I Can't Feel at Home

The process of deconstructing your core belief system is often painful and isolating. In the case of leaving “the church,” it’s a messy combination of stripping away both the moral foundation of your ideals and abandoning a community that has surrounded you for decades. So much of the Christianity I grew up with emphasized alienation from the “world” and that people and community would ultimately fail you unless you had your one true friend, Jesus. Stepping away from the church meant abandoning real community, real support. It took me years to learn that wasn’t true.

This promise of isolation should one leave is prevalent throughout much of my experience with Evangelical Christianity. Nothing quite exemplifies it as well as the hymn, This World Is Not My Home, which was a favorite of my congregation growing up. There’s something deeply sinister about the refrain, which says, “Oh Lord you know, I have no friend like you,” and “I can’t feel at home in this world anymore.”

I Can’t Feel at Home is my way of looking back at my own deconstruction and represents my first musical foray into better understanding the impact the church and the process of leaving it has had on me. The text for the work comes from two sources, excerpts from the poem “ABSCENCE/PRESENCE VARIATIONS” by writer and long-time collaborator, Caroline Preziosi, and interpolations of the refrain of This World Is Not My Home.

Excerpts of the hymn weave their way throughout the piece. A recording of my childhood church singing it crests in and out of a pad of tape delay feedback, built from its melody before erupting into the chorus. Electronics and live performers lock perfectly in sync, a flashback to when times were simple and faith was strong. Things begin to warp and glitch however, eventually shunting us back to a more complicated present where the only way forward is “to continue turning.”