Two weeks ago I attended my 25th college reunion at Stanford University. I don't know how many of you regularly attend such gatherings, but I never had been to a college renunion before. This is less a matter of principle than it is a function of, I guess you might call it, shyness. This is not particularly self-flattering, but I am one of those people who is hardly shy at all, even in a crowd, so long as everyone in the crowd knows who I am. But put me in a crowd of strangers, and I fall to pieces.
First, my hands begin to grow. I assure you, it is not a pleasant thing to be the only person in a crowd with growing hands. So I hide. I gravitate toward bulletin boards. I read the fine print on flyers advertising concerts that took place two weeks before. After 47 years I have begun to accept that this probably will not change. So when I received the invitation to my 25th college reunion, I threw it in the wastebasket.
One week later, I received a call from the reunion organ- izer. He was wondering if I would speak to my classmates about my post-Stanford experiences. Almost instantly my storied shyness was supplanted by an even more powerful impulse, the sin of pride. So there I was, two weeks ago, in an auditorium at my alma mater, seated on the platform with four other classmates, overcoming my shyness with the knowledge that by the end of the afternoon everyone in the room would know who I was.
My first fellow-luminary was Phil Taubman, foreign editorial page editor of the New York Times, and with his wife Felicity Barringer, part of our All Souls community. So far, so good. I felt right at home. The second was a major record executive, the woman who founded and runs Wyndon Hill records, which, as far as I can tell, is the leading supplier of cosmic elevator music. The third turned out to be one of our country's most successful, and I would add, self-confident, artichoke farmers. He even invented an artichoke, the purple blush artichoke. Evidently it looks inedible, but he assured us, several times in fact, that "its blemish is actually a blush." Finally, my fourth colleague on the panel-- and this is just incredible -- is the world's most prominent and outspoken female arms and munitions dealer. As far as I could tell, her goal is to provide every law abiding citizen with a semi-automatic machine gun so that we can protect ourselves against the government. At this point, flanked by an artichoke farmer and a munitions dealer, I began to wonder what the criteria actually were for being selected to sit on this distinguished panel.
The arms dealer, by the way, credits her passion to Senator Diane Feinstine. Evidently, two years ago, Senator Feinstine called upon the women of this world to do something about the proliferation of guns in our society. Thus inspired, my plucky and really quite frightening classmate answered the call.
I spent more than 1/10th of my life at Stanford University, first as a student, and then for a year as assistant to the Dean of the Chapel, before coming east for my graduate work. Stanford was home to me. At least it served as home, and often even felt like home, a place where I put down roots and found a sense of belonging, a sense of place.
But going home -- to this old home of mine -- was almost completely disorienting and strange. First, it literally was disorienting. When I tried to show Carolyn around, I kept getting lost. So many new buildings had been erected that I had no sense of bearings. I felt far more out of place than I do even when I visit a new city, one I have never seen before.
And then there was the culture shock. I was graduated from Stanford in 1970, at the height of the anti-Viet Nam student rebellion. The Spring of 1970 was the Spring of Kent State and the Cambodia invasion. We shut Stanford down three months before graduation, and spent all our time at teach-ins and mass demonstations in White Plaza, right in the center of campus. Two weeks ago, White Plaza was teeming with activity, thousands of remarkably clean and tailored students patiently awaiting their turns to speak with hundreds of high-tech and financial recruiters at an all-day job fair. Imagine how strange this seemed. The Stanford commune I remember so well is now the Stanford widget factory. This may represent a kind of progress. I'm sure in many ways it does. But this home I had returned to left me feeling far less like a returning traveller than like an extraterrestrial anthropologist, who knew so little about what he was seeing that he could make almost no earthly sense of it.
And then there was the big dinner party. Carolyn gets at least a month's worth of marital vouchers for enduring this evening with me. One person after another came up to her and shared their memories of me, stories which together began to add up into perhaps the most frivolous and egotistical late 60s caricature imaginable. I'm sure that most of these stories were fabrications. Such as the story of my throwing a brick through the administration building window. Nonetheless, by the end of the evening I was on the verge of an identity crisis.
As we were leaving, one table of strangers cried, in mischievous glee to one another, "There's Forrest Church." I dutifully went over. "Whatever happened to that old hearse of yours?" one asked.
"What hearse?"
"You know," another chimed in, "the hearse you equipped with a 100 watt stereo and ferried all of us back and forth to class in."
Two weeks have passed and I am still haunted by this hearse. Not only were none of the people at this table even slightly familiar, but I can't remember ever having a hearse. Either this happened during a particularly bad month, or, more likely but equally unflattering, I made such a strange impression during my years at Stanford that this kind of weird story ends up with me in it anyway.
About a month ago, before I left for my reunion, assuming that I would experience a kind of homecoming on returning to Stanford, I assigned myself this morning's sermon topic: "Going Home and Moving on." In fact, as Carolyn and I drove away from the campus following this party, my principal feeling was not one of recent homecoming but rather of post-nostaglic disorientation. This place I had lived and been fully, even passionately, at home in for 1/10th of my life turns out, upon revisiting, almost disturbingly unfamiliar. Who I was then as much as where I was were not only different than I remembered them to be, but so completely different that my sense of self was temporarily thrown into abeyance.
Only over the following two days did I begin to reorient myself. Only then, in a very different setting, did I begin to get a handle on the strange balance between going home and moving on.
The occasion was my father-in-law Earle Buck's 75th birthday celebration. His entire immediate family, his wife Minna, his three children and their spouses, and his grandchildren, gathered in Napa Valley for a weekend together in his honor. Carolyn came up with a brilliant idea. Each of us wrote a verse or two reflecting our relationship with Earle, based on Gilbert and Sullivan's "He is the very model of a modern major general." In about 20 verses, each with a different perspective, a portrait was fashioned, poignant, honest, amusing, often even hilarious, that gave a full, many-faceted impression of this man's life and loves. The sense of home that I felt fractured during my day at Stanford, emerged in a place where most of us had never been before. This sense of home, far from static, resonated not from place, but from relationship, the deep, complicated relationships that distinguish every family. Even more strikingly, this home could be revisited only because everyone around that table had at more than one time and in more than one way moved on, on to independent lives, with independent thoughts and views, as often fashioned not in imitation of but in reaction to their shared past experience.
It began to become clear to me that home, our various homes, are not places we return to, or even can return to. So much of our disappointment when we try to returnhome may in fact stem from a mistaken impression of where home is, or ever can be. Jesus said, home is where our heart is. I'd never really thought much about this before, but if he is right, and I think he is, home is something we take with us, not something we return to, even if we could.
For instance, if I were looking for my past at Stanford -- which in a way I think I was -- I couldn't have found it there, even if new buildings had not been built, even if the plaza were filled as it was twenty-five years before by blue-workshirted, long-haired protesters. One problem with nostalgia, with looking back or going back to some more innocent time to revisit our lost homes is that we are looking in the wrong place for our hearts. I didn't leave my heart in San Francisco. I took it with me. Any attempt to return home in search of our hearts can only lead us away from them.
On the other hand, I did find my heart in the Napa Valley, somewhere I had never been before. I found it in the reconciliation and non-judgmental embrace of family. Heart to heart.
This wasn't Eden, mind you. We had all long since eaten of the fruit of the knowledge of good and evil. Each of us long since had been cast from that garden to which there is no return. As with every family, there were tensions, arguments, childishness, pettiness, occasional tears. But that's what home is like, not a place, not a cocoon, not an imagined simpler or more innocent site where we flourished before we moved on, before we got lost. This is important to remember, because if home is where the heart is and our hearts are somewhere else, at our original hearth say, or college, or anywhere we happen to have moved on from, then we are homeless, because we can't return. We can only keep moving on. This is not bad news. It is good news, for if we instead devote ourselves to living fully in, not for but in the present, our hearts will be full and we will find our home in them.
One thing happened at that Stanford dinner that did touch me deeply. For a few short minutes all my self-consciousness and disorientation passed and I was fully present, my heart at home there once again. Right before the meal, someone asked me if I would read the names of all our classmates who had died, that we could remember and honor them with a moment of silence.
There were more than 50 names on that list I read. Most were not familiar, but one, Dalton Denton, my closest friend in college, who died when we were sophomores, gave real presence and moment, at least for me, to all the other names as I read them. One by one, I read the names of our departed fellows as everyone sat in silence. We were one then, our hearts together, our fallen classmates present in the room, on the campus, and nothing had changed. There we were, one body, many members, joined in place, returned in time, home once again, home where our hearts were.
Copyright, All Souls Church, 1996