One of the best pieces of advice I ever received was from a high school girlfriend. Like many hormone-filled teenagers (which is to say, teenagers), I was trying to figure out in my mind how she and I might eventually kiss. And, like many teenagers, I was having an awkward go of it.

I had probably learned too many unrealistic lessons from watching fake romance in the movies. I was waiting for the dramatic scene where we would look at each other, the camera would zoom in and, as we inched closer, the magic would happen as the music swelled in the background.

Needless to say, that’s not generally how it works in real life.

Luckily for me, this young woman a) felt similarly about kissing, but b) had a wiser head on her shoulders. Thus, the advice: “Josh, if you want to know whether someone wants to kiss you, the best way is probably just to ask.” I did, she did, it was nice.

It turns out the lesson isn’t only applicable in romantic contexts. As the famed philosopher Big Bird puts it: “Asking questions is a good way to find things out.” Yet so many times, I find that I, and other people I know, forget it.

Our base condition feels like it’s been exacerbated in recent years by our technologies. Any number of studies have demonstrated an enormous rise in social anxiety disorders in the last 30 years. And anyone who has been around teenagers today (like this guy) is likely to have witnessed a general discomfort with the idea of talking to a stranger to schedule a doctor’s appointment or handle customer service—much less ask if their date would like to kiss.

But if this situation has gotten worse in recent decades, that’s perhaps because it’s building on how we human beings arrive from the factory. Our minds are generally lousy at living in the unknown. They’re hungry to establish a narrative to fill the space. As the science of confirmation bias has shown, we often wind up constructing a story before we’ve done our homework. Our minds, desperate to get a foothold, form an opinion and then push us to understand the facts in a way that fits.

That, in turn, makes us uncomfortable with the idea of even doing the homework—talking to the stranger, making the ask. Many of us are far more comfortable living in our wonderful little mental world of assumptions. And it seems like that’s not a recent phenomenon. (Look no further than another example of teenage love, 16th-century style: Romeo and Juliet, which is based on a chain of false assumptions and un-had conversations.)

It could be that not even Moshe Rabbeinu is beyond this basic challenge of assumptions and communication. Rabbi Simcha Bunim of Peshischa comments on the verse, “And Moses sent to call Dathan and Abiram” (Numbers 16:12), which comes in the midst of their rebellion alongside Korach. He asks, “Why was it that Moses our Teacher did not succeed in establishing peace within the camp of Israel?” He answers: “Because Moses did not trouble himself to personally go to them and persuade them with words of appeasement and reconciliation. Instead, he sat in his tent and sent [messengers] to call them to come to him. Therefore, the path to peace failed.”

According to Rabbi Simcha Bunim, while Korach and his band hold their share of responsibility for the rebellion, Moses failed significantly in this episode. He was unwilling to make himself personally vulnerable and instead hides behind his office and works only through emissaries. Had he personally engaged, the rebbe suggests, peace would have had a greater chance.

Where does Moses’s reluctance come from? My own sense is that it’s rooted in the basic human impulses we’ve described. For whatever reason, Moses, in Reb Simcha Bunim’s reading, closes himself off from a genuine encounter with the unknown. He thus sends the message that he isn’t really open and listening. That, in turn, exacerbates a loss of trust, the result of which is a deadly uprising.

Our spiritual practices are intended to support us in living mindfully in the space of the unknown. We seek to be at home in our own lives such that we can confidently, openly, genuinely engage with the lives of others. As Rabbi Jonathan Sacks puts it, our aim is “being secure in one’s home, yet moved by the beauty of foreign places, knowing that they are someone else’s home, not mine, but still part of the glory of the world that is ours… In the midst of our multiple insecurities, we need that confidence now.”

While Rabbi Sacks wrote those words in the wake of 9/11, they ring just as true a quarter century later. And they were probably true 3,000 years ago too.

For Reflection & Conversation

• In general, how do you feel about asking questions of others? Does the prospect excite you? Scare you? Something else? Why?
• How, if at all, does your spiritual practice support you in engaging with the unknown, especially when it comes to human interactions?

The Feigelson-Blitt house is a bit of a physical mess right now. Our eldest graduated from college and brought all his stuff home. Our middle child finished his first year of college and brought a lot of his stuff home. And both of them have had a lot of laundry to do. The effulgence of stuff—sheets, blankets, towels, winter coats, phone charging cables, electronic devices, assorted college tchotchkes—has been oozing out into the hallway. Conversations have been had, but it’s a challenge.

Plus, having five people in the house, including three who qualify as teenage boy or young adult man, means we need to have approximately seventeen times as much food in the house as normal. The fridge is jammed with leftovers, a round-the-clock supply of schnitzel at the ready, and the various condiments each seems to require. The shelves are bulging with boxes of protein bars, bananas, and Trader Joe’s dried mango (my God, our capacity to eat that stuff).

First-world problems, 100%. We are fortunate to be able to afford to feed everyone, especially with prices soaring the way they have in recent months. I recently read that a food bank in New Mexico used to have a monthly fuel bill of $10,000. Since the latest war began, that has increased to $22,000, which ultimately impacts the increasing number of people who need to use the food bank. As I’ve grown used to saying when people ask how I’m doing, “Thank God for the problems I have.”

Despite that awareness, I find my attention still tends to focus on the mess. Why can’t everything be neat and tidy? (Which is to say nothing of my wife’s attention—she has a higher standard than me.) Why can’t we figure out a storage solution so that we don’t have a box of protein drinks sitting on the floor? And why are there clothes on the floor of the kids’ bathroom—what happened to the laundry hamper?

Rabbi Moshe Chaim Ephraim of Sudilkov (1748-1800) was the grandson of the Ba’al Shem Tov and author of the Degel Machane Ephraim. He offers an apt comment on God’s commandment to Moses to assemble a band of people to reconnoiter the land of Canaan: “Send someone from each of their ancestral tribes, each one a nasi, a chieftain, among them” (Numbers 13:2). The word nasi in Hebrew is spelled nun-shin/sin-yod-aleph. Thus, the Degel points out, “it includes within it the letters of the words ‘ayin’ (nothing) and ‘yesh’ (something). A nasi, a leader, who thinks of themselves as ayin is ultimately a yesh; while one who thinks of themselves as a yesh is ultimately an ayin.”

On one level, there’s a simple message here about literal selflessness, particularly in leadership (though, following my teacher Parker Palmer, I would argue nearly of us exercise leadership much of the time). When spiritual or psychological myopia takes hold, it is possible to perceive oneself as yesh, that which is, while perceiving others as ayin, nothing. In such a view, other people become instruments to us while we live out our egoistic fantasy. Ultimately, that’s a path to a broader ayin, nothingness—not in the transcendent spiritual sense, but quite plainly: under such circumstances, it doesn’t take long for relationships and communities to fall apart.

But I think the Degel is also saying something deeper about our perceptions. So often, our evaluation of a situation rests on how we answer the questions, “What is yesh—what’s here? And what is ayin—what’s not here?” Consciously or subconsciously, our minds are making this evaluation all the time. We can bring our attention to what is true now, or to what we wish were true instead. We can focus on that which we perceive to be present, or that which we perceive to be absent. And when we do so, we might actually find that things aren’t quite what they seem.

Yes, the house is full of clutter right now. Yes, I’m making a lot of trips to the grocery store and spending more on food and running the dishwasher more frequently with all these people home. There’s messiness and complexity and a lot more laundry to do. It might be nice not to have to do all that.

And: the house is full. All my kids are home for a few weeks—a rare and precious event. The chessboard is out on the coffee table because they’re playing each other in the evenings. The house is noisier—and it’s a good kind of noise.

Famously, the Torah portion that begins with a charge to the spies latur, to scout out and perceive the land ends with the mitzvah of tzitzit—to make, and then look at, the fringes on our four-cornered garments, so that lo toturu, we will not follow after only our hearts and eyes. “Do not form judgments by following the impulses of your hearts and eyes,” explains Rabbi Samson Raphael Hirsch. “Do not rely on them in deciding what to accept or reject. Do not call anything ‘good’ merely because your hearts are drawn to it and your eyes yearn for it. Do not call anything ‘evil’ merely because it is distasteful to your hearts and eyes.”

A key aim of our spiritual practice is to help us hold these questions, to create space within our heart-minds in which we can perceive clearly, discern, and make wise judgments. On a fundamental level, those judgments center around the questions, what is present and what is absent? What might it be that we think is absent but is actually present? What is yesh and what is ayin?

For Reflection & Conversation

• When have you held one reflexive view of a situation that, upon further reflection, turned out to be quite different than you assumed? What supported you in coming to a new understanding? What, if any, was the role of your spiritual practice in that change?

My wife Natalie is a woman of many talents, and she always has a craft project of one variety or another that she’s working on. At one point she made beautiful cloth banners with Hebrew letters that still adorn our home at Jewish holidays. For the last few years, she’s been working on a special kind of embroidery in which she overlays black and white photos with splotches of color.

About a decade ago, she was also doing embroidery, but of a different kind: funny/ironic takes on what you might find more traditionally on a throw pillow in an antique store. (I know this was around 2016, as one of them said, in traditional black serif letters on a white background, “A woman’s place is in the White House.”)

Chip off the old block that he is, my youngest child, who is also our most artistically inclined, recently redecorated his room and included a small black felt board with white plastic letters that were arranged to read: “Home is where people don’t judge you if you fart.” To quote Homer Simpson, it’s funny because it’s true (at least in our home).

Why is that? Probably for the same reason that home is a place where we might be known by a special nickname, or we can recite merely the punchline to a joke and elicit a knowing chuckle. As the queer literary theorist Michael Warner puts it in Publics and Counterpublics, “The difference between genres of private and public speech anchors the sense of home and intimacy, on one hand, and social personality, on the other.” Home, we might like to imagine, is the ultimate shared private space, connoting a place and time in which we are known and accepted for who we are, without performing in the ways we do in public (e.g. holding a fart in).

Drawing on earlier feminist theory, however, Warner goes on to upend this notion of home. He points out how the concept of home, with its very strong protections for privacy, has also been deployed a shield for oppressive behavior: domestic (i.e. in the home) abuse, child abuse, and domination rooted in a concept of dominion that gives nearly absolute power to a man in his castle (i.e. his home). That critique, in turn, surfaces a truth about home, which is that, like all concepts, it is subject to multiple meanings and a variety of experience.

This is, in part, why I like to talk about the feeling or sensation of being-at-home, because I think it provides some more flexibility. Warner himself argues that for groups who may have historically experienced “home” as an oppressive place—he writes particularly about queer folks—the creation of alternative, sub-public spaces (think of bars, bookstores, or the shared readership of a magazine or digital space) has been essential for cultivating a feeling of being-at-home. In such cases, it’s less about holding it in when one needs to pass gas, and more about being able to let out the tension of holding in one’s essence.

“Now I take the Levites instead of every first-born of the Israelites; and from among the Israelites I formally assign the Levites to Aaron and his sons, to perform the service for the Israelites in the Tent of Meeting and to make expiation for the Israelites, so that no plague may afflict the Israelites for coming too near the sanctuary” (Numbers 8:18-19).

Like you, I expect, Rashi observes the surfeit of “the children of Israel” in this passage: Why five times when one would do? He responds: “In order to show in what affection they are held by the Holy One: the mention of them is repeated five times in one verse, corresponding in number to the Five Books of the Torah.” Rabbi Dovid Morgenstern, the second Kotzker Rebbe, adds: “This is to teach that even though each one of them was a book unto themselves, nevertheless together they constituted one Torah.”

We might hear in this a variation on the foundational Hasidic teaching that each of us has a soul-root (shoresh haneshamah) in a letter in the Torah. That is, each of us has a spiritual home in which we can experience the reality that we belong.

“Vayehi binsoa ha-aron, When the Ark would begin to travel” (Num. 10:35): I would suggest that our work to find and make home in our bodies, minds and hearts, within and among one another, is our ongoing avodah. It is our personal craft project whereby we aim to craft our person and shape a home. “Uvenucho yomar, When the Ark would come to rest” (10:36): The moments we can experience profound at-homeness individually and collectively are precisely those in which we might sense the divine Presence in our midst.

For Reflection & Conversation

• When, where, or with whom do you feel particularly at home (i.e. able to let it out)? What makes those times, places, or relationships different from others?
• Does your spiritual practice help you to experience being-at-home on a regular basis? If so, why? If not, why not?

While the Priestly Blessing is a central ritual at my family’s Shabbat table, that hasn’t always been the case. For whatever reason, it wasn’t part of my parents’ repertoire when I was growing up.

That changed when, at age 12, I attended the bat mitzvah of a family friend and saw her parents place their hands on her head and recite the words. I told my folks, “I’d like us to do that.” Soon thereafter, my dad started blessing my brothers and me. (For whatever reason, my mom left it to him to do.)

In both the relationship with my father and my relationship with my children, I have experienced real power in this ritual.

Parent-child relationships aren’t easy, and Friday afternoons can be tense. Teenage children can be moody (okay, so can the rest of us), and I imagine ours is not the only family in which we’ve sometimes been forced to decide whether to wait for a child who was having a hard time making it to the dinner table that week, or just proceed with dinner. In those cases, I have found that the laying of hands and the recitation of this bracha can work as a kind of solvent, melting some of the ice that can form.

On my dad’s last Shabbat, as we gathered in a small conference room in the hospital palliative care wing for a dinner prepared by friends, my brothers and I—all full-grown men with families of our own—each went to him to receive what we knew would be our final blessing from him. It’s hard to describe how that memory makes me feel. Suffice it to say that if you know, you know, and it made me grateful for advocating for the ritual when I was young.

“Thus will you bless the children of Israel,” the Holy One instructs Moses to instruct Aaron and the kohanim (Num. 6:23). It is in Parashat Naso that we find the words of this ancient blessing that we still recite today.

Koh, “thus,” shall you bless. The Seer of Lublin comments, “The Priestly Blessing is the blessing that the people of Israel should be blessed with the traits of Aaron: to pursue peace and love one another.” Similarly, Rabbi Avraham of Gur points out that the commandment here is not actually to bless but is rather in an instruction in how to bless when blessing. Why? Because the default state of the kohanim is understood to be hesed, loving connection. Thus, no commandment was necessary to bless—they were naturally going to do that. The instruction is simply in what words to say.

These are beautiful commentaries, both of which get at the loving sensibility conveyed in both the words and the action of the blessing. Yet I find a third Hasidic vort (short gloss) particularly moving. It comes from the Modzitz tradition: “‘Koh, thus shall you bless them’—thus, just as they are. Don’t search for the most outstanding or important among them, nor for the greatest or the most righteous. Rather, every individual deserves to receive the blessing.”

While this instruction would seem to be directed at the blessers, I think we can understand it as directed at all of us, whether we are offering blessing or receiving it. In blessing my children, or offering blessing to others, I try to soften my proverbial gaze and perceive the child or person in front of me as no more and no less than a human being, an image of the Divine who is utterly unique, infinitely valuable, and equal to everyone else. Their accomplishments and setbacks, the stories I might tell myself about them—they melt away for a moment, and I can be a channel for a Divine blessing toward them.

After all, that’s what I experienced in receiving the blessing from my father, something I think we all yearn for and need: coming home to a loving embrace in our fundamental humanness, a “safe place,” in the words of Maya Angelou, “where we can go as we are and not be questioned.”

For Reflection & Conversation

• Have you ever given or received a blessing? If so, what was the experience like? If not, what do you imagine it might be like?
• Is there someone in your life who has provided unconditional love and acceptance? If so, how did they demonstrate that? Whether yes or no, do you think you can provide that kind of support to someone else? What’s one way you might do so?

Like many other people, the Covid pandemic brought my extended family a bit closer. Like many Jewish families, that happened as a result of “Zoom kiddush,” a Friday afternoon gathering of first cousins, aunts and uncles, that included some catching up, some reminiscing, and a performance of a few Shabbat rituals.

Six years later, our family’s Zoom kiddush is still going. Every Friday afternoon I go over to my mom’s place and the two of us get on the call together. At this point in her Alzheimer’s journey, she doesn’t have all that much to say, but she’s very happy to be there. Yet when the time comes and she sings the Shabbat evening kiddush, it’s as though a light switch has flipped, and she is, for a moment, the same Happy we have long known and loved.

These days I also try to visit her on Sunday afternoons. While I usually bring a treat to snack on, the main event is when I get out my iPhone and call up a playlist entitled, “Happy’s Tunes:” Rogers and Hammerstein, Lerner & Loewe, Peter, Paul and Mary. Last Sunday my eldest son, a freshly minted college graduate as of this weekend, came with me. We put on Fiddler on the Roof. As Zero Mostel sang “Tradition” through the phone’s speaker, my mom’s face lit up in a smile: “This is such a good one,” she said.

Another metaphor I often hear to describe the effect of familiar music on dementia patients is a thirsty plant coming back to life after watering. The blank look disappears, the disorientation gives way to a sense that, for a moment, the patient knows, in the words of Tevye, “who they are and where they come from”—and, on an even deeper level, “what God expects them to do.” It’s like you’re witnessing the regrowth of roots that have been severed in mind, body, and soul, the momentary returning home of a being that, most of the time, is somewhere else these days.

The Book of Numbers, which we begin reading this week, is starkly different from its predecessors. From the get-go, it is concerned less with individuals than with the corporate identity of the Israelites. Hence its emphasis on counting—the men of fighting age in each tribe and the people as a whole and, later, the gifts brought by the head of each tribe for the dedication of the Tabernacle. The lives of individuals are, seemingly, a secondary concern for much of this book.

Yet the Jewish interpretive tradition has long understood this shift as an invitation to explore questions of individual and group identity. Or, put differently, the shared project of making a home together. In a teaching from 1872, the Sefat Emet offers a psycho-spiritual reading of the second verse of the book: “‘Take a census of the whole Israelite community according to their families, according to their ancestral houses” (Num. 1:2). “Even though the Children of Israel changed, increased, and spread out until they reached six hundred thousand,” he says, “they remained attached to the root of their birth—’And they established their genealogy according to their families.’

“This is the meaning of the verse (Psalms 131:2): ‘Surely I have stilled and quieted my soul; like a weaned child with his mother.’ A person must be connected to their source, for that is their essential point, like an infant clinging to its mother.

“And so,” continues the Sefat Emet, “Rabbi Bunim [Rabbi Simcha Bunim of Peshischa (1765–1827)] explained the words of our Sages: ‘A person must always say: When will my actions reach the actions of my ancestors, Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob [Sarah, Rebecca, Rachel and Leah]?’ Seemingly, who is foolish enough to seek to equate their own actions to the actions of the Patriarchs [and Matriarchs]? Rather, the intention is: When will my actions reach (touch) their actions? Meaning, that they should be a continuation of them. For surely the actions of the generations are not equal, but through the attachment to the root—meaning, to the Patriarchs [and Matriarchs]—we bring all of our actions close to their root: ‘to their ancestors’ houses.’”

I hear in the Sefat Emet’s reading an affirmation of a truth that psychologists have rediscovered in recent years: the fundamental importance of rootedness and connection. While a particular thrust in Western society came about through the assertion of our rugged individualism, Jewish life, like many other traditions, has long understood that we are profoundly connected and interconnected. Rootlessness is not really an option. Our bodies and spirits know it, even if our minds might try to think otherwise.

Reflecting on his novel Roots after it became a massive television event in 1977, Alex Haley observed, “In all of us there is a hunger, marrow-deep, to know our heritage—to know who we are and where we have come from. Without this enriching knowledge, there is a hollow yearning. No matter what our attainments in life, there is still a vacuum, an emptiness, and the most disquieting loneliness.”

I would only add to that the connection with roots is not only a matter of intellectual knowledge. The kind of knowledge Haley is talking about is, in my experience, one that lives in our bodies and hearts, as well as our minds. Our rootedness, and our desire for that rootedness, is something that lives deep inside, ever ready to be reawakened and reconnected through the songs and words, laughter and tears, we share with our spiritual ancestors.

For Reflection & Conversation

• How connected do you feel to your spiritual roots? If you feel connected, what has supported that connection? If you don’t, what has inhibited it?
• Is there anything you wish you knew that would help you feel more connected to your roots? If so, what? If not, why not?

Happy birthday to me! I’m in the midst of turning 50. My birthday on the Jewish calendar was last week, my birthday on the Gregorian calendar is next week. As my teacher Rabbi Dov Linzer remarked when I saw him the other day, “Some people refer to that as chol hamoed,” the intermediate days of the festival. Thank you in advance for all your good wishes.

Having a birthday in mid-May has long meant that I grow a year older in the midst of an emotionally rich time. Spring is in full bloom. Walking to elementary school in my neighborhood growing up, I would pass the flowering crabapple trees that always blossomed this week, loudly displaying their pink petals and spraying their sweet fragrance into the air.

When I arrived at school, there was a sense of wistfulness as the academic year was about to end and no one, not even the teachers, really wanted to be inside. The environment was one of end-of-year ceremonies, concerts, proms and their attendant angst about romantic relationships, graduations, and the mad dash to summer and its seeming liberation—along with, in high school, the anxiety of final exams.

All of that is part of my personal coding around my birthday.

So, it’s probably not surprising that I’ve found myself daydreaming about my childhood home more frequently in recent weeks. Images of those crabapple trees and their scent have been wafting through my mind. In meditation I’ve found my memory calling up unbidden the aroma of our family’s house, the smell of my dad’s pipe, the feel of our living room’s pea soup green shag carpet on my bare feet.

That has led me to wonder, what’s going on here? Is this nostalgia operating? I remembered a quotation from the scholar Svetlana Boym in her book, The Future of Nostalgia (2001): “At first glance, nostalgia is a longing for a place, but actually it is a yearning for a different time—the time of our childhood, the slower rhythms of our dreams.” But don’t get too comfortable, because Boym critiques that: “In a broader sense, nostalgia is rebellion against the modern idea of time, the time of history and progress. The nostalgic desires to obliterate history and turn it into private or collective mythology, to revisit time like space, refusing to surrender to the irreversibility of time that plagues the human condition.”

Maybe. But I don’t think this is me mounting resistance, at least not actively. It’s something else, perhaps closer to Maya Angelou in A Letter to My Daughter: “Thomas Wolfe warned in the title of America’s great novel that ‘you can’t go home again.’ I enjoyed the book, but I never agreed with the title. I believe that one can never leave home. I believe that one carries the shadows, the dreams, the fears and dragons of home under one’s skin, at the extreme corners of one’s eyes and possibly in the gristle of the earlobe.”

As I ride the carousel for my fiftieth turn about the sun, I find Angelou’s words more resonant. These sensory images of home—not only or even primarily visual, but aural, tactile, and especially olfactory—are finding their way to the surface, seemingly beckoning me to revisit them. Or, perhaps, more emphatically reminding me of the incessant demand to reckon with home and my experience of being at-home.

“You shall count off seven weeks of years—seven times seven years—so that the period of seven weeks of years gives you a total of forty-nine years,” the Torah commands. “Then you shall sound the shofar; in the seventh month, on the tenth day of the month—the Day of Atonement—you shall have the shofar sounded throughout your land and you shall hallow the fiftieth year. You shall proclaim release throughout the land for all its inhabitants. It shall be a jubilee for you: each of you shall return to your holding and each of you shall return to your family. (Leviticus 25:8-10)

I wrote about this passage last fall as I prepared to encounter my fiftieth High Holidays. I quoted then Rabbi Judah Loew of Prague (d. 1609), who explains why the shofar for the Jubilee year is sounded on Yom Kippur rather than Rosh Hashanah, as we might have expected: “The Jubilee and Yom Kippur—the two are really one. For the Jubilee is the return of each individual to their original place of security, to be as it was in the beginning. And so too with Yom Kippur: everyone returns to their original place of security as the Holy Blessed One atones for them.” (Gur Aryeh Behar, s.v. “Mimashma”)

“Everyone returns to their original place of security.” Or, as Angelou might have put it, home: “The ache for home lives in all of us, the safe place where we can go as we are and not be questioned.” While the Jubilee envisions this, perhaps in the Torah’s own daydream, as a physical return home, the Yom Kippur dimension makes clear that, as in my own experience, home is not only or perhaps even primarily a place, but a state of being. Again, Angelou articulates it best: “I believe we feel safest when we go inside ourselves and find home, a place where we belong and maybe the only place we really do.”

“The land must not be sold in perpetuity,” cautions the Holy One, “for the land is Mine, and you are strangers and sojourners with Me” (Leviticus 25:23). I hear in Angelou an evocation of the Sefat Emet, who interprets this passage to mean that “in this world, we must be like strangers—we must know that our essence is from something beyond only the physicality of this world… ‘The land must not be sold in perpetuity’ suggests that we must not become fully estranged and removed from our supernatural roots.”

There is much more to say, of course, which is why I’m turning to this theme repeatedly in these writings. But it’s time to sum up this piece, and I cannot do so without expressing my profound gratitude to the many people who have aided and supported me for this first half-century, and the Source of Life. I have been blessed in far too many ways to count. I pray that the coming years will enable me to repay the many extraordinary gifts I have received—and to help us all to be and feel more truly, deeply at home.

For Reflection & Conversation

• When you think of positive sensory images from home, what comes to mind? What do you notice about how you feel?

• How does the idea of returning to home, physically or spiritually, feel in your body and mind?