This Week

This week at praxis...You can't go home again

Jesus left that place and came to his hometown, 
and his disciples followed him.  
On the sabbath he began to teach in the synagogue, 
and many who heard him were astounded. They said, 
"Where did this man get all this? What is this 
wisdom that has been given to him? What deeds of 
power are being done by his hands!  Is not this 
the carpenter, the son of Mary and brother of 
James and Joses and Judas and Simon, and are not 
his sisters here with us?" And they took offense at him.  
Then Jesus said to them, "Prophets are not without honor, 
except in their hometown, and among their own kin, 
and in their own house."   And he could do no deed 
of power there, except that he laid his hands on a 
few sick people and cured them.  And he was amazed at their unbelief. 	
-Mark 6:1-6

After the remarkable healing of a woman who had suffered for 
12 years from hemorrhages and after the raising of the dead 
child of Jairus, Jesus goes home to Nazareth accompanied by 
his disciples.  He teaches in the synagogue on the sabbath, 
and the people are amazed both at his teaching and at the 
murmured accounts of the healings.  For a moment or two it 
would appear that a warm celebration of 
"hometown boy makes good" is about to erupt.  
But not so.  What is about to happen is rejection, 
the same kind of rejection that would dog his trail 
all the way to Good Friday.  "He could do no mighty 
work there...because of their unbelief."
- Jim Callahan, "Miracle Worker," Christian Century 6.21-28.2000

For much of the 1990s, (Sebastiao) Salgado wandered through 
40 countries to create this visual record of what he calls 
"a global convulsion entirely of our own making."  
Wherever he went, he found people driven from their 
homes by famine and war, or lured away in the quest to 
escape poverty.  Many were risking their lives to reach 
wealthier lands, sneaking over borders or plying dangerous 
waters in crowded boats.  In central Africa and the Balkans, 
countless refugees were simply trying to stay a day's walk 
ahead of ethnic slaughter.  Vast numbers were destined for 
the world's new megaslums in Asia and Latin America, 
swelling yearly by the millions.
- Jeremiah Creedon, "through a lens, darkly" 
Utne Reader July-August 2000
 
I once wrote a novel, Every Man a King, 
about a young smart aleck who works for a senator in D.C.; 
he sins, at least as sin is defined in the Potomac catechism, 
and is cast out, homeward, to live among the people he has 
celebrated with a mawkish insincerity seldom seen this side 
of the Nashville Network.  Like my doughtily dysfunctional hero, 
I did go home, for good.  And for better. Healthy, 
life-giving parochialism exists in even the most 
dispirited and quotidian places.  We-or at least I-can only 
ever really live the familiar; rage and anger require the 
anchorage of love lest they become exhausting and pointless hatred.

...The disjunction between Washington conservatives 
and real American places is summed up in the first 15 
seconds of the Rush Limbaugh show.  His theme music is 
from the Pretenders' "My City Was Gone," in which Chrissie Hynde 
describes a return to Akron, her hometown, where 
"all my favorite places" have been urban-renewalized into memory:  
"I went back to Ohio/but my city was gone/There was no train station/
there was no downtown"-a bitter and sardonic observation 
on how the destruction of landmarks erodes a sense of place, of loyalty.

- Bill Kauffman, "passport to main street" Utne Reader, July-August, 2000
 
"While home is the place where you can relax and be  yourself, 
this doesn't mean you can take advantage of the love and affection  
other members of your family have for you."
-20th Century Typewriting, D.D. Lessenberry, T.J. Crawford, Lawren W. Erickson

"It is essential to experience all the things and moods of one good place."  	
-Thomas Merton

Perhaps the most radical thing we can do is to stay home, 
so we can learn the names of the plants and animals around us; 
so that we can begin to know what tradition we're part of.	
-Terry Tempest Williams


Questions:


	Why couldn't Jesus do a "deed of power" in his hometown?  Why was he rejected?
	How is this story a normal experience, and how is it unique?
	What do you consider "home" as it fits this story?
	Can you go home again?  Who can?  Have you?  
	Has it been good?  What if you never left?
	In what ways are homes being destroyed for people in our time?
	Kauffman returned home and states he "can only ever really live the familiar."  
	Is this true for you, or not?
	Is it better to stay home or to leave?  Why?