Waldo Beach - "Where's Your Home?" (September 20, 1959)

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	(congregation shuffling and coughing)	0:04
-	During the last 10 days on this campus,	0:24
	amid the ganglia and blobs of humanity,	0:28
	which congeal on the crosswalks and hallways	0:34
	where people meet.	0:39
	The most common question asked, has been,	0:43
	where are you from?	0:47
	Where's your home?	0:49
	This is the usual opener in the nervous game	0:53
	of meeting strangers	0:56
	and getting settled in a strange place.	0:58
	It provides a little thread of spiritual connection.	1:04
	Like the weather it's something everybody has in common	1:10
	to start conversation with.	1:16
	Since everybody comes from somewhere.	1:19
	The thread is a fragile one indeed.	1:23
	It almost breaks when he says Montclair	1:27
	and you say oh yeah, do you know Joe Blow?	1:31
	And he says, oh, I'm afraid I don't.	1:33
	And it snaps quickly.	1:40
	When as a freshman in orientation week,	1:43
	you meet five people the first day	1:46
	who never even heard of the town you came from,	1:50
	and you suffer a kind of cosmic chill	1:55
	of being a real forlorn stranger.	2:00
	All this talk among us these first days about home	2:05
	and this anxiety and dither to have newcomers	2:12
	feel at home on this campus	2:16
	is an outer and visible sign	2:20
	of an inner and spiritual problem and situation	2:23
	of almost all students	2:28
	in their pilgrimage through Duke	2:31
	and their answers to the question,	2:34
	where's your home?	2:37
	If you run true to form,	2:41
	you may find a sequence something like this.	2:45
	As freshman, you feel yourself away from home at college	2:49
	and on some gray Sunday afternoon this fall	2:56
	a lurking wisp of home sickness will curl over your soul	3:01
	despite yourself.	3:07
	Then along about spring vacation of sophomore year,	3:11
	maybe earlier, maybe later,	3:16
	you think of home differently.	3:20
	You'll talk about getting back to school.	3:22
	You'll have shifted your emotional duffle	3:26
	to somewhere on campus,	3:31
	in double H or facet or wherever.	3:34
	Though no one has yet put up a sign	3:39
	over the entry of double a H, God bless our home.	3:41
	(woman laughs)	3:47
	For a junior, back home in Montclair	3:51
	is now something you go through,	3:57
	on the way to somewhere else.	4:03
	To pick up fresh laundry and sleep.	4:06
	And you can't go home again	4:11
	as Thomas Wolf found out.	4:13
	So the university becomes your home base	4:16
	and shortly it assumes a maternal complex of its own.	4:21
	The victim of institutional momism.	4:26
	And we have an annual homecoming.	4:32
	(audience laughs)	4:35
	But the alumnus one year out,	4:39
	back for homecoming finds that returning	4:42
	is not quite the same.	4:46
	It's not like home.	4:48
	They've changed things	4:51
	and somebody else is in my old room.	4:52
	His homing sense is now beamed to somewhere in suburbia.	4:57
	And so it goes.	5:03
	And it all denotes a profoundly important	5:06
	theological problem.	5:09
	The question, where's your home	5:12
	is as of central religious import,	5:15
	as the question what's your name?	5:19
	Though no IBM machine can detect it.	5:23
	The word home does not mean your address.	5:28
	What you fill in on the second line.	5:32
	It means rather your center of reference.	5:37
	The inner meridian of the spirit.	5:42
	Where you view things from.	5:45
	Its longitude and latitude may be plotted spiritually	5:50
	but not geographically.	5:55
	A person's home is his center of reference	5:58
	in two great main senses.	6:03
	One is the intellectual sense.	6:08
	The home of the mind is the center of the mind	6:11
	or the heart of the mind where it finds its nexus of meaning	6:16
	in all that it studies and learns.	6:23
	For the great part the intellectual pilgrimage	6:27
	of university students is one of homelessness.	6:30
	Of having no centering point	6:37
	from which he can make sense of the whole mess	6:39
	of the courses that he's taking.	6:44
	His learning is anarchic.	6:48
	It lacks the integration,	6:52
	which follows from having one center	6:53
	around which to incorporate the disparate	6:58
	five, six courses he's carrying.	7:01
	This lack of an intellectual center of the mind,	7:07
	this homelessness of disintegration	7:11
	as illustrated negatively by the dark anxiety	7:13
	on the face of the Duke student	7:19
	of modest intellectual prowess,	7:21
	whom I once encountered walking into a tough final exam	7:25
	in economics as strangely erect as a West Point plebe.	7:29
	What are you standing that way for, I asked.	7:37
	Sir, he said, I gotta stand this way.	7:41
	If I leaned over	7:44
	the whole course would slide off onto the floor.	7:45
	(audience laughs)	7:48
	The word home has a second meaning.	7:54
	It means not only the mind's point of reference	8:00
	but also the altar of the heart.	8:06
	The fireside of the house of the self,	8:09
	whatever the self supremely treasures and cherishes.	8:14
	Its center of affection.	8:19
	The old maxim, home is where the heart is,	8:23
	is not really corny, but an accurate description	8:28
	of the relational self,	8:33
	which has a kind of homing instinct.	8:37
	The demand to find its integrity, its self-hood	8:39
	in an objective love,	8:45
	which it finds as supremely good and holy.	8:48
	Education of the whole self,	8:53
	of head and heart, of mind and will,	8:58
	is in essence the process of finding the self's true home.	9:01
	The authentic center of the mind's life	9:07
	from which it can rightly understand its universe	9:12
	and the true altar of the heart's love.	9:16
	The process of our work in this university community	9:21
	when understood this way becomes the same kind of venture	9:26
	which is described in our lesson of the morning	9:33
	in the epistle to the Hebrews.	9:38
	The kind of search of the heroes of faith,	9:40
	with Noah and Abraham and the others.	9:46
	We go out, not knowing where we're going.	9:50
	We are seeking a homeland.	9:55
	On pilgrimage from one kind of base to another.	9:59
	In search of the city which has foundations,	10:05
	whose builder and maker is God.	10:08
	The text becomes relevant to our growth,	10:14
	both in its intellectual and its emotional sense.	10:17
	What should be going on between the lines	10:23
	of quizzes and lab reports, class discussions,	10:27
	campus forums,	10:32
	is education literally leading you out	10:35
	from a narrow home.	10:40
	From a pinched insular parochial outlook	10:43
	to the range and spread of a high mind	10:48
	which views things from a point of eminence.	10:55
	And this process of the mind	11:00
	is concurrently negative and positive.	11:02
	Negatively it means that sometimes painful detachment	11:05
	from the small town provincial outlook,	11:11
	and there are shocks and jolts to the soul	11:16
	in this emancipation.	11:21
	When you discover at Duke that	11:24
	21 Summerfield place, Montclair, New Jersey,	11:26
	is not after all the center of the universe.	11:29
	That 1959 is not the only year in history,	11:34
	and that God is not necessarily a Baptist.	11:39
	Throughout your career at Duke	11:46
	the progressive enlargement of your vision	11:49
	will have to scan the wide range of things	11:53
	and your comfortable beliefs will be well ventilated	11:57
	if not blown away.	12:02
	And sometimes you'll yearn secretly to go back	12:05
	to the simple picture of the universe	12:09
	and the simple homely truths that you learned,	12:13
	as one student put it,	12:19
	at my mother's knee and other joints.	12:21
	(audience laughs)	12:25
	Trouble is what you learned at mother's knee	12:31
	does not always fit with what prevails at other joints.	12:34
	But you can't go back to innocence.	12:40
	Positively the process of finding the mind's right home	12:45
	involves attachment to a perspective transcendent	12:50
	of local time and space	12:56
	which has educated itself out from a local outlook	12:59
	on the universe to a universal outlook on the local.	13:04
	This is the quality of the high mind.	13:10
	It has nothing to do with time and space.	13:14
	Like Thoreau it can say, I have traveled much in Concord.	13:17
	It's something like the outlook on the letter	13:24
	addressed to Rebecca in Wilder's play, Our Town.	13:26
	Jane Crowfoot the Crowfoot farm, Grover's corners,	13:32
	Sutton county, New Hampshire, United States of America,	13:38
	North America, Western hemisphere,	13:43
	the earth, the solar system, the universe, the mind of God.	13:46
	That's what it said on the envelope.	13:53
	The narrow mind is that of the gum chewing American	13:58
	who tours Europe from Kansas with some surprise	14:03
	and a little scorn that they don't have Coca-Cola	14:09
	in the Sistine chapel or Tasty Freeze in the Louvre.	14:12
	(audience laughs)	14:17
	The educated mind emancipated from provincialism in time	14:22
	is also emancipated from provincialism in space.	14:30
	And while the narrow mind is caught	14:37
	in the pinch of this age	14:40
	the free mind sees things under the aspect of eternity.	14:41
	Which is another way of saying that his intellectual home	14:47
	is a city which has foundations,	14:52
	whose builder and maker is God.	14:55
	And that he is at home in any century or country.	14:59
	The same double process, negative and positive	15:06
	goes on with the heart search	15:13
	for its true home and true fireside.	15:14
	The level of the volitional self.	15:19
	Right education of the will Involves gradual detachment	15:23
	from small loyalties,	15:29
	gradual attachment to high affections.	15:33
	If you're a denizen of east campus,	15:38
	it may not have been very long ago	15:42
	that the emotional center of your affection	15:46
	was a teddy bear.	15:49
	Or of west, a high school gang or team.	15:53
	By this time you've been disenchanted from that love affair	16:01
	and your heart seeks a larger home.	16:06
	Your career here will be a series of crushes	16:09
	and emotional growing pains.	16:13
	The process of being driven from home to home	16:17
	seeking a city.	16:20
	Permanent housing for the soul,	16:23
	an altar of devotion and intrinsic worth,	16:27
	which is not instrumental for anything else.	16:30
	Which is where the soul stops.	16:35
	There are many such centers of affection on the Duke campus	16:41
	glamor, romance, grades, the crowd, prestige.	16:47
	Your altar may move and be moved from dorm to dorm	16:56
	to dope shop, to the stadium.	17:02
	Yet these all prove too finite,	17:07
	too limited to satisfy our secret yearnings	17:10
	for the infinite.	17:14
	Substandard housing for human nature,	17:17
	which is created to seek a better country.	17:22
	That is a heavenly one.	17:25
	This is not a very special situation	17:31
	unique to duke students.	17:34
	It's the human lot, the human condition	17:38
	of men living in a flat universe,	17:42
	estranged and alienated,	17:49
	restless with their small household gods	17:52
	of chromium and plastic.	17:56
	As Chesterton's poem puts it,	18:02
	men are homeless in their homes,	18:05
	and strangers under the sun,	18:09
	and they lay their heads in a foreign land	18:11
	whenever the day is done.	18:16
	This chapel is here,	18:22
	not as a Gothic bauble for tourists and visitors	18:25
	to track through.	18:30
	But a house of God, a place of worship,	18:33
	which is set centrally here to signify	18:38
	a profound conviction about the nature of education.	18:42
	The university services of worship	18:49
	are held here to hallow the name of God.	18:51
	And to point you to your true center of reference,	18:57
	your high altar, your right home.	19:02
	As a physical place this chapel is not itself home.	19:09
	It points those who worship here by the very manner	19:15
	of its architecture and worship.	19:22
	And we hope of its preaching.	19:26
	Beyond itself to a house not made with hands.	19:29
	It stands for a point of reference,	19:36
	the spiritual meridian of mind and heart,	19:39
	the center of all things	19:43
	around which your education may gradually	19:45
	become incorporated.	19:49
	Intellectually you will find yourself along the way,	19:54
	storm tossed and all but lost,	19:59
	confused With no fixed stars to plot your course by,	20:04
	you'll say perhaps with Yates,	20:12
	things fall apart, the center cannot hold.	20:16
	In this chapel if you will wait in silence and in openness	20:23
	you will sense again, the hidden sure center of things	20:30
	and be restored by the confidence	20:37
	that there is faithfulness at the core.	20:39
	Unity, reason, form, and meaning,	20:44
	in the plurality of being.	20:49
	In such moments, you will know where your true home is.	20:54
	At other times, you may come to worship here	21:02
	smugly absorbed with some little campus deity.	21:05
	You may come here to see or to be seen.	21:13
	In the presence of the high and holy one	21:20
	who inhabited eternity	21:23
	you will be brought low.	21:27
	Stripped of your pretense and foolishness	21:30
	by the awareness of the mysterium tremendum.	21:35
	Driven out from your small house and led to pray	21:40
	in contrition, the prayer of Saint Augustine,	21:45
	oh, Lord, narrow is the mansion of my soul.	21:50
	Enlarge thou it, that thou mayest enter in.	21:56
	In all these ways the worship of this chapel	22:04
	drawing you here in the regular self discipline of worship	22:09
	will give you the sense that, of all places on campus,	22:17
	that you belong.	22:21
	This is home.	22:23
	In the presence of one who has been our dwelling place	22:27
	in all generations whose name is God.	22:33
	Let us pray.	22:40
	(audience shuffling)	22:44
	Oh Lord our eternal home,	22:51
	who has created us for thyself,	22:55
	so that our spirits are restless	22:59
	until they rest in thee.	23:01
	Grant us the wisdom to know thee,	23:05
	as the home of our minds search and our hearts love.	23:09
	That in all our going and coming	23:16
	we may live as those whose dwelling place is in thee	23:21
	through Jesus Christ, our Lord.	23:28
	And now unto him who is able to keep you from falling	23:30
	and to present you faultless	23:36
	before the presence of his glory with exceeding joy,	23:39
	to the only wise God, the glory and majesty,	23:44
	dominion and power, both now and evermore.	23:49

Item Info

Title:

Waldo Beach - "Where's Your Home?" (September 20, 1959)

Permalink:

https://idn.duke.edu/ark:/87924/r4s46n71b

Date:

September 20, 1959

Speaker:

Beach, Waldo

Contributor:

Duke University. Chapel

Identifier:

UA.17.01.0003 RR-0078
ref5355_axi
uachapelsermaud
duke:627909
dcrau002108
ark:/87924/r4s46n71b
94516962-47f8-4371-8195-6b4b0ade228c

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Duke Chapel Recordings

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North Carolina
Durham (N.C.)

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The Duke University Chapel Recordings were transferred to the Duke University Archives beginning in 1970.

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CC BY-NC 4.0

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This recording may contain 3rd party materials, such as music or readings that are therefore not covered by the Creative Commons license indicated here. For more information see https://library.duke.edu/rubenstein/research/citations-and-permissions.

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Waldo Beach - "Where's Your Home?" (September 20, 1959)

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