“Home is” – Spoken Word by Yehuda Mansell

31 Oct “Home is” – Spoken Word by Yehuda Mansell

My thoughts here are unapologetically subjective, a much-needed corrective, to thinking that cold empiricism and stats are the only way to tell a compelling story. So, here is my own journey of discovery and wonder, as one who has been prone to wander, searching for home, for rootedness.

If you want facts and figures, then bug me afterward; I can deliver, ad nauseum, just ask my students or my children. But until then… let’s begin.

***

Home is
Waiting, for news, for something, for hope. Sometimes it takes two years, sometimes fifteen. Either way, it’s exhausting, and so very slow, which can suck the hope, trash the soul – until the phone call, “get ready… you’re going to a new home.”

Then the whirlwind: visas, UN documentation, plane tickets, vaccines, and last goodbyes, some of which you know are forever. After years of languishing, everything is about to end and begin.

Home is
Suitcases in the lobby. Giddy and nervous hellos, pregnant with hope and layers of misunderstanding. A hand-drawn welcome sign on your door. Inane instructions about recycling and laundry. I know it’s so overwhelming and exciting, but it will soon feel like home.

Coming to dinner: so many faces, so many languages – way too many names to remember, but you smile and nod a lot, but the joy is mingled with sorrow, as your thoughts are of big meals back home.

And your new neighbours – everyone is a little like you, forced to flee and move, and now – they seem to know something you don’t – it is going to be hard, but it’s going to work out.

Home is
Learning that a place does not belong to me, but that I belong to the people of that place, and that privacy is an unfortunate myth that we tell ourselves to stave off the ache of loneliness.

Home is
A knock at my door, a warm plate piled with savoury foods I’ve never tasted before. Being willing to receive more, than I can ever give back. There is an odd vulnerability in that, an antidote to whatever dysfunctional saviour complex I may still hold.

Home is
Having to step over a tangle of children gaming in front of my door because the wifi is strongest there – and now, so is the smell of adolescent feet.

Oh and the sound of those feet, sprinting, giggling down the hallway as they try to evade my curfew call. “Oh, Hudi – five more minutes, pleeease?”

Being able to laugh long and hard, as I try to ascertain how in heaven’s name there are footprints along the ceiling!

If the Kingdom belongs to the children, then my friends perhaps the throne room is a hallway that smells of cumin and savoury rice, with potato chips ground into the carpet, and everyone is playing Roblox late into the night.

Home is
Curiosity about universes of knowledge, language, and experiences that I have not yet discovered. Depths of religious devotion where I have infinitely more to learn than I could ever share. But sometimes, my prayers, if called upon, are seen to have a weight that I would never ascribe to them, and it is then I realize my faith is very small in comparison, but expansion is possible.

Home is
Standing in awe of individuals who are so brave, resilient, and understated I wonder why the film studios aren’t begging to write their screenplays, and then I see that in some sacred way, some of the best narratives are whispered friend to friend, and their power and strength in the end, is not in their wide distribution but in intimate sharing, like a cup of tea, bitter, strong, and sweet.

Home is
Recognizing my need, to be fragile and open, and not self-important. When sharing personal loss and grief over the recent massacre, and my Muslim Syrian neighbour telling me how he can’t stop crying over the Jewish children murdered. Or the times, when I lost family and friends, my neighbours have been there for me, in ways I could never expect of nice but chilly Canadians.

Home is
When we survived the trauma of a fire, most of us triggered afresh by loss and fear, to slowly regain our bearing, and to heal and hope together.

Home is
Waiting at the airport, being able to share in a family finally reunited after three long years – I’m so excited, I’m nearly crawling out of my skin. In a world that often feels unimaginably bleak, I treasure these wins.

Home is
The achingly hard goodbyes that are bittersweet in every measurable way: it is at these junctures that I am most aware of my own frailty and my profound need for friends and family. It is this temporality, that makes me ache in ways that ground me in the tactile, the sacred, the today.

I used to think that “ministry” was somewhere we went to do a thing, only to return at the end of the day, the event, the program.

Now I don’t think about ministry anymore, but that I get to be, and while I inhabit my space with others, and I’m sure I do stuff, but meanwhile beautiful, magical things to all of us: as we care for, encourage and feed each other. We get annoyed with but are known to each other, as our stories slowly trickle out.

Home is
A national and personal policy of absorption – we don’t know where we’ll put you all, but if we work together we’ll figure it out, even if you have to crash on my auntie Monica’s couch.
Here’s to federal blanket forts!
Here’s to embracing an adventure, here’s to mobilizing hope.

Here’s to realizing that we do have enough space, food, time, furniture, clothes, blankets – but we just need to share.
Here’s to realizing that our cities and communities are made measurably stronger, healthier, and safer with the arrival of refugees.

So, my friends, I dare you to imagine what home could be.