A transcript of the Taizé homily given by Wayne Whitson Floyd on March 21, 2010.

As a child growing up in thepre-civil-rights world of the Deep-South, warm spring nights like tonight wereoften occasions for deep prayer.  I would lie on my back on the thick matof St. Augustine grass in our small-town front yard, look up at the starswinking through the leaves of the huge pecan tree overhead, and fervently praythat a spaceship would come down and take me to a galaxy far away, where I wassure I had been born, only to be inadvertently lost and abandoned inMississippi.

At the tender age of ten or eleven, maybe I had read too much sciencefiction in the library where my mother worked, and where I spent many anafternoon after school reading whatever I could find to feed my precociousimagination.

Or perhaps I already felt somehow in my heart what I couldn't really nameuntil I was almost out of high school -- that there was something inherentlywrong with any child having to grow up shaped by an apartheid world, originallyshaped by life on cotton plantations worked by slaves, and still into the 1970ssubject to a system of racial segregation that had changed little sincepost-Civil War Reconstruction.

Intuitively, I knew something waswrong, although as a lower middle-class white child, I had no inkling just how wrong things were - often entirely dependent on the colorof one's skin.  I never once visited a house on the black side oftown.  And little did I know that some of the parents of the children Iwent to school with all week, or to church with all day Sunday, weresupporters, if not organizers, of the states' rights segregationists whoengineered the continuing separation of the races ... and enforced it byviolence, if necessary.

I knew something was wrong when from the church pulpit ministers preachedGod's love for all, but denied entrance to the blacks (who outnumbered whitesin my hometown almost two to one) not just for Sunday worship, but even for thefunerals of people they had worked for, and sometimes cooked for, cleanup upafter, and provided nursing care for up to the time of their deaths.

Later I was to discover just how ordinary a thing it is for adolescents of all sorts to see themselves asstrangers-in-a-strange-land, aliens lost in an adult world that seems to haveno idea whatsoever who they are.  This entirely natural sense of awkwardly-adolescent, newly-awakeningself-identity was wrapped up at the time, however, in the entirely unnatural social conventions of segregated Mississippi and theentirely indefensible hypocrisiesof a form of Christianity that had all but given up its ability to stand as anysort of prophetic witness against injustice.

As I matured into young adulthood, I slowly learned that my sense ofalienation from much of the culture and religion that had raised me made itimpossible for me to stay any longer where I was.   And so Igradually moved away from the Deep South, geographically and socially, and awayfrom the United Methodist Church that had been the cradle of my earliest andfondest spiritual awakenings.

I first came to be able to name the things I was running away from - the brutalities of the Vietnam War, the atrocitiesof attempts to wipe out the civil rights movement by intimidation and violence,and the inabilities of the Christianity I had known thus far to help me makesense of any alternatives, either for myself, or for my country.

All I really knew to do was to flee. So I ran away from it all.  Facingan imminent draft into the Army, and having failed to secure alternative servicein a Mississippi National Guard unit, I accepted what I at the time saw as myonly other alternative, an offer of a full scholarship to Candler School ofTheology, the United Methodist Seminary at Emory University.  Now I'm veryaware of the ironies of fleeing rural Mississippi only to wind up in urban Atlanta, thinking I'd escaped ‘the South'; or leaving life in my localMethodist Church only to wind up in a Methodist Seminary; or that I chose toshift my allegiances to the Episcopal Church while I was earning my M.Div. inan entirely 'Methodist' place.  But that's another homily.

Let me just say that, as a still-very-wet-behind-the-earstwenty-two-year-old first year seminarian, I learned some powerful and lastinglessons right away.  I'll stick to my Big Five, and be brief about it.

First, although I had expected my teachers to answer all my barelypost-adolescent questions, I discovered instead that what they had were not allthe answers, but far better questions than I had ever dreamed.

Second, I learned that racism and intolerance of all sorts of humandifferences aren't something a Deep Southerner can easily simply turn awayfrom; it is a disease from which I would always be in recovery.

Third, I discovered that most of my fellow students, and many of myprofessors, had fled the same things that I had, and that one of the thingsthat bound us together was the commonality of our life-journeys.

Fourth, I experienced the deep humanity of the faculty who taught me, whocould lecture to us on John Wesley, or pastoral care, or the Undivided Trinityby day, only to stay up all night drinking beer at a student keg-party, arguingabout who had had the greatest impact on the human race, Jesus Christ or BobDylan?!  Those were the 70s - you probably just had to be there tounderstand!

And fifth, I learned that there were deep wells of wisdom in the Christiantradition that I had only begun to fathom, and that some of the wisest voiceswere those who in their own times had wrestled with questions similar to mine,and had discovered in their pilgrimage through life how to hear God's voicespeaking from the midst of the whirlwind of change and confusion that are anendemic part of the human experience.

One of these was the man we know as St. Augustine of Hippo, from whom thegrass in my childhood front yard had indirectly gotten its name.  He was afourth century North African Christian who lived in times as turbulent as ourown.  Augustine's life spanned the time of the fall of the Roman Empire, atime of civil, and cultural, and religious turmoil we should have littletrouble imagining - whether we look back at the upheavals of the 1960s or justlook down the street at the Capitol this evening, at the rancorous and uncivildemonstrations by protesters who during the past two days have been hurling atU.S. Congress members racial and homophobic slurs that have not been heard inpublic in decades.

Augustine wasn't thought of, however, as a saint in his own day.  Hewas a headstrong young man who was initially controlled by the ambitions of hismother.  He fled from her to the arms of a mistress with whom he had achild.  Then he fled from Christianity to try every other religion andphilosophy that he could find - the creation-hating Manichees, the secrecy-ladenGnostics, the other-worldly neo-Platonists.

Augustine had come to understand something I had recognized only slowly inmy own life - how important it is to flee away from what distorts our humanityand community, and yet how difficult it is to run towards something that is anybetter.

In the volumes of writings known as his Confessions, Augustine tells of a discovery that was to changehis life.  It came when he realized that the point of life isn't to findthe answer to all of the questions, or arrive at the right destination. The point is the journey itself, for it is one that God has placed us on,indeed a journey God has been on as well.  And so our humanity is not asimply a moral journey away from things that we or others find objectionable;life is mainly a pilgrimage towards the very reason why we're here.  AsAugustine put it far more eloquently: "You have made us foryourself, O Lord, and our heart is restless until it rests in you."

It was in conversation with St. Augustine that I came to value the restlessnessthat I have felt since I can remember.  And I learned to trust thatwherever that restlessness leads me, it doesn't lead me away from God. For God is in the journey itself. God made me to long for mycreator.  And the restlessness of my heart is the sign that I am still onthe way there, being pulled and tugged Godward, by God's own desire forme.  It is the pull and tug of God that has brought me here - by howevercircuitous a path - to be a member of St. Thomas' Parish.  It is the lure ofGod that pulls us together as a church community further into the reaches ofLent, drawing us all towards the mystery of Easter.

I still think occasionally about my childhood fantasy of being taken away byaliens to a world where there were no unfulfilled longings.  I'm glad now,however, that God's answer to that prayer was NO, because God had a betterquestion to ask me, the question of who I am, and whose I am.  It is aquestion answered only by journeying with God, until at last we rest with Godforever -- which, of course, will be where we've always been, however long ittakes some of us to realize it.