"Once upon a time we waited for another baby. And he came, Justin, Heather's brother. But Justin was a very sick baby; he stayed with us only a day. And then he died, or went home to God. The pain of his leaving convinced us of how precious each child is." I looked at Heather. Big tears rolled down her cheeks — the first time in seven years I saw her communicate any emotion about the brother she never knew, the brother who died when she was only about a year old. I continued: "But God works good even out of apparently bad things: now we have a saint in heaven who intercedes for us in prayer, with Jesus, and he is still with us in the Holy Spirit." I put my arms around Heather as I continued; I was trying also to contain my own repressed emotions.

"And once upon a time, God blessed us with another gift, Katie, who I am sure will grow to be a precious, beautiful girl, like Heather." I truncated the rest of my words, trying to convey to my family in abbreviated fashion, because of the high emotion, some deeply held convictions I hold after my years of both celibacy and family counseling. Among the convictions are: the great gift of children, the best gift to children is working at a good marriage, and how the most real experience of Church is in prayer, love, reconciliation, graced meals at home, in the domestic church.

After the ceremony I expressed surprise to my brother and his wife at Heather's reaction to my mentioning of her brother. They were not surprised. Kathy, my sister-in-law, told me Justin is a very large image in Heather's consciousness. My brother concurred. After we were alone, I asked Heather if her tears indicated that I had made her sad. She told me she was not sad at all.

No — it was not sadness. Though she does not have the words to convey it, Justin, though never seen or met, is very much a part of Heather's home.

Sometime around the time of Katie's baptism, I mustered up enough courage to do something. My father passed away about a year and a half ago. About six months before his death, faced with the inevitability of his terminal illness, both he and my mother asked me to facilitate the sale of our family home, a house on the south side of Chicago. We had been there since I was 3-1/2 years old, that is, 38 years. To make a long, agonizing story short, my brother and I arranged the sale of the house and the pass over of my parents to the Promised Land of a suburban condo. A difficulty that I had for over a year after the sale was that I could not go back and look at home. Friends kiddingly challenged me to go back and look. I, in fact, was close to the house for various reasons, many times. But it was like a reverse magnetic force — I was propelled away from my house/home. I could not face the vulnerable pain of going back to look at a home I did not want to leave, but was, in effect, "thrown out of" by history and circumstances.

I could not go back....until, one day, I explained my feelings about all this in a talk. A woman came up to me and said: "Go, go look at it again; celebrate the memories of home, and be glad that the bricks, wood, cement, and glass are becoming a happy home to other people."

I filed her challenge in the back of the "to be gotten to" file until recently, when I felt both the need and the courage to go back and face home.

That morning, as I got closer to the street that I had deliberately avoided for over a year, my heart began to pound rapidly and strong. I was feeling the beginning of a panic attack. I turned off the radio. I wanted quiet as I experienced this strange phenomenon. As I got closer to the house, the words to an old African-American revival song came to my mind..."This is holy ground ...this is holy ground..." I hummed to myself. Finally, I made the turn onto the block of 79th and Fairfield, and for the first time in fifteen months, stared at...home.

My heart stopped pounding. I felt like I had x-ray vision. I could tell people about every nuance and crevice in that structure. As I looked, I felt how much I loved that house...I love that house. I drove around, parked in the alley and looked at the backyard and the back of the house. I drove around and parked in front, and stared. I felt a strange peace. I always loved that house. But finally I realized that it was no longer home for me. It is a house that I will always love. But it is no longer home. "Home" is the people and experiences that I encountered there, who are now in my memory, some of whom have died but with whom I am one in spirit. "Home" is the people and experiences that are currently part of my life — even the apparent "exile" in a suburban condo. I moved in that experience from exile to home.

I recently celebrated a multi-racial, multi-ethnic liturgy at the close of a day-long conference. A powerfully gifted African-American female soloist sang a song as part of the Liturgy of the Word. As she sang I saw one woman, a black woman, "get the Spirit." She was so powerfully moved by the song she fell to the floor and began to scream, "My, Lord, My Lord." Having worked at African-American revivals before, I was aware that such occurrences are rather common at such gatherings. I was apprehensive, however, about the reactions to the incident from the rest of the congregation, which was largely white. Specifically, I was most concerned about my mother's reaction. She was in the congregation, and is not one to appreciate effusive expressions of emotion at worship. For her, church services should be short, to the point, respectful, and not too sociable in nature. Thus, after the ceremony, I was waiting to take my punishment like a man; but I was surprised at my mother's reaction.

"Pat," she said, "when that woman sang, and that other woman got so emotional, I began to cry. I cried through the whole mass. "Why did you cry?" I asked.

"For the first time since he died (fifteen months ago), I felt your father's presence and could see him in his gray suit. It's the first time it happened to me since his death."

For several days after the service, she spoke of recurring episodes of seeing him and sensing him. I tried to explain to her that I have felt his presence a lot since his death. That experience, I believe, is a gift, a gift of divine consolation. After fifteen months of grief, bitterness, and her own physical decline, robbed of her house and husband, my mother has finally begun to feel at home again.

Home...it is not a place. It is rather a state of mind. It is what Erik Erikson called years ago "identity," a general feeling of well-being about ourselves, feeling at ease in our own skin. Home is not a place; it is intimacy, especially with people we call "primary relationships." Home is not a place, rather it is the communion that exists between ourselves and those who have gone before us in death. Home. It is not a place, but the communion that exists between ourselves and God, who loves us unconditionally, is ever present to us as Spirit, and who works all things to our good, even life's painful moments.

Home. It is such a simple reality, but it is also so elusive for so many of us. It has become elusive because of the values of the "counter-gospel" around us, values like independence, isolation, fragmentation in and loss of relationships and intimacy, the massive de-valuing of the relational and the personal, expanding materialism and consumerism, the loss of vulnerability and willingness to be wounded that is needed for love and commitment.

To sum up, there has been in our culture a devaluing of relational matters. There has been also a devaluing of the interior life. Jesuit teacher William O'Malley said recently, "We've forgotten that essentially we are souls, spirits." Thus, we have become a people with a lot of houses, places, things but without homes.

Part of being at home in the world is having an ease about the self, identity, a healthy ego strength. Madonna Kolbenschlag in her book, Lost in the Land of Oz, writes about the wounded consciousness of our culture that has rendered many of us orphan-like in our approach to life. We orphans have a lust for material things, inflated expectations regarding success and productivity, but dashed hopes, low-grade anxiety, and depression. As orphans, people of our age and culture have feelings of abandonment, deprivation, loneliness, mourning, and a lack of nurturance in our relationships. These relational experiences have contributed to the development of misguided notions about ourselves, flawed visions and mis-informed outlooks on life. Many of us stand in need of massive re-education of our self-concept. We are not what we have. We are not what we do. We need to discover the true self.

Kolbenschlag suggests that many of us are like Dorothy in the Wizard of Oz, ripped from rootedness and identity. The tornado in our case is our culture. She admonishes her reading and lecture audiences: stop surrendering so gently to Oz, get critical about societal values and what they are contributing to the malformation of the self. We need to get back to Kansas, home, the true self that God willed in the womb.

Part of being at home in the world is the discovery of intimacy -- in and out of marriage. One ex-priest told me recently that in the seminary he was trained to not have special relationships with men. Neither was he to be close with women. "Wasn't I prepared well," he mused, "to work with people?" Maybe that man's seminary training is a glimpse of many people's experiences of growth and relationships.

Most of us receive little or no training in human relations skills. In addition, the major image or paradigm for relationships in American life is independence. Even married people in their apparent union remain independent, married singles, as the Marriage Encounter movement calls it. Consultant and writer, Stephen Covey, says that there is a continuum of maturity: dependence . . . independence . . . interdependence.  Covey says most would characterize maturity as independence, when in fact, interdependence is true maturity. Interdependence is the discovery of one's need for others, for closeness, for intimacy, for synergy (or combined energies) when it comes to tasks or endeavors. We lock ourselves in and lock others out when it comes to communion and community.

Communion or community with others necessitates that:

    We deliberately spend more time with people whom we claim to love;
    We seek deliberately to understand the unique situations and circumstances of other's lives;
    We keep commitments and promises when we feel like it and when we do not;
    We practice honesty in communication, even if it is embarrassing because it is self-revelatory, 
      or challenging because it involves confronting another;
    We apologize and seek reconciliation when we hurt someone;
    We forgive someone who apologizes to us;
    We encourage rather than discourage each other;
    We pray for the people that we love; and pray for our perceived enemies;
    We pray with the people that we love and pray with our perceived enemies;
    We recover from the culture's approach to sexuality, and reveal its true nature and beauty.
      Sexuality ought not to be used to sell toothpaste, neither is it like shaking hands. We need 
      to re-discover human sexual experiences as the deepest expressions of trust, commitment, 
      and communication between two people.

Home is not a place, it is the experience of communion with those who have gone before us in death. It is the realization we are still one with them in the Spirit. It is the awareness that we can still speak to them and be heard, pray through them when we are in need. Sister Francesca Thompson, reflecting on the life of Sister Thea Bowman, said recently, "God loved her so much He kissed her with a kiss that pulled her into total oneness with Him." For Sister Thea, who had a long bout with cancer, death was always the process of "going home." When the tradition of death is re-interpreted for the self and others as "going home," our deepest fears are conquered; and we are truly free.

Molly Fumia in A Child at Dawn tells the beautiful story of being paralyzed in life after the death of her infant son, until two years later she had a conversation with him on the profound level of her imagination. Mother and son reconciled and became one in the Spirit through the conversation. "I'll always remember and love you," said Jeremy. Home is oneness with those who have gone before us. My father, nephew, grandparents, and friends are spirits that I daily feel at home with.

Finally, home is living in communion with God, daily conscious contact with our higher power. I have a reputation for being a high achiever, a very productive man. Without bragging, I can admit to being very disciplined, goal oriented, and productive. But I only do my many life tasks well, or with a sense of integrity and peace of heart, when I am working a spiritual program. My program includes daily quiet time, prayer, writing in a journal, reading, exercise (running) and a certain amount of asceticism or self-denial for a therapeutic purpose. When I work the program, or stay in communion with God, there is a power greater than I at work in me.

In summary, I try to do the best that I can in most endeavors, but I reach a point at which I turn it over, surrender it. Faith is the experience of being at home in the world with God.

A friend of mine is recovering from a bout with depression. Gradually as she has come out of the deep depression, she planned to take a job in another state. She took that job, but feeling herself sinking back into depression, she asked for a temporary leave and returned to Chicago. She visited me while she was in town, and told me of her deepening depression. I rather abruptly asked her, "Where is your home?" She answered abruptly, the southwest side of Chicago. She even was precise in naming the church that she felt most comfortable in, and could pray well in. I told her, "Forget going back to the job. Stay here in Chicago."

That friend has begun to leave Oz and return to Kansas. Let us all, in a similar way, work our way back home.

Gunther Knoedler: It has been said that we are born originals and we die copies, depending upon who has influenced us during our lifetime. Tell me, who has influenced you the most during your lifetime?

Patrick Brennan: As I have tried to convey in my talk, I have been deeply influenced by home, people of faith who have befriended and mentored me and taught me to pray and have intimacy with God. Evangelization studies are showing that if churches want to evangelize well, people with faith can influence other people with whom they have primary relationships. Big programs for evangelization don't work that well. It is people of faith "faithing" with others that influences people.

I know that I am a Christian. I have had a conversion experience because of my home and because of my friends who have faith and who "faithed" with me.

Gunther Knoedler: This is exactly the problem you suggested in terms of the alienation in which we live, that home and those kind of influences are very important.

Brennan: Yes. As I mentioned, in the materialistic culture in which we live, there is a high emphasis on things, places and houses, but not enough on the relational, which is home. The metaphor "home" sums that up, the relation.