasy I would contend, when we turn our political energy towards bumper stickers and slogans, hoping for a technocratic fix when what we need actually lies close at hand: The place that needs care and attentiveness is around us. The truth that needs to be spoken is not to some distant Pharaoh but to the petty tyrants in our own neighbourhood. The support that our neighbour needs, is us. The reconciliation that needs to happen lies in plain view. Christ waits in the guise of the stranger.

This fantasy is expressed in contemporary versions of the Anabaptist fantasy of a community without “spot or wrinkle”—in our modern iterations, we long for a sense of belonging with people who look and sound as much like us as possible. Like Calypso’s offer of a belonging free from the struggle and frustration of real community, our digital tribes offer a polarizing counterfeit of the real thing. However real community is not found in like-mindedness, but in shared weakness.

This came home to me in a profound way in the fall of 2020 when my father tragically and suddenly passed away in a car accident. I still remember standing shell shocked with my mother as the police officer gave us her condolences. And then, they came tricking in, friends, relatives, and neighbours. People with tears in their eyes, hugs, and theologically suspect cliches. I still remember the moment when the door burst open and in came one man with whom I had never seen eye to eye with. He didn’t pause. He came straight at me and wrapped me with a hug so tight that I could barely breathe. I glimpsed in that moment what Jayber Crow saw in Wendel Berry’s novel of the same name. Jayber sees a vision of his town, Port William, “imperfect and irresolute,” “frayed and always fraying,” “always disappointed in itself, and disappointing its members,” and yet, held together by various kinds of love. In the end, he sees Port William “somehow perfected, beyond time, by one another’s love, compassion, and forgiveness…”[11]

How do we find our way back home? What we need is here.

I can think of no more urgent task in our technological age then the work of Joy. In a world obsessed with metrics, achievement, production, and performance, we need to return to the Joy of finding our humanity in relationship with others. To find our way home, we must once again make our home in the world, in our own bodies, and with each other:

Plant a tree. Make a friend. Invite people over. Write something. Make something. Read a book. Cook a meal. Raise your own chickens. Pray. Go barefoot. Gaze at the stars. Think about the meaning of life. Take a risk. Love someone. Go back to your roots.[12]

The work of peace is the work of joyful homemaking: Careful attention to the present. Faithful love to the people and places around us, this is what repairs the world. (Mat. 6:24-34)

“And we pray,” not for some other, better world, community, or place, but “to be quiet in heart, / and in eye, / clear. What we need is here.

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[1]. Wendell Berry, “Wild Geese,” from The Selected Poems of Wendell Berry, (Berkley: Counterpoint Press, 1998), 90.

[2]. Homer, The Odyssey, trans. Emily Wilson, (W. W. Norton Company Inc., 2018.), 23:233-241.

[3]. “State of Gen Z Mental Health,” Harmony Healthcare IT, September 15, 2022, https://www.harmonyhit.com/state-of-gen-z-mental-health/

[4]. Homer, The Odyssey, 5.74.

[5]. Ibid., 5.136-137.

[6]. Ibid., 5.213-214.

[7]. Ibid., 5.219.

[8]. Martha Nusbaum, “Transcending Humanity”, in Love’s Knowledge, (Oxford University Press, 1992), 366

[9]. L. M. Sacasas, “Embrace your Crookedness,” The Convivial Society, Vol. 4, No. 13, July 27, 2023, https://theconvivialsociety.substack.com/p/embrace-your-crookedness

[10]. David Cayley, Ivan Illich: An Intellectual Journey, (University Park, Pennsylvania: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2021), 151-170.

[11]. Wendell Berry, Jayber Crow, (Berkley, Counterpoints, 2000), 205

[12]. Julian Waldner, “Gluttony, Fasting and Feasting: Three Approaches to Technology,” Coffee with Kierkegaard, August 22, 2023, https://coffeewithkierkgaard.home.blog/.