On Coming Home

There comes a point in the religious life when the orientation reverses. For years, perhaps for decades, the seeker has been moving toward something. Toward truth. Toward oneness. Toward the Source of All Things. The whole structure of the search has been forward — more practice, deeper reading, longer silences, the next teacher, the next form. And then, sometimes after long preparation and sometimes by what seems like accident, the direction collapses. There is no longer a toward. There is only here. The seeker discovers that what they had been moving toward was what they were already standing in, what they had always been standing in, and the practice now continues on a different ground.

The shift in orientation

The shift cannot be willed and it cannot be earned. It is, in the older language, a gift. What can be said is what those who have known it have said for a very long time: that the search itself was the preparation, and that what was being searched for was never elsewhere. The seeker who has had even a single moment of direct recognition knows this. What is seen cannot be unseen.

What changes after the recognition is the structure of the practice itself. The Syllabus is still done. The rituals are still kept. The sacrament is still received with gravity, when and if it is received. The community is still held. But the function of these has changed. Before the recognition, they were a ladder — the means by which the seeker hoped to climb toward what they did not yet have. After the recognition, they are something else. They are the form that keeps the recognition alive. They are how the seeker returns, again and again, to what is already the case, against the daily forgetting that the world will reliably impose.

This is the difference between seeking and abiding. It is the meaning of coming home.

The ordinary as the venue

The seeker who imagines that direct experience will lift them out of ordinary life is unfortunately mistaken about what direct experience does. The encounter does not remove the seeker from the world. It returns them.

What is different is how the ordinary is held. Before the recognition, ordinary life is a backdrop against which the religious life is attempted, in the small windows when the demands of the day permit. After the recognition, ordinary life is where the spiritual life is. There is nowhere else for it to be.

The daily preparation of food for one's own body or for the bodies one loves is, in the long traditions, becomes an act of attention. Of presence. Tasting, salting, watching the heat, knowing when the onion is done, knowing when the rice will hold. These are not interruptions of contemplation. They are the contemplation, because what is being attended to is what is, and the Source of All Things is, by the panentheistic logic the arc has been tracing, in and of and with what is.

Parenting is another example. Children are the most relentless teachers in the contemplative life because they refuse to permit the parent to be elsewhere. The bedtime story being read for the four-thousandth time is the bedtime story being read now, to this child, in this body, in this moment. The parent who has come home discovers that the bedtime story is the religious life. Not a distraction from it. Not a sacrifice for it. The thing itself.

Grief is a another. The death of someone loved cracks ordinary life open in a way that little else does, and what is shown in the cracking is what was always there underneath. The seeker who has known the Source of All Things directly does not grieve less. Often the grief is sharper, because the love being mourned is being mourned more clearly. But the grief is held differently. There is a floor underneath it. The one who has died has not gone elsewhere, because there is no elsewhere; the seeker who remains has not been abandoned, because the Source of All Things could not abandon. The grief is honored, and is wept, and is allowed its full weight. And underneath, something is holding.

Work is yet another opportunity. The hours each day spent at the labor that one's life is structured around — the office, the field, the studio, the patient, the spreadsheet, the stove. The seeker who has come home does not necessarily change what they do, though sometimes they do. What changes is the relation. Work is no longer what is endured between the moments that matter. It is a moment that matters, because all of the moments matter, because what is in them is what is in all things.

What home means here

Home, in this arc, does not mean a destination reached after a long journey. There was certainly a journey. But the destination was never elsewhere. The seeker has arrived at a new place, but not necessarily a new location. The seeker has recognized the place they are in.

There is no outside of this. The seeker cannot reach the Divine by traveling, because there is no direction in which the Source is not. The seeker can only recognize what was always already the case. Coming home is another name for that recognition.

Home is this room, seen now with new eyes. The kitchen one has cooked in for twenty years. The bed one has slept in. The face in the mirror. The grief one carries. The work one does. The children one loves. All of it is what one is in, and what one is of, and whom one is with — all at once, all the time.

The invitation

Ekstaeses is a form, and it is here. It has been built carefully, by people who have walked the road, to carry seekers toward the recognition this essay names and to hold them in the form of life that follows from it. The door is open.

If you find yourself drawn closer, the means are findable. The next step, if there is to be a following step, is yours to take.

If you find yourself moved but not yet ready, that too is honored. The form is not going anywhere. The door does not close because you did not walk through it today.

If you find yourself reading and recognizing what has been described — if the language of these essays has met something already alive in you — that is the recognition itself, beginning. You are already coming home. The form is here when you are ready to walk it.

What we hope for you

We do not promise you an outcome.

What we hope is that you find yourself, one ordinary morning, putting on the kettle, and you notice that the noticing is itself the prayer. The calm. The peace. The ground beneath your foundation is ever present.

That is what coming home means. The Source of All Things is what you are of, what you are in, and whom you are with — and has been all along.