Home is where we start from, T. S. Eliot wrote, and the widening concentric circles that turn into recursive spirals define the trajectories of our lives.

My childhood home was full of love and near-chaos, and so is my life. Now that I am older ("I was always afraid I would die young like my father," I said recently to a friend, who replied, "That's something you don't have to worry about.") the restlessness has diminished a little, although it has not - thank God - disappeared.

When my life began to level off and grow more mellow, I thought I was becoming more disciplined, even virtuous. Now I know it was just a lower level of testosterone.

The greatest gift a father can give his son, observed Jean Paul Sartre, is to die young. I know what he meant. From the moment my father disappeared when I was two years old and my mother returned to the work from which she thought she had been freed forever, I became a latch-key kid and relied on my imagination to fill up that empty space, creating linguistic artifacts that represented "home."

In my earliest stories, adolescents often walked through the cold twilight down lonely city streets, collars turned to the wind. They passed warm lighted vestibules in which women waited for the bus or looked up at tall towers of inner-lit glass cubicles in which families moved about, half-realized, like shadows on a screen.

And because my father was a Christian and my mother was a Jew, those two sensibilities became polarities that defined my journey. Both/and a Christian and a Jew but more than a Christian and more than a Jew. Now, a Jew who speaks Christianity fluently, having been an Episcopal priest for sixteen years which I left to be only who I am.

No wonder I look to the virtual world, looking outside/inside for that symbolic structure that will transform identity into destiny and provide a larger story with which to link. Following luminous breadcrumbs through the forest at twilight toward the glowing window that represents home.

Our lives are self-created mythologies, stories of who we think we are, cushioned with memories that support our interpretations. Memory is one hundred per cent subjective. In a digital era, shared memories are often the bars of a large digital cage, inside which we all simulate effortlessly the freedom of flight.

The more we move about, changing jobs, homes, careers, even religions, the more the memories we share come from films, television, printed editions of multimedia scenarios. Entertainment and "news" fuse, generating common memories of things we think we experienced.

Real birds in digital cages.

I learned as a priest that the only community that exists or can exist is created by our mutual need, subordinated to the necessity of civility, bound together by shared symbols. Community is the context in which our individual selves are fulfilled.

Cyberspace is like a multi-dimensional cubist construction in which we become ten-dimensional portraits by Braque or Picasso, our digital selves both artifact and artist.

Somewhere inside my psyche will always be a little boy shivering in the autumn twilight, nose to the cold glass, looking at a family gathered around a meal in the candlelight. Only now it's a monitor rather than a window, and the community I glimpse through the monitor dimly is the one we self-consciously create as a digital possibility.

In churches and synagogues, people read silently to themselves from books, calling it prayer, something that was unthinkable only four hundred years ago. Yet they recoil from the kinds of digital community we are creating and discovering in cyberspace.

Well, let them recoil, let them shrink from the new selves that cry out to be freed from the tyranny of typography the way figures by Michaelangelo cried out to be liberated from limestone. Let them carry laptops as illiterates carry newspapers under their arms. We build for the future, not the past. We build architectonic structures out of symbols of possibility and promise for our children and our children's children, not for those who huddle among tombstones as if they have found refuge. We feast in digital castles, laugh and get drunk at digital banquets. We will not shirk our responsibility to create a legacy for our descendents who will hunger and thirst for digital meaning.

Our journey into cyberspace is like hiking up a switchback through thickets, eyes on the ground as it rises, hiking higher and higher. There suddenly come moments when we emerge in a clearing and are breathless at a view that is miles-deep. But then we grow restless again and hike higher, those moments of far-seeing the fuel of our search for a deeper communion. We interface now through digital imagery like blind people placing their hands against one another's. Out of our mutual need, we build something bigger than ourselves. The digital castle through which we walk is an interior castle in which we are astonished to discover room upon room. We had no idea! what we would discover in this internalized space of our trans-planetary digital civilization where multiple-species of beings will search out one another and touch hands, palm upon palm, shocked into the possibility of a communion that extends to the limits of our finite but unbounded universe.

The ultimate intention of consciousness is to become coextensive with all the molecular structures it or we will or can create as apertures onto the outside/inside of our collective Life. That cosmic unity, that singular way of being, we will link and mine, a brain that uses whatever materials seem to work.

I stand outside your comfortable spacious home and knock on the window. Your willingness to open the drapes and have a conversation turns me from a lurker into an invited guest with whom you speak through the thick double-glassed picture window, always on the edge of turning back to your other life. And finally, I turn too, turning up my collar to the wind and going ... home ...

The only way back is forward. The only way out is in. The end is always the beginning. And the willingness is always a gift.

September 14 1999