Sacred Words: Home

 

When we finish ritual, or prayer, or any other kind of shared meaning in a circle with others, we often find a closing word or phrase helpful to show we value what has been shared, we care for what has been said, consumed or enacted, we wish to hold it as sacred and embody some aspect of it in our everyday (read: magnificent and meaningful) lives. Having been burnt free of any alignment with Christianity by my childhood experiences, I cannot include the word “Amen” in my repertoire without gagging on it a bit. And as a person who experimented with a wild variety of New Age practices in the ’90s, but who then became educated into the abuses of other cultural practices by the modern western marketplace, I cannot in good conscience utter a Vedic “Om” (or “Aum” if you prefer that spelling) or a Lakota “Ho,” without knowing I am at the same time uttering evidence of my own culture’s spiritual poverty, as well as its voracious appetite to fill that emptiness with the gifts of others – often the others it has colonized, slaughtered, marginalised or otherwise processed into neat, inoffensive packages to be bought and sold. What to do in this postcolonial, secular (post-Christian, for me) void?

 

I have an answer. You may find it helpful also, if you are interested in having a daily practice that aligns you with the sacred in nature (the nature within the self, the body, the mind and heart, the land and sea and air and other creatures and night sky; the nature we are indistinguishable from). At these moments I say “Home.” This practice reminds me of what is most important – look after the place you live in, along with all else that lives in it. This Home is planetary, including all races and cultures, but the word for these purposes also relates directly to our own local conditions and loyalties. It sounds remarkably similar to the other traditional sacred words I have come across – almost combining them, including the Native American with the Vedic and Christian. And it is true to me, to being here, to loving and caring for and beyond the self. I see it as another little marker of what White Fella Dreaming can offer my people, I hope. Now to find out what the local Australian Aboriginal peoples, the Wurunjerri people of the Kulin nation, would have used for such a word! (Report to follow soon.) Home!

 

*NB: The ancient Greeks used the word oikos to mean something like home and this word became the root for both economy and ecology (as well as all our other usages of “eco”). Another pathway along which we might combine the ways we do things, dissolving another dualism along the path to a resacralised world: an economy that truly takes care of its home, the earth, and all of its ecological diversity.