by Rev. Terry Davis
Delivered at Northwest Unitarian Universalist Congregation on June 12, 2016
On Friday, it seems that Louisville, Kentucky became America’s hometown.
On that day, tens of thousands of persons showed up Louisville and elsewhere to honor the life of Muhammad Ali. On that day, a funeral procession took Ali’s body past places where the legendary boxer spent his formative years – his childhood home, his high school, and the first boxing gym where he trained.
News reports said that Ali, who suffered from Parkinson’s disease, spent years planning his Louisville funeral. He wanted it to be a giant homecoming . . . an opportunity for his fans and persons of all faiths come together in love and to celebrate. After all those years and accomplishments, as well as moving more than 1,700 miles away, it seems that Louisville had never left Ali’s heart.
Twentieth century author Thomas Wolfe wrote a novel entitled You Can’t Go Home Again, a line that has since entered our American speech. It makes reference to the sometimes disappointing experience of attempting to relive youthful memories or finding people and places unchanged.
“You can’t go back home again,” concludes Wolfe’s character George Webber, a fledgling author who made his own hometown and its residents the subject of what became his successful, but controversial first book:
You can’t go back home to your family,
back home to your childhood …
back home to a young man’s dreams of
glory and of fame …
back home to places in the country,
back home to the old forms and systems of things
which once seemed everlasting
but which are changing all the time –
back home to the escapes of Time and Memory.
If this is true that you really can’t go back home again, why then did Muhammad Ali pick Louisville for his final farewell? What is this desire to go home all about?
What might we really be seeking?
In thinking about these questions and after reading Neal’s reflection, I found myself wondering about my childhood homes in the Washington area (we moved once when I was in elementary school and again when I was in middle school).
Were they still standing? Who lived in them now?
I had never attempted to look them up on Google Maps, and I wasn’t so sure I wanted to see what the satellite image might reveal. But I did anyway.
And, I discovered that the two-story brick townhouse of my elementary school days was gone. In its place was a newer, larger house and a few others that looked just like it, surrounded by the older, smaller, and – now – rundown houses from my youth. The home I lived in during middle and high school, which was brand-new when we moved into it in 1972, was still the same vinyl-siding white ranch at the end of a suburban cul-de-sac. The front yard, however, looked rough and patchy, nothing like the immaculate, lush green lawn my father sweated over every summer.
I tortured myself some more by hunting down satellite photos of my elementary and high schools. They looked stark and lifeless from outer space. Where were the kids? I wondered. Why did everything look so worn out?
Unlike Muhammad Ali, I couldn’t imagine wanting my family and friends to send me off to whatever lies beyond this life from the changed places and streets of my youth. I started getting a sinking feeling.
Enough! I shut down Google Maps.
Thomas Wolfe and George Webber had it right – I couldn’t go back home to the escapes of Time and Memory.
But, I think Neal had it right, too.
He had it right when he suggested in his thoughtful reflection that home is more a feeling than it is a place. He had it right when he said that going home again is really about a desire to reconnect to something deeply meaningful and astonishingly simple – such as the familiar and comforting bonds of family, which were temporarily, but significantly damaged by a painful divorce.
Neal’s childhood home . . . my childhood homes . . . aren’t what they used to be.
I expected that might be the case when I went searching on Google, and I felt some twinges of sadness and old age.
I think it would be far more disturbing, however, if I was unable to answer the questions “Who am I?” and “What is of deep meaning to me?” That’s a place I’ve been to before, too, and it was a very difficult visit.
I think to go home is to get beyond the sentimentality of nostalgia. Instead, it’s about shooting down like a taproot into the rich, black soil of our souls. To be homeward bound is to be on a spiritual journey toward our most essential self . . . that place that knows who we are and to whom or what we are connected.
While Muhammad Ali lived out his final years in Scottsdale, Arizona, Louisville was the rich soil of his soul. And his connection to it – to Louisville and to his innermost self – could be seen and felt everywhere. That’s why Ali was so much more than a boxing legend to so many.
I learned that it you visit downtown Louisville, you’ll find the Muhammed Ali Center, where exhibits document and celebrate his boxing career . . . and also promote the six core principles of confidence, conviction, dedication, giving, respect, and spirituality that were at the heart of his humanitarianism.
There is the Muhammad Ali Institute for Peace and Justice, located at the University of Louisville, that offers training, research and service in the areas of urban violence prevention, social justice and peacemaking.
There is his unassuming and pink boyhood home, completely restored and open now as a museum. There are his former boxing gyms, two of which still exist. His old elementary and high schools are still around and thriving.
Perhaps Muhammad Ali was one of those lucky ones whose sense of home included both people and place. While his spiritual journey home led him to Islam, it also never led him away from the rootedness he felt to the people and the places in his Kentucky town.
****
In the end, George Webber, the author in search of home, discovered something that perhaps Ali knew all along. He learned that the quest for home and purpose and the truth is really about keeping the important questions flowing and the willingness to grow alive.
Perhaps this is our strange and haunting paradox
here in America –
that we are fixed and certain
only when we are in movement.
At any rate, that is how it seemed to
young George Webber,
who was never so assured of his purpose
as when he was going somewhere on a train.
And he never had the sense of home
so much as when he felt that he was going there.
As we carry on with our homeward bound journeys individually and as a faith community, may we find ourselves searching not simply for nostalgia, but for a deeper connection to ourselves and to others.
This may require some painful realizations on our part about what is real and what isn’t. But, I believe that facing the truth about people, places and changes will only set us free and aid us on our course toward connecting to our most essential self.
May it be so, for you and for me. Amen.
(Photo credit: Agrees Latif/Reuters from the Globe and Mail)