I was telling someone the other day of the time when I gave in to a long held desire and stretched out in the centre aisle of Saint Francis Xavier church in NYC in order to look up at the ceiling. I waited for a judicious moment–if memory serves, it was a Saturday morning when I was going there for a meeting anyway and I arrived early. Folding my jacket as a pillow, I stretched out and gazed freely at what could be seen from that perspective…all of the side statues, the artwork on the ceiling, the scrollwork at the top of columns, where the sunlight rested as it came through the different stained glass windows… It was glorious…. A chance to know more, see more, feel and sense more, of a space that I already knew as a place that felt like home.

The other evening at Saint Andrew’s, a similar feeling washed over me…a desire to be there some Wednesday for the contemplative service but from above in the choir loft. I love my usual place, tucked in snug beside a pillar, two or three rows back…and I’d miss being within the people… but there is something about wanting to experience a different perspective and notice what I learn, notice what it teaches me. When I am trying to know a person, I can ask questions, dialogue, and spend time with them. Getting to know a space, I think, means asking questions by moving around within it….and letting the space reveal itself…and more.

Any place I know that I’d say feels like home provides room for me to reveal myself too. It allows for sinking in and stillness and simple Being, until being becomes opening becomes part of the sacred diaphony, (Robert Nicastro, Centre for Christogenesis) the eternal, where we are ultimately most at home.

As the conversation with my friend went on, we spoke of home as this relationship between space and self. The learning, the being, the allowing, the history…that which remains and that which goes forth. Also, how this sense of at-home-ness has nothing to do with ownership or possession, but a profound sense of welcoming and belonging, knowing that many others might also feel this way about the space…and yet, no matter for how many people, it does not diminish the unique welcome and ‘holding’ for each one… in fact, in enriches the space and all that it offers.

I love that feeling…the snug expansiveness when space says “Welcome home…settle in and let go. You are safe and loved and I’ve got you.” Space that has things to show me too…insights, perspectives, on a greater sense of the whole.

On God, who is more than I can hope for or imagine…Home, endless and eternal and always and everywhere.