"More Kind Than Home; More Large Than Earth"

"Something has spoken to me in the night,

Burning the tapers of the waning year,  

Something has spoken in the night,

And told me I shall die, I know not where.

        Saying:

        'To lose the earth you know, for greater knowing,

        To lose the life you have, for greater life,

        To leave the friends you loved, for greater loving,

        To find a land more kind than home, more large than earth –

                Whereon the pillars of this earth are founded,

                Toward which the conscience of the world is tending –

                A wind is rising, and the rivers flow.'"

 

Thomas Wolfe wrote these words while he was still a young man,

        and though he did not know it,

                he would die before long, too.

What drove him to write such prescient truth

        went far beyond the stories he told about his hometown

                and the people he knew from childhood.

Not that those stories weren't shocking enough on their own.

Wolfe was vilified in his hometown

        for writing about the people he knew.

 

An intuitive sense of his fate may also 

        have lent urgency to his work, 

                for it was nothing less than a voluminous outpouring 

                        of commentary on the human condition.

Time passes quickly, Wolfe says.

We're gone before we even knew we were here.

Everything perishes.

And yet some things remain the same.

By the cycles of the seasons we know death and rebirth.

In them we see what lasts forever.

 

And Wolfe saw paradoxes everywhere.

He described one sinister local character as someone 

        "so genuinely, unfathomably evil"

                that he seemed to have a grandeur about him.

He had an eye for the twisted, 

        the pathetic, 

                the perverse side of human nature.

He reserved his compassion for those who were genuinely oppressed –

        and not for the town fathers and company managers

                who were the oppressors.

His stinging social commentary exposed additional truths,

        which people would have preferred he did not mention.

But he did mention – everything,  

        and his reader is left with a view of the human condition

                as a bundle of contradictions,

                        almost too tightly wound to sort out.

 

Amid these realities, however, Wolfe invokes another one:

        the reality that is, perhaps, more real 

                than the one we think we know.

We have a sense of it only when we try to imagine

        what would happen 

                if we were to let go of all that holds us 

                        to places, people, life itself –

to lose everything,

and leave everyone –

                to find that place more kind than home,

                        more large than earth.

 

Perhaps Wolfe is simply telling us 

        that after we die,

                we go to a place like that –

                        and it's a better place, 

                                where our better selves will feel at home at last.

Even so, it's not a conventional image of heaven.

This one is connected to the earth.

It is a place 

        ‘Whereon the pillars of this earth are founded,

                Toward which the conscience of the world is tending –

                        A wind is rising, and the rivers flow,’

                                Wolfe says.

We have a sense of this land 

        "more kind than home"

                from what we see here on earth every day,

                        the "conscience of the world" assures us it is there,

                                and nature itself flows towards it.

 

What better affirmation can any of us make,

        if not that somewhere 

                at the end of all our struggle and effort,

                        there is a place we can envision,

                                and it resolves the injustices and contradictions 

                                        of our human ways,

                                                and it forgives what went wrong

                                                        and it keeps what is good;

a place that is not really a place at all,

        but a moral role in creation,

                that heals divisions

                        and stands for some great benevolent truth

                                we know in our hearts is real.

Not that any of us this is easy to express.

Especially for us –

        having solidly anchored ourselves 

                in the day to day imperatives of our faith,

                        the work of community and service and education –

                                we leave the question of a larger context unsettled,

                                        since we are not the ones to settle it.

So many of us have had to strip away layers of indoctrination

        from experiences of religion earlier in life,

                we welcome the expansive, 

                        open sense of not knowing

                                and it makes us feel free.

Our own faith makes no demands on us 

        to seek or express our sense of God,

                or what larger reality may hold us in its embrace

                        as we go about our days.

 

Thomas Wolfe talks about it in different ways:

        that land more kind than home,

                which calls forth so many associations;

                        a place more large than earth,

                                which looks towards all creation;

                                        and yet, despite the power of these images,

                                                they describe little.

What they do instead is stir the heart to hope 

        and to faith that a good life is worth living;

                that nothing is wasted,

                        and no one is lost,

                                in that land more kind than home, 

                                        more large than earth.

 

Recently a family called me to visit a dying man.

He was not a Unitarian Universalist.

His only connection with our faith

        was that he visited a UU church in New York City with friends

                from time to time.

When he learned that he was to die soon,

        everyone, including him, 

                seemed to think that he needed a minister.

Not knowing any,

        they remembered their visits to the church in New York,

                and called me.

 

Such encounters put our own faith to the test.

We put such value on our relatedness,

        the sharing of ourselves,

                the intimacy of our community life.

We know each other.

Our ministry is an extension of that familiarity.

 

But I was invited to sit in a room with a stranger.

I knew a little about him.

I knew that he had cast off his Episcopalian upbringing.

There might be something he wanted to confess.

 

We talked about some of his unfinished life work,

        and the status of his relationships.

And then we sat together for the longest time.

A few more halting attempts to open up possible areas of concern

        led us to talk about what happens when we die.

 

We Unitarian Universalists don't talk about such things much,

        and when we do, 

                we don't agree.

But I wasn't there to give him 

        a survey of UU attitudes about life after death,

                and it occurred to me at that moment

                        how utterly useless such self-inventories are.

All I had to offer him were my own tentative thoughts,

        the only ones I could speak with any authenticity.

 

I said to him,

        "Well, I've always thought – 

                ever since I was a young child,

                        that there is some part of us 

                                that belongs to God.

And I think that part of us existed 

        before we were born

                and goes on after we die.

And I imagine that when we die,

        we don't go on consciously as the person we were in life –"

                and when I said that, I cringed a little,

                        for this man had one day, at most, 

                                left to be himself.

"I imagine that something does survive,

                and that we follow it, or become it,

                        and it takes us home."

 

It’s amazing what comes out of us

        when we are confronted with the exigency 

                of a situation such as this.

More than anything,

        I felt I needed to speak the truth as I understood it.

And I needed that truth to be something that would comfort,

        not anger, or frighten,

                a man who was about to lose the only life he had.

 

"‘To lose the earth you know, for greater knowing,

To lose the life you have, for greater life,

To leave the friends you loved, for greater loving …"

Can any one of us be in the presence of death

        and not reach for the greater knowing,

                the greater life,

                        the greater loving

                                that some part of us insists is real

                                        and will sustain us, come what may?

I can't.

 

I came home from my visit with the dying man.

The phone rang.

"He wants to see you again," his wife said.

"Come tomorrow."

But the next day he was gone.

 

Since then I've thought a lot about our faith

        and what its message has to give to the world.

Much of what we have to say speaks about inclusiveness,

        and the value of diversity and tolerance for difference,

                for in those values we see freedom and growth.

As A. Powell Davies said, our tradition 

        "begins with individual freedom of belief ."

Some people think God wears a blue hat –

        to recall Christopher Buice's fable –

                and some thinks she wears a red one.

Some think that God is a delusion 

        and really doesn't exist at all.

 

In Buice's story, the people get so incensed over their differences

        that they split down the middle 

                and build a wall to stay away from each other.

Not until God herself comes back one day

        and sees what they have done

                do they learn that God can wear a hat 

                        that is blue and red,

                                if she wants to.

And they wake up to the truth

        that these differences between us

                do not matter at all.

What matters is laughing together 

        and tearing down the walls that keep us apart.

 

Our faith tradition has long preoccupied itself

        with valuing difference.

And that is a large part of who we are.

But we sometimes appear to have forgotten

        that our Unitarian and Universalist faiths have each pointed 

                to something beyond difference,

                        to something beyond Unitarianism and Universalism even,

                                to something we cannot capture or define,

                                        and is our hope and our truth.

It is something that "goes out to the limitless,"

        as Davies said,

                which is "more large than earth,"

                        where walls come down,

                                "more kind than home,"

                                        where God helps people laugh.

There the wind is rising and the rivers flow,

        and the conscience of the world is tending,

                and there we know our soul's true self,

                        in the eternal flow of life,

                                where all are free

                                        and we are one.