Foxes, Beavers, & Finding a Home in the Wild Fig Network.

field notes on spiritual homelessness and finally choosing to stay

I’m sitting in the last seat on the Blue Line out of Chicago, heading from Jackson to O’Hare. My back is to the places I am going as I watch the city slip away one horizontal framed snapshot at a time through the window I’m leaning against. I’m going home—to my wife, to my children, to my office where the two ceramic geese will be waiting for me, the ones that sat in my grandparents’ house when I was growing up. The geese make my office feel like home. But no office is a home. Hell, sometimes a home doesn’t even feel like home anymore.

For the last week, I spent my days walking the half mile between Chicago’s Whitehall Hotel and the LaSalle Street Church with a group of almost strangers for the first annual Wild Fig Network National Gathering and somehow that week felt like I had found something like a home.

The Wild Fig Network is a brand new and still evolving relational network of pastors, leaders, writers, artists, and prophetic voices who believe the church needs to move beyond denominations and statements of belief into an expression of Christianity that’s more loving, just, and inclusive. We call this prioritizing relationship over rightness in our shared rule of life within the Appalachian Order. I was humbled when one of the founders asked me to join its design team a couple of years ago when it was just an idea.

Two years and some months later, I’m sitting in a small room with a group of people I’ve only ever met on Zoom calls and social media. I don’t feel out of place. In fact, I realize that these people feel like “my people”. That’s not nothing for me spiritually.

I wrote in my journal during the gathering:

I’ve never felt like I belonged anywhere with the exception of wherever my wife is. I’ve worn that, at times, like a badge of honor—I’ve always felt drawn to foxes, I think, because they are adaptable to whatever environment you put them in. I’ve called it cunning. But cunning and adaptation are exhausting.

Because underneath the badge was a wound. Something that bleeds at the most inopportune times. Something that makes me feel never quite settled or okay. My wife says I’m restless. She’s right. And more than once, that restlessness has threatened the best parts of my life in the pursuit of whatever might come next.

I’m reading this passage from my journal, and when I look up, we’re somewhere around Addison. A young Mediterranean couple boards the train at the stop. The man sits in the seat adjacent to me and guides his partner down next to him. They each have a carry-on bag, clearly headed to where I am going, traveling to some place that is not their home, but when the woman sits, she puts her head against his shoulder and he kisses her head like they’re the only two people on the train. Wherever they are going, they’re taking home with them.

I don’t want to stare and begin leafing through my notes from the last week in that same journal and the phrases seem to jump off the page. I am taking them with me as well.

“Relational.”
“Post-Denominational.”
“Credentialing isn’t about elevation. It’s cultivation.”
“Relational Accountability.”
“Life always finds its start in the cracks and extends outward.”
“Beavers only build when they hear rushing water.”
”Beavers create a home where there was once just a passing by.”
”We are beavers.”
”Spiritual Refugee.”
”Home.”

That word … home.

I live in the Victorian Old Town neighborhood of Wheeling, West Virginia. I love my home. I have a complicated relationship with it, but most long-term relationships are complicated. Time has a way of wounding and healing in waves and cycles, and that makes the bond stronger, but strong bonds aren’t often clean.

The same can be said of my spiritual journey. I grew up in a church that was two double wides put together in the form of a “T”. I attended there until I was a young adult. It wasn’t a cult by any means, but it was insulated. I went to a small Christian school with the same kids I went to church with. Our parents hung out. It was safe. And yes, it very much felt like home.

But when that community had fewer thoughtful answers than my expanding mind had questions, I left. For a while, I didn’t attend anywhere, but in my mid-twenties when I began working my way back to a reconstructed spiritual life, I found myself feeling very much like a spiritual wildling.

I attended other Evangelical churches and then a litany of others. Baptist. Methodist. Presbyterian. Episcopal. Catholic. Orthodox. And a bunch of other smaller stops along the way as well. I met wonderful, God-seeking people in each tradition and borrowed or adopted something from each of them. But none of them felt like home.

Nothing felt like a spiritual home again until this past week when I shared tables and pews this group of almost-strangers from across the United States all daring to dream of a building the scaffolding for a tangible but relational network made up of the people, places, and work being done in the spaces often named post-evangelical.

The train comes to a stop and I put my things into my bag before stepping onto the platform and working my way toward the airport.

There are two men cleaning trash from the rails beside me. A woman stands down the tracks from them with a machine that looks like it is monitoring where the trains are. A welcome safety measure for those men, I’m sure. I think as quickly as I walk past that I wouldn’t want to be where they are. But they seem comfortable enough in it.

I ride the escalator up and enter through some turnstiles that make it very clear that I’m exiting the train platform and won’t be allowed back on. I walk to the bathroom to wash my face and get my paperwork ready for the airport.

The space I’m in now is no longer a train station and not quite an airport. Everyone looks a little confused. I am a little confused. We gather around the signs and large board that shows the incoming and outgoing flights for the day. They don’t help much.

There is a group of people shuffling toward the signs that say “parking”. The signs become more clear when get get closer to home. Those are not my signs. Not yet.

I belong to the tired-faced throngs of people still clearly in the middle of their journey—the ones who still have hours ahead of them before they arrive wherever they’re trying to stay. The ones that don’t have the look of people who are about to meet their loved ones because they … we … aren’t home yet. But our signs will come.

Often times, it’s the in-between spaces that are the most uncomfortable. Human beings like to be sure of things. We like to be certain. We like to be settled. But if we rush the times we’re meant to walk in the wilderness, we’re sure to miss the lessons and skip the experiences we’re supposed to gather along the way and carry into our new place.

I eventually find my way to my gate and sit down to get some work done. My wife calls and asks why I’m at the airport so early. I tell her I wanted some time to think and get a little work done. That work turns into me starting to write this piece.

She catches me up on everything that I’ve missed at the house, what the kids are up to, and what’s waiting for me when I walk through the door. It’s a mixed bag. Because home isn’t just comfort. It’s messy. It’s hard work. But, that’s why it’s yours.

My plane is about to board. I’m waiting for my group to be called. I put my laptop away and flip a final time to the journal page where I lament the feelings attached to my feeling of kinship with the fox spirit.

In reality, I’ve always thought of the fox as the opposite of a beaver.

One builds.
There other steals.

One makes a place and stays.
The other slips in and out of the homes that others have built.

One is steady and dependable.
The other is a trickster not to be trusted.

I think about the two double wides shaped like a T. The Baptists and the Methodists. The Episcopal liturgy and the Orthodox icons and the Catholic contemplation. And it’s true, I took something from every one of those established institutions. I was accused of scavenging, but maybe I was gathering.

Maybe a fox isn’t meant to become a beaver.

Maybe he never really wanted to be wandering alone in the first place. Maybe the fox is just gathering until he finds a pond to bring what he’s gathered. Maybe he’s been looking for a place that felt den-worthy, where the water meets the ground and everything that has been waiting is allowed to grow in new soil.

Maybe I am that fox. And maybe Wild Fig is the place that is den-worthy.

A place where I might be seen as someone who brings life rather than steals it on the way out the door.

I don’t know what the next five years are going to look like for the Wild Fig Network just like I don’t know what life looks like for my family five years from now. Just like I don’t know what will happen in my state or my community or my neighborhood.

But for the first time in a long time, I’ve found a spiritual space filled with people that feel like they want the same things as I do and agree on the general principles that could bind us together in that pursuit. And that feels comforting, even if I know there is more work to do now than has been done in the rearview.

Creating a new home for spiritual refugees and wildlings like me, like us—an ecosystem for those tired of not belonging or being told they no longer belong—feels as much like work worth doing as I’ve ever been invited to.

So I think I’m going to stick around, and I’d love for you to join us too. Because … home doesn’t just need structure. It needs people to gather and choose to stay. That’s the only way real, interesting things happen.

And that’s the only way that a place along the way can become a home for anyone who needs one.

To learn more about The Wild Fig Network, visit wildfignetwork.org or check it out on Facebook and Instagram.