In my Father’s house there are many dwelling places is one of the most radical statements of welcome in all of scripture. There is room for every single one of us, through Jesus, in God’s kingdom. It sounds too good to be true. And yet there it is, in Jesus’s own words, this profound statement of jubilant welcome. Before I moved to New Jersey, I spent years teaching art & design at a college in Brooklyn, and my first few years were rough. One class, Introduction to Drawing, comes to mind. The school where I taught served primarily first-generation, low-income students from across New York City. Many had come through underfunded public schools, and most were immigrants. They faced a lot of obstacles, and they came raw. I was going through a difficult stretch in my own life and needed to prove something. So I picked up the syllabus the school gave me and followed it with an iron grip. Students were expected to arrive with their materials. If they did not, they were marked absent, given a zero, and sent home. Three weeks in, one student came to class again without her supplies. She was waiting for her paycheck. I reprimanded her in front of everyone and told her she needed to leave. Then I turned my back and started writing on the board. I heard rustling behind me. When I turned around, every other student in that room had given something from their own kit so she could stay. They already understood something I had not yet figured out. I hadn’t taught them that. They brought it with them. That was my first lesson in welcome, and I still didn’t learn enough. Nearly 40% withdrew before the semester ended. The following semester I overcorrected, accepted incomplete work, let lessons dissolve into socializing, and it was a shambles. Again, my students left in droves–why would they stay? That summer I finally sat with the question I had been avoiding. I had grown up inside drawing, never knowing what it felt like to stand in front of a blank page and feel like a trespasser. I had no idea how my students felt. As it happened, I was trying to learn yoga, failing badly, and getting ready to quit. I understood, in my body, what it felt like to be a beginner in a room where everyone else seemed to belong. My teacher had led us through a meditation I couldn’t stop thinking about. I quit yoga and kept the meditation. The night before class started my second year, I realized what I had to do. On the first day, instead of drilling through the syllabus, I asked my students about themselves. We talked about their memories of art class, the teachers who told them they couldn’t draw, the friends who were better and said so without thinking. I noticed something else I had seen every semester. When I went through the supply list, I would hear them quietly working out who could share what. And yet when it came to their own materials, they held back, trying to complete entire semesters with one pencil worn to a nub. Using up supplies felt like a transgression. These were students who had not yet learned that they were allowed to take up room. My job was not to teach them something to draw. I had to help them find what was already there. Improvising, I dimmed the lights and led them through that borrowed meditation. I had them close their eyes and imagine a ball of light right at their hearts, pulsing steady with their own heartbeat. Then we sent that light down through their bodies, through the floor, all the way to the center of the earth. Then back up, through their hearts, through the tops of their heads, out past the ceiling, past the atmosphere, to the edge of the known universe, and then beyond that, to the edge of all creation. While they sat with that line, I asked them to look around in their minds and see the same lines of light coming out of every other person in the room, then outward, city by city, country by country, all those lines of light, every person connected from the center of the earth to the edge of everything. Then I brought them back down into themselves. That line, I told them, comes out of you in every direction. The way you speak. The people whose lives you have changed. The memories you have made. And now we are going to spend time with its most humble expression. We are going to pick up a pencil, and we are going to take our lines for a walk. I placed paper and pencils on each desk and opened the shades and told the students to open their eyes. Whatever line you make today is as valid and as connected as any other line in this room, on this planet, in all of creation. Learn to love your line, because if you trust this process, you will learn to use it to articulate the world around you in ways that help you understand it more fully. Then we began to draw, no longer a group of strangers assigned to the same room. We were a community of people who had just gone through something together. That was the most frightening thing I had done in a classroom, and it was the only thing that worked. I had to make room in myself before I could help make room for them. Jesus tells us that the Father’s house has many dwelling places. I used to hear that as a promise about what is waiting for us, rooms already built, already assigned, already ours. But I think it means something more active than that. When we genuinely welcome each other, when we enter the work of loving someone as they actually are, we discover more of the house. Welcome is not the management of existing space — it’s how the house grows. Jesus says this plainly. The one who believes will do the works that he does, and greater works than these. The house does not stay the same size. It grows through us. This means that the people beyond our doors are not waiting to be let in. They are already part of what God has made. Walking through an unfamiliar door takes courage. The question is whether we meet that courage with equal openness. And this is where I want to ask something honest of us. If welcome always feels comfortable, that is worth examining. Comfort, in this context, can be a sign that we are extending ourselves only toward people whose presence costs us nothing, people who confirm what we already know and ask nothing of us we aren’t already prepared to give. That is a warm feeling, but it is not entering any where new in the house with many dwelling places. Real welcome has give in it. It asks us to be moved, to be changed by the encounter, to make room in ourselves before we make room in our sanctuary. A few weeks ago I led a workshop about how we talk about St. John’s to people who have never come here. I asked the group what you would put on a T-shirt? And what you gave me was not a tagline or a campaign. What you gave me was testimony: A beacon of welcome. A dose of sanity every Sunday. Lapsed atheist. A place called home. Come for the community, stay for the faith. Experience acceptance. One person’s story stayed with me. While going through a serious illness, they found real solace in faith, learned to ask for help and actually let community hold them. But when they spoke of this faith with friends facing something similar, they were met with resistance. People carry a great deal of baggage when it comes to houses of faith, and those friends were carrying theirs. What moved me was how this person held both truths at once, their own solace and their friends’ resistance, without needing to resolve the tension or win the argument. That poise in the face of discomfort is not a small thing. Philip asks Jesus to show him the Father, and Jesus says: you have already seen him. You have been looking at him this whole time. That is what I want to say about that story, and about those phrases, and about a room full of students with very little who gave everything anyway. When someone stays poised in the face of discomfort, when someone holds another person’s pain without needing to fix it or win, when a community keeps discovering how much more room there is — that is not simply a nice thing that happened. That is the Father, made visible, in the works we do for one another. Those are the greater works Jesus is talking about. That is the house with many dwelling places, not a building that controls who enters, but a community that keeps finding, together, how much more room there is. The promise Jesus makes is already true. Meeting it with our whole selves, as a living, feeling body of Christ, is how we make it real for everyone who walks through that door. Amen. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit libbyclarke.substack.com
