The Second Chances Club August 31, 2014

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Oswald Stokes
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1 The Second Chances Club August 31, 2014 by David Green Thomas Wolfe was one of the most-acclaimed authors of the early 20 th Century. His last novel was published in 1940, after his death the year before at the age of 37. You Can t Go Home Again tells the story of George Webber, who s written a successful novel about his hometown and his family. He returns home expecting to be greeted with acclaim, but instead he s confronted with anger and outrage. His lifelong friends and family members feel that George in his novel has ridiculed them and exposed their weaknesses. Their scorn drives him from home. Now an outcast, George Webber begins a search for his own identity. He realizes: You can t go back home to your family, back home to your childhood back home to a young man s dreams of glory and of fame back home to places in the country, back home to the old forms and systems of things which once seemed everlasting but which are changing all the time back home to the escapes of Time and Memory. In ancient and modern literature, in sacred works, in mythology, in theater and film, there s a reason the inability to go home again is such a common theme. It s tied up with ideas of life as a journey, our growth and maturity, the constant of change, the yearning to understand ourselves, and finding peace, acceptance, purpose, security, and love. It s a universal experience and a universal quest that longing, that seeking because we do grow and change over our lifespan. And if we change, so does the landscape of places we ve known and relationships we ve had. Even in it s simplest form, you can take a road trip over the weekend and return home. You ve arrived back and it may seem as if nothing much has changed. But the fact is, things have not remained static in your absence. The world has kept turning. Events have transpired. And you ve had your own journey where you ve had new experiences. Even in small increments, you have changed, home has changed, and there s nothing you can do about it. Of course, that s assuming you want to go home again. Not everyone who leaves home has the desire to go back, even if they could return and find things just as they were. Too many of us come from territory we d just as soon never revisit. It s one of the hard truths of living that none of us goes through life without emotional or physical bumps and bruises. And many of those injuries are suffered at home. We ve been wounded, and we ve inflicted wounds. And if we have a conscience, even those things we ve done wrong and would never do again and maybe have even made amends for, those things still haunt us. So no matter if we re the one who s been hurt, or the one who s caused hurt, or both, we d feel a lot better if we could get away from that place to erase that past so the memory would stop jolting us awake at night.

2 Most of us and I daresay all of us have had a moment in life when what we needed most was a fresh start, a clean slate, a second chance. We know we can t go home again, but we d sure like to find home. In so many ways, we spend our lives searching for home, and what we re really searching for is ourselves. I was at a coffee shop recently and chatted with the barista who took my order. He was a young man and I could tell from his accent he was not from around here. Sure enough, he said he was from Newark, New Jersey. I asked if he was a college student; I thought maybe WT was now recruiting students in New Jersey: Come out west and see a what a horizon actually looks like. But this young man wasn t here to go to school. And he had no family here. No ties whatsoever. And that was the point. He told me he needed to get away. He wanted to go to a place no one back in New Jersey would ever imagine, or think to look for him. So he found a map and put his finger on Amarillo. And he got off the bus, found a job as a barista which is what he d done back home and told me he was starting over. A second chance. He was a little vague about why he needed that chance; something to do with what he called family issues. I didn t ask him if he thought he d ever go home again. At this point, it didn t appear he wanted to. Either that, or it just wasn t an option. Of course, going home again doesn t usually mean a literal return to where we came from. It s not so much about a physical place. It s about finding peace, acceptance, purpose, security and love. At one point or maybe at many points in our lives, we inevitably feel we have lost those things. So we seek a second chance, or a third chance. Or a fourth or a fifth chance or more. And finding home again may be for some of us finding it for the very first time, because we didn t know that such a place really existed, or it lived only in our imagination. But it does exist. It exists in finding relationships that heal and restore us, and where we re given the opportunity to provide healing and restoration for someone else. I strongly believe we best know ourselves, not in isolation, but in relationship. In belonging. We need others to hold a mirror up to us, so that we can discover who we are. Such a relationship may be found in one person, and when that happens it s wonderful. But whether or not we re in a one-on-one relationship, belonging also happens very powerfully in a group; a community of people. Finding belonging in a group is a pretty basic human need. Most of us have a handful of groups we operate within. And some of them overlap. Friends at work, civic groups, political organizations, neighborhood associations. People we just like to hang out with, travel with, go out to eat with, watch college football with. A reading group, a group focused on outdoorsy stuff or a physical activity, a socially conscious group of do-gooders, a yoga group, a meditation group. You may be involved with a performing arts group, or a group that gets together in a park on Saturdays and

3 dresses up in medieval clothes and you duel each other with rubber swords. Whatever floats your boat. Increasingly, groups are virtual; you re connected online. We choose any group because it meets one or more of those basic needs of peace, acceptance, purpose, security, and love. And the belonging we experience in that group feels like home. Twenty years ago I lived in Elgin, Texas, and one morning I stopped in at the local Dairy Queen to have some coffee. The coffee was horrible but it was the only place in town that was open at 7 AM, so I didn t have many options. Seated at a group of tables near the door was a collection of eight or nine men of retirement age farmers and ranchers leisurely drinking coffee and eating biscuits and gravy. They looked like an interesting collection of characters straight out of a western movie, so I sat nearby and eavesdropped on their conversation while I pretended to read a newspaper. It became evident they d known each other for years. They had names like Skinny and Pee Wee and Chester. Apparently they held court at the Dairy Queen every weekday morning, and there they would gently tease each other and exchange gossip and remark on the weather and talk local politics. At times they told corny jokes and laughed boisterously, but they also shared somber news of a friend s illness or a neighbor s misfortune. And they grew reflective and quiet. I realized what these men had going on was a significant sense of belonging. They cared about each other. Over a morning cup of coffee at Dairy Queen, they were safe, accepted, and very much at home. For me, it conjured up an odd mix of feelings. I was glad for them that they had this sense of community. I was envious. It reminded me of things I was searching for. I had no desire to sit around and chew the fat with a bunch of guys at Dairy Queen every morning. At the very least, the coffee would need to be a lot better. But I ve always had the yearning to seek, create, and live in meaningful community with other people. It s not that those things have been absent in my life, but periodically I ve realized so much about those things has changed, and I ve also changed. And I d very much like to have another chance at finding belonging. Going home. For me, and for many others, church has always been a place of significant belonging. Part of that is cultural. In America we still assume most folks at least over a certain age have a church affiliation of one brand or another. The degree to which anyone is actively involved in a church can vary quite a bit. Someone may say they re Methodist, but they haven t darkened the door of a Methodist church in years. All the way to someone who sings in the choir and never misses a Sunday. Churches are interesting animals. I think a lot of us assume the only reason anyone belongs to a particular church has to do with their beliefs and doctrines. That can be true. One of the most common questions people ask me about our Fellowship is, So, what do you guys believe? And that s not something you can explain in one sentence. You know that if you ve ever tried.

4 But I ve found it s equally important and in some cases, much more important than any particular beliefs that a church provides that essential feeling of home: the promise that you can discover yourself in that community. That for you, it s a place of peace, acceptance, purpose, security, and love. And I know for a fact that s why so many of our members lost faith in traditional religion long ago. Because those things were lacking. We might ve also moved away from certain beliefs, but the atmosphere of belonging, or not the sense of the community holding those beliefs can be just as important when we decide to seek something different. Sometimes it happens that the belief system and the sense of community are so enmeshed, to truly belong means you have no choice but to believe a certain way, or at least, pretend you believe that way. And the internal disconnect the conflict between your own belief and the community grows to the extent that that place can no longer be home for you. Some of us have made such a clean break with the faith we once knew that we ve denounced it and every other form of religion. We can be quite angry that the people and the place we called home, we can no longer trust. On the other hand, some of us can t imagine ever letting go of long-held beliefs, or still feeling somewhat connected to another church, even as our understanding of those beliefs has evolved to the point where we can no longer fully belong there. That detachment process may have been gradual or sudden. That distancing may still be going on for you, and it may always be part of your journey, and that s okay. The bottom line is, you ve sought a second or third, or fourth chance at finding home. Your story may be like mine. I never saw myself as ever being anything other than a traditional, mainstream Christian. We were not angry Bible-thumpers and did not think it was polite to condemn other people. We were more about maintaining a comfortable status quo, and if you disagreed with someone over a belief or a doctrine, that was fine; we could still be respectful friends. But in time, many of my friends and colleagues began to shift further and further toward a way of believing that excluded my way of thinking. And that denied my freedom to question, my freedom to grow and to change. Until, I found myself feeling curiously isolated in the religious home I d grown up in. It felt as if my favorite comfortable pair of shoes had shrunk, and to put them on and walk around in them gave me blisters. I needed a second chance. I needed to find home again. I needed to seek, create, and live in meaningful community with other people. To rediscover myself in a place of peace, acceptance, purpose, security, and love. Some of us here today probably never expected we would need or want a second chance at something like church. It s more that we ve found belonging a home in a place that happens to call itself a church. Whatever you might call us, we re about the work of healing and restoration for each of us. If we re nothing else, this Fellowship is a

5 community of beginning again, of second chances and then some, where we all have the chance to discover ourselves. You re probably familiar with a poem by T. S. Eliot. I think it expresses so well why we re here: We shall not cease from exploration, and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time.

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