Readers might remember my earlier post from March 13, 2024, also entitled What we need is here. That post was an earlier draft of my entry into the Henry C. Smith Oratory Contest. The piece below is the version I actually delivered. I’ve also included a video my performance of the speech for those interested. This speech ended up being quite different from the earlier draft I posted.
In Jesus’ most famous parable, a son returns home. He is standing on the dusty road, fearing the worst. He has squandered his father’s wealth and wished him dead. But then, comes that moment so powerfully expressed in the song Fire and Bone by the Killers:
When I cam back empty handed
You were waiting in the road
And you fell on my neck
And you took me back home.[1]
What we human beings long for more than anything—our most basic human need—is to come… home.
Home. What does it evoke? Perhaps for some of you something complicated. And yet… Rest. A long-contracted breath released. Tears of relief. Peace. 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 us… home. As Augustine said: 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… “it is finished” (Jn 19:30). In Jesus, God’s peace has arrived. It is here. He calls us home, into the joy of creation, 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 many 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 cultural belonging and the growing 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 connected with these realities.[2]
Our technological world of power, speed, and efficiency has been constructed by what I will be calling a ‘homeless fantasy’: the fantasy that what we need for a better world always lies in some future fashioned from some Ideal. We buy into this and find ourselves rushed and anxious, out of sorts, and discontent with ourselves and the world.
How can we find our way back home?
What we need is here.
In the sermon on the mount, Jesus gives our prodigal technological selves a roadmap back home. Jesus draws a fundamental contrast between two different ways of being in the world. We must choose, Jesus tells us: we cannot serve God and Mammon (Matt. 6:24).
The homeless way of Mammon lives in the future, planning to ensure that the vicissitudes of life turn out in ways that keeps the cash flowing. The creation, our creaturely bodies, and imperfect communities must be managed and smoothed out to allow for the free flow of production and consumption.
This is not the way of Jesus. He calls us to stop living in the future: the present has enough for us. (Matt. 6:34)
Look and see. Look at the geese of the air (Matt. 6:26), look at the birch trees, look at the canola of the field (Matt. 6:28)—in turning our grateful attention to the world, we discover the loving care that undergirds it all, and us. Come into the abundance of the present moment: The breath in our lungs. The soil between our bare feet. Here we find that it as Jesus promised, our heavenly father cares for us: what we need is here.
Jesus tells us “Seek first the kingdom of God:” let go of securing outcomes, and instead be faithful right now: Matt. 6:33) We work for a good future by caring for the good things of creation and culture that we have in the present.[3] The work of justice does not lie in the hands of the political machine, the experts, or our anxious attempts to control the future.[4]
The work of justice actually lies close at hand: In our homes. Neighbourhoods. Farms. And backyards. 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.
There is 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. The work of peace is the work of homemaking in a homeless world:
Plant a tree.
Make a friend.
Invite people over.
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.
Love someone.
Take a risk.[5]
What we need, is here.
What does homecoming look like? We tend to think that homecoming would mean finding the ideal place. The ideal people. The ideal community. We long for utopia—the Greek term meaning, no place. We long for a sense of belonging with people who look and sound as much like us as possible. 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 trickling 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. 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 Wendell Berry’s novel of the same name: A vision of his town, Port William, “imperfect and irresolute,” “always disappointed in itself, and disappointing its members,” and yet, “somehow perfected, beyond time, by one another’s love, compassion, and forgiveness…”[6]
How do we find our way back home? What we need is here.
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)
In the words of Wendell Berry: “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.”[7]
[1]. The Killers, “Fire and Bone,” track 6 on Imploding the Mirage, Sound City,2020, Spotify.
[2]. “State of Gen. Z Mental Health,” Harmony Healthcare IT, September 15, 2022, https://www.harmonyhit.com/state-of-gen-z-mental-health/
[3]. Wendell Berry, “Feminism, the Body, and the Machine”, in What are People For?, (San Francisco: North Point Press, 1990), 178-197.
[4]. David Cayley, Ivan Illich: An Intellectual Journey, (University Park, Pennsylvania: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2021), 151-170.
[5]. Julian Waldner, “Gluttony, Fasting and Feasting: Three Approaches to Technology,” Coffee with Kierkegaard, August 22, 2023, https://coffeewithkierkgaard.home.blog/.
[6]. Wendell Berry, Jayber Crow, (Berkley, Counterpoints, 2000), 205.
[7]. Wendell Berry, “Wild Geese,” from The Selected Poems of Wendell Berry, (Berkley: Counterpoint Press, 1998), 90.
Coffee with Kierkegaard 
This is beautifully written and beautifully presented. May this message ringing clearly to your generation and to mine as well, for we have forgotten what we once knew, or maybe we never really knew it well.
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Thank you Joe. I appreciate the thought about weather this is something we’ve lost or weather it’s something we never knew well. I think we become more articulate about things like community, connection with nature, or simple living when those are things that we have lost.
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Thank you for continuing this conversation. Your comment “Community is not found in like-mindedness, but in shared weaknesses” has stuck with me.
In Rod Drehers book “The Benedict Option” he speaks of the Benedictines rules for living. Under the topic of stability he says “Instead of believing that structure is good and that duties to home and family lead us to live rightly, people today have been tricked by liquid modernity into believing that maximizing individual happiness should be the the goal of life. The Gyrovague, the villain of Saint Benedict’s rule, is the hero of postmodernity.”
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