Journal of Sacred Work

It was probably the first time in his adult life that he had ever cried.
– from the short story "The Swimmer" by John Cheever.

   Cheever’s story (which I read and saw in movie form many years ago) has a strange opening premise. In the movie version (click on scenes from the film, left and below) a man who lives in Beverly Hills decides one sunny day that he would like to swim home through a chain of backyard pools owned by his rich friends. At each home, and in each setting, he finds himself progressively more unwelcome. By the end of the story we encounter him in the midst of a thunder storm pounding on the doors of his own mansion. Chillingly, the mansion turns out to be empty and foreboding.   
   It’s a depressing and powerful story. Among other things, I have always been haunted by this story as a metaphor for our desperate need to feel welcome and loved in the different communities of our lives…

      Think of the different homes in which you have lived. Once you move, you can never return to the
same kind of warm presence you once may have taken for granted in your old house. The home in which I grew up in Southern California was the haven of my childhood. Upon returning years later, the front door I once walked through with abandon was, of course, now locked against me.
   Think of the settings in which you have worked. Once you leave and take a different job, you can never return to your old place with the same kind of acceptance you may once have enjoyed. In more than forty years, I have worked in as many at seven different jobs, some as short as two years, some as long as twelve. I have left most by my own decision through promotion or other advancement. I have also been fired twice as the result of mergers.
   In every instance, I formed an attachment to my job and my fellow workers. Imagine how it feels for any of us to return to a setting where we may be greeted in a friendly way, but of which we are no longer a part.
   In each instance, the gain of a new house or a new job is accompanied, to some degree, by a feeling of loss for the way things were. Even a bad job or a defective home may hold happy memories.
   I have wondered how this sense of loss must feel for couples who divorce. The feeling of intimacy once so comfortable, trusting and rewarding suddenly (or gradually) turns as cold and foreboding as the empty house in Cheever’s story.
   Some people yearn for retirement. A part of me yearns to return to some of the positions I once held and to have the kind of easy accessibility to thousands of people who were once partners.
   All of this, for me, is really about acceptance – about feeling welcome and wanted. Our places of worship, at their best, give us this feeling of inclusion. At their worst, they can make us feel shunned.
   Somehow, we need to find a way to feel welcomed in the world itself.  The truth is, none of us own anything and yet we "own" everything we can sense. We don’t really own our homes because we can never occupy them for more than a lifetime and they can always be taken from us by any number of other forces.
   By the same token, our friends, our jobs, our families are never truly "ours." For us to think otherwise is what leads to stress. If we think we "own" things or people than it is likely we will try to control them. We really can’t.

   No one can actually give us the feeling of being welcomed in this world unless we have first learned how to accept ourselves. Our bodies are temporary spaces we occupy. As all of us know, they are ever vulnerable to breaking down – and letting us down.
   The protagonist in "The Swimmer" (played by Burt Lancaster) is not really welcome anywhere because he has not welcomed himself. The first tears he sheds at the end of the story are new for him because he has never been in touch with his truest feelings. As he searches for acceptance outside, we know he will never find it because he has never felt welcome inside his own body.
   As is always the case in the Journal. There is never a better answer to this dilemma than for each of us to align with the energy of Love.

-Erie Chapman