Sanctuary: A Meditation on Home, Homelessness, and Belonging

by Zenju Earthlyn Manuel

Finding home, feeling home, and being at home are complex, multilayered, spiritual and cultural experiences independent of the place we live. Where is home? What is my true nature, and what does it mean to be at home with it? When I don’t feel at home, where can I find sanctuary? These questions become critical when our lives are under threat.

Sanctuary is the place we can go when our lives are under threat, where we can consider love in the midst of oppression. It’s a place for those who speak a language not of the dominant culture, a place where anyone can say, “I am home.”

Sanctuary is a place you create when you are “missing” in the scheme of humanity. Establishing sanctuary is critical to finding home.

it became clear that to shape religions to my own sense of home is to create sanctuary.

to shape

many of us have become ill attempting to follow customs and beliefs that are counter to who we are and what we actually feel. You might find yourself masking or growing numb. There is a separation between soul or spirit and the strategized existence.

In one sense, at the core of sanctuary is the failed quest to find home in the places we live.

Surviving meant assimilation. Not fitting in meant never feeling welcome, body and spirit never being at home.

“Gone, Gone, Gone Beyond, Gone Completely Beyond — Awake, So Be It.” Yet we aren’t transcending or going beyond suffering. Our lives are gradual paths of groundlessness. When we can accept that people and things are always shifting and changing, our hearts can open.

Suffering teaches us this. When we suffer this much, we can only be still and take each moment as it comes.