Home
Sweet Home
“The
word home summons up a place—more specifically a house within that place—which you
have rich and complex feelings about, a place where you feel, or did once,
uniquely at home, which is to say a place where you feel you belong and which
in some sense, belongs to you, a place where you feel that all is somehow
ultimately well even if things aren’t going all that well at any given moment.”
Frederick
Buechner (The Longing for Home, p. 7, Harper Collins, 1996)
In the
Christmas story, we are told that Mary and Joseph traveled from Nazareth to
Bethlehem to register for the census. When they arrived, they could not find a
place to stay and so ended up sleeping in a stable with the animals. It was
there that Jesus was born. It is 96 miles from Nazareth to Bethlehem, a trip
that might take us a couple of hours in light traffic, but must have taken
Joseph and Mary several days, especially since she was enormously pregnant. Suffice
it to say, they were far from home. One can only imagine how difficult that
must have been, and how much they longed to be at home surrounded by family.
Our idea
of home may change over the years, especially in our nomadic culture, but there
is almost always one place that we identify as home even if we haven’t
lived there in decades. Typically, it is the home of our childhood—the one we
have etched deeply in our memory. But home can also be a brand-new place, one we
have never seen before we walk in and know in our bones, “this is home.” In
that event, home is a feeling, and internal knowing; one of familiarity and belonging.
Home is a complex, and sometimes even mystical, concept.
I told
my cousins in a phone conversation yesterday that when someone asks me where I
am from, I always hesitate. I almost choke on the word, Alabama, even though I
have lived here more than half of my life—40 years! It is somehow not home,
even though my sons live here, my friends live here, and I love my house.
Because home to me will always be the mountains of North Carolina, and when I
have finished my time here in the earth-school, my ashes will be returned there.
This
year, we will not be able to make the pilgrimage to our ancestral home as Mary
and Joseph did. We are in the middle of a pandemic, and as it was for them,
travel is treacherous. But sometimes, miraculous things happen even in harsh conditions—even
when we feel dismal and lonely. Something new is born into the world that
raises our spirits and imbues our hearts with hope and joy.
We don’t know what lies
ahead, but we do know that when we can travel again, home will seem sweeter
than ever. We will appreciate our sometimes-difficult families more, tolerate
them better, and even feel deeply grateful to be able to hug and kiss them—next
year, when the pandemic is over. For now, we can embrace our longing, and remember
happy times with them in whatever place we call home. This year, we will have
to settle for Zoom.
In the Spirit,
Jane
No comments:
Post a Comment