I’m Coming Home: The Quest for Community | May 25, 2025 | Rev. Karen Melander-Magoon, D.Min.

What are we as a church community?  What are we as any community?  We have all been deeply saddened by the loss of our beloved shepherd, Dr. Dorsey Blake.  Our community has suffered and will always mourn our loss, and yet we know Dr. Blake would want us to gather together to become stronger, as he continues to inspire and guide our steps.

I wrote this poem some time ago to remember everything I love:

There are winds that want to blow

There are hearts that want to know

There are hands that want to reach

Beyond the past

Bring me home where things are small

Nothing giant, nothing tall

Let me linger with

The earth and flowers and grass……….

I’ve a story I may tell you

It’s no bigger than your smile

No smaller than your tiniest desire

Please just wait awhile with me

And let yourself be free

With hand and heart that open wide to love

There are winds that want to blow

There are hearts that want to know

There are hands that want to reach

Beyond the past

Bring me home where things are small

Nothing giant, nothing tall

Let me linger with your love

And let it last

Let me linger with your love

And let it last

Love always lasts somehow, but where does it begin?

When we are babies we often don’t even realize we exist apart from our mothers and fathers.  I remember my first born, holding this tiny little boy in my hand and saying:

Tiny fingers

Tiny toes

Tiny joys

And tiny woes

Little thing

Now so small

Do you know

You’re there

At all?

We are taught that the first thing we learn is trust.  But there is no reason to trust until we know we need to believe in something, until we know we ARE.  Trust grows as a baby realizes certain needs and cries out for them and is satisfied.  That is the first community, the baby and the mother and the father, each recognizing their bond and their dependence and responsibility to each other. 

In the New Testament, Matthew 22:35 Jesus very clearly places one commandment as higher than all the rest, and that commandment has to do with loving something other than oneself, something greater than oneself---- that great spirit he calls God.

“…one of them, a lawyer, asked him a question,

Master, which is the greatest commandment in the law?

Jesus answered, Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind.

This is the first and great commandment…..”

And for all of us when we are just beginning to taste and feel the world as babies, what is this great love in something other than ourselves but the trust and faith in our parents--- source of all life, of all sustenance, of all comfort, yes, of all love.  This first commandment is far more a recognition of our need to open our hearts to our first community, to trust our mothers and fathers or whomever is taking care of our needs, to trust and open our hearts to something beyond ourselves, even as we cannot distinguish as babies between ourselves and that source of love and sustenance.  That is our first communion, our first community, our first experience of what we might call “worship”.

Beyond that love and acceptance and communion with all our heart and soul and mind comes the second commandment, to love your neighbor as yourself.

And we are told:  On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets.

I think we could say that on these two commandments hang our lives and the life of our beloved community, its law but also its mercy, its justice, but also its love.

We come into the world responding to the otherness of our parents really as ourselves; we learn to trust that otherness until we can recognize our own identity, and with that identification we give back love again to something we used to think of as the same as ourselves.  And as we grow in thought and body and spirit we are able to embrace an otherness beyond our mothers and fathers, beyond our families and friends, into our wider community and eventually the world at large, and God, or the great Spirit.  That is our first understanding of our soul and how it is wrapped up in everything we see or hear or sense or contemplate. 

The two commandments—to love with all our being something beyond ourselves and then to love our neighbor as we love ourselves are, in a sense, one idea.  The baby and its mother or father, the relationship of ourselves within our community and our trust and love in and through ourselves of others and of our understanding of God is the secret of life.

In Hawaiian, we have the word “Aloha’, which means love and welcome and generosity of spirit.  When one says, “You are aloha” it is a deep recognition of your humanity, of the depth of your commitment to the community and all nature and beyond.  It also can be simply a beautiful expression of what we call love.  Spending time in Hawaii, where my late husband was born, I once wrote this song to honor the spirit of aloha in others:

You are aloha!

When I see you smile I think of flowers

When your eyes meet mine

I think of hours of happiness and of hellos

You are aloha

Where you are is where I too belong

Every time we meet I feel my life is more complete

With love and song

You are aloha

Like the blue that fills the skies

I see the love inside your eyes

The whispering palms

And songs of birds

A gentle echo in the wind

That turns a page as you begin

To sing

Aloha!

This sounds like a simple love song, but we can respond to the whole world with Aloha once we accept the holiness of everything around us, seen and unseen, and find ourselves as part of that holiness.

When Cain killed Abel, the first homicide in the Old Testament, God asked him where his brother was and he responded, “Am I my brother’s keeper?” What had happened here?  Cain expressed a lack of responsibility for another in his own community; in fact, he refused to identify with his own brother. 

Haven’t we all observed that war is only possible when we can de-humanize the enemy? When we call soldiers or civilians who are to be treated as enemies, “Gooks”, or “Krauts”, cockroaches or terrorists---? When we dehumanize people through ridicule to justify torture or further humiliation and degradation, we disassociate ourselves from our responsibilities to another human being. 

Am I my brother’s keeper?

One of the first leaders in the women’s movement, Jane Addams, once said, “The essence of immorality is the tendency to make an exception of myself.” So we ask again, Am I my brother’s keeper?  Am I responsible for the cruelty I exercise on others, particularly if I am asked to do so by a higher authority?  If my government pursues a policy of injustice in its dealing with others, am I responsible? 

Jane Addams said further, “The good we secure for ourselves is precarious and uncertain until it is secured for all of us and incorporated into our common life.”

Am I my brothers’ or my sisters’ keeper? 

We all can be Aloha.  It is a choice we make to be generous in spirit and to look out for each other.

Jane Addams was born in 1860, forty years after Clara Barton’s birth and one year before the Civil War began.  She was born into a tumultuous time, yearned to study to be a doctor but found considerable resistance from her parents. After they had taken her to Europe to finish her education, she became ill and was fitted with a back brace for a year for a curvature of the spine.  A year later, she decided on her own to visit Europe and discovered Toynbee Hall, a settlement home in the slums of England.  That became the model for Hull House in Chicago, which she founded and directed for a quarter of a century to live in solidarity with immigrant communities, seeing as many as 2,000 people a week during the great depression.

Jane Addams confronted poverty with a demand that laws be changed to protect children and workers.  She was accused of being Communist and lost many patrons for Hull House, which she then supported from her own pocket through lectures and writings.  Twenty years at Hull House became a best seller and allegedly brought her a fortune!  She was a founder of the ACLU, a charter member of the NAACP and was a leader in the movement to give women the vote.

Jane Addams was, in a very real sense, the essence of the two commandments, to love passionately beyond ourselves and to treat our neighbor as ourselves. She saw herself as her brothers’ and sisters’ “keeper”.

Audrey Urry, a devoted Quaker, writes in Quaker Faith and Practice, “All parts, all issues, are inextricably intertwined. Indeed, the web of creation could be described as of three-ply thread: wherever we touch it we affect justice and peace and the health of all everywhere."                                   

In a 2003 speech to the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force, Coretta Scott King said, "We are all tied together in a single garment of destiny...an inescapable network of mutuality... I can never be what I ought to be until you are allowed to be what you ought to be.”

Again, the spirit of Aloha.

How does this translate into the responsibility of community to seek the health and sustenance of its own----which means of course, all of nature, the animals and fruits and flowers, forests and rivers and plains---all that is part of this miraculous and holy earth?

Let me tell you something I learned just lately---the banana is probably doomed to extinction.  For a hundred years, a handful of corporations were given this delicious fruit and allowed to do what they wanted with it. What happened? They had one good entrepreneurial idea – to select one banana clone that was easy to commercialize and in order to squeeze every tiny drop of profit from it, they destroyed democracies, burned down rainforests, and ended up possibly killing the fruit itself.

There is a long history leading to the potential demise of the banana, beginning in about 1911 in Honduras, where the fruit had thrived in the wild for about 150 years, and where countless variations on what we call a “banana” were thriving in their tropical paradise. According to British columnist Johann Hari, a businessman named Samuel Zemurray decided to take over Honduras as his private banana plantation, decimate the rainforests and use chemicals to harvest large quantities of a single clone of banana. 

This was the beginning of the term “banana republic” when foreign colonialist businessmen began to rule little countries in Latin America solely to extract profits from it for their own pockets.  To counter just such thugery, another country, Guatamala, elected a science teacher, Jacobo Arbenz Guzman, as its President. He had high ideals of land reform where people would cultivate their own property.  He and his wife gave away acres upon acres of land to try to realize this dream for the people of Guatemala. Considered by Eisenhower to be Communist, the CIA overthrew this democratically elected President in a coup.  Why? Because the reforms he had organized were counter to the wishes of United Fruit, a huge corporation by now dominating much of Latin American trade.  Jacobo Arbenz Guzman eventually became a fugitive in Latin America, committing suicide in 1971, just as his father had before him. As you can imagine, there is much more to this story.   He had tried to save the banana and other agricultural gems by allowing people the possibility of owning their own land and cultivating their own farms, thereby promoting the diversity of clones necessary for agriculture to thrive.

As we know, diversity is the key for all of us—and all communities—to thrive.

Our community is our world:  its air, its oceans, its gardens, rainforests and rivers, its animals and its humanity.  We are the keepers of all this and more.  We cannot deny the identity of our neighbor any more than we can deny our own identity and our responsibility to our community and our world---to struggling peoples everywhere, be they in Haiti or Gaza, in Ghana or Uganda, or in our own cities, the children on our own streets.  We are responsible for the health of our home, our planet.  We are responsible to and for each other. We are inevitably our brothers’ and sisters’ keepers and they are ours.

Think of a world

Where all are free

Where we don’t live exclusively

Think of a world of honesty

Think of a world

Think of a world where children play

And laugh and sing throughout the day

Where no one shoots them in revenge

For what?

Think of a world

Think of a world of peace and sun

Where we can live with everyone

Where we will love our neighbor’s son

Think of a world

Come with me to make a world

Where all are free and all are loved

Join with me to make that world

Think of a world.

We all seek a community as a safe haven, a place where life can be sustained and we can find peace, a restoration of the spirit.  Perhaps that is our definition of home.  As babies we connected with our mothers and fathers and then learned to love as separate entities our parents, our families, our communities, nature, to connect with all living things in the world and beyond.  We began to understand home as not just our family but the whole earth and all existence with which we have any commonality.

We love our home, but we also know we must sustain it.  Whether it is by acting locally to support our communities, planting gardens to live ecologically healthy lives, or treating all people justly, and by extension all animals and plants, so that life may be protected, we discover as we grow the need to live gently so that all may thrive.

We are all a part of this home we call earth and just as infants responding to our mother’s warmth and embrace, we look to earth to accept and embrace us.

We hold the world in our arms.  Just as the earth sustains us, it is up to us to sustain the earth.

Unless we as a community of peoples do our best to save the treasures of earth:  the banana, the salmon, even the rainforests and oceans themselves, we may lose this home we call earth as we know and cherish it.  We are admonished to love that which is outside ourselves with all our heart and soul and strength and to love our neighbor and the world—yes, even the universe, as ourselves, for we are a part of all that wonder, all that miraculous life.

We thank all that came before us----the indigenous Ohlone, our revolutionaries, both men and women, our beloved Dr. Blake and all those whom we have lost in the past year and beyond---and everyone who has made a difference in our lives and the life of our community.

May our prayers be for the patience to recognize our love and the miracles inside us as well as gratitude for blessings given others and for the wonder of our earthly home.  May we pray for the compassion to be instruments of mercy and light, of gentleness and kindness.  May we hear the laughter of children and rejoice with them in the magic of life.  May we see the beauty of the moon and the evening star within our hearts, may we be grateful for all with whom we share our lives.

I close with a reflection I am told is Native American:

Let the winds come singing here

Let the clouds with rainbow greet

And most comfortably embrace

The people of my life

The ones who own my heart

And let us…….each one

Wish another well.

From wonder to trust, to community and beyond, we are always “Coming home” to what we love.