Blog Post
Glenys M Huws • Nov 10, 2020
Doors - for leaving and returning
[A reflection by Glenys M Huws from her book "Where the Spirit Dwells - Lenten Reflections on Home". Permission to republish here given by the publisher, The United Church Publishing House and the author. First published in 2007. P.63]
Bless this door ...ever open to joy and love
It is through the door that people leave and return home. Between those two actions, leaving and returning, we are sojourners for a week, a month, years, decades, a liftime. The door through which we leave may not be the door through which we return. The person leaving will not be the same upon returning.
God calls us to sojourn - to leave the place where we think we belong. The Bible is a collection of stories about sojourning, about being temporary residents on the way to someplace else. Abraham and Sarah travelled far from their home country; the people of Israel wandered in the desert for decades. Ruth and Naomi left a place of security for an unknown reception; the disciples left their homes and livelihoods for an uncertain future. As for Jesus, he had no familiar place to lay his head.
Yet God does not call us to an unaccompanied and aimless journey. God yearns for a true home for God's people, a place grounded in memories that provide identity and meaning, where our doors are ever open to the promise of God's future and where humankind dwells in joy and love. When we share this yearning, we are not wanderers, even if we are far from where we think we belong. We journey with and to God.
Prayer
Whatever my state, wherever my space, your Spirit knocks at the door of my heart, calling me from death toward life, from complacency toward divine discontent, from illusion to hope, from alienation to belonging. Divine Friend, if you accompany me, I am already on the move. AMEN
Pilgrim Praxis
The genocide in apartheid and settler colonial Palestine urgently calls for urgent discernment and action. Could the ongoing rounds of blood letting and destruction finally end to begin a journey toward truth, and justice-based peace? I hope so for the sake of all who dwell in this (un)Holy Land.