The Power of Home
When most of us hear the name Chernobyl, we immediately think of nuclear catastrophe, uncontrolled outpourings of radiation, and mass exodus. Yet when some people hear that name, they think of something different – they think of home.
In this fascinating eight-minute TED Talk, Holly Morris tells the story of a community of around 200 persons, mostly elderly women, who elected to stay in Chernobyl and have lived there the last 27 years. Why stay there when it is considered one of the most hazardous places on earth? Because it’s home. It’s the place they were raised and in turn raised their children. It’s the place their parents and grandparents are buried and where they want to be buried as well. It is, in every possible way, their home.
Given how frequently we move in our society, many of us may have a hard time understanding such extravagant attachment to a place, but when you have spent your whole life – and your family has spent generations – in one community, that place is more than a place, it is holy ground. (The closest I’ve come to this is when students or friends talk about their family farm.)
I thought of Holly’s Talk as I watched pictures of the devastation left by Super Typhoon Haiyan in Tacloban and other part of the Philippines. So many lives lost, and so many more people displaced. Many of whom may never come back, even as others return to rebuild and start again.
It’s one of the questions that gets asks regularly after Hurricanes like Andrew and Sandy and typhoons like Haiyan: why would anyone come back to an area marked by such storms? Yet when that place is home, it provides such a sense of identity and security that it’s difficult to underestimate. Perhaps that’s why the Old Testament is so marked by the promise of land and descendants, promises that are intimately connected.
One of the more remarkable pieces of information that Holly Morris shares is that as a population, the folks who elected to stay in Chernobyl have fared better over the years in terms of health and longevity than their peers who were relocated. Could it be, she asks, that keeping your home as opposed to fleeing for unknown terrain is more potent even than radiation. It’s a powerful question, particularly as over the next weeks and months so many people will have to decide, in the wake of another natural disaster, whether to flee and start over or return home and rebuild.
My prayers are with them as they struggle to come to an answer.
Notes: 1) If you are receiving this post by email, you may need to click here to watch the video.
2) Holly Morris is at work on a documentary about Chernobyl’s residents called The Babushkas of Chernobyl; you can find more information about it here.
Reading this reminded me of a conversation I just had with my mom, who was preparing a sermon about the people of Israel’s time in the wilderness, how it wasn’t a curse but a decision and how Joshua and Caleb made the case for the land being the home they were called to. I don’t think I would know what to do if I was facing the devastation of actually losing my home. I have the privilege of making this a symbolic lesson about fear and going where God calls us. For that reason I am grateful for this post about faith in the context of loss that is so meaningless and unanswerable (and still requires us to act.)