A Sort of Homecoming

Do you feel at home?  What does that word even mean?  Home?  It’s a powerful word, isn’t it—almost mystical.  It conjures up deep feelings, emotions, and memories…  On the one hand, home transcends any particular place.  It’s a feeling, a deep sense of peace with the world and with one’s self.  But those feelings and emotions are so tied up with place and memory.  They are born out of the interactions we’ve had in the places we have called home and the people—loved ones of all kinds—who showed us love and acceptance there.

Home.  It is the house I grew up in, my sisters, Mom and Dad.  It is a special kind of safety and security—the feeling of my mother's arms wrapped around me as a boy, the cool, soft flesh of her arms able to enfold my young body.  It is a place where I knew who I was, or at least didn’t think to question about it.  It is peace, the feeling that everything is in its right place.  It is the town that I grew up in, but it is more.  It is old friends, the Fourth of July parade.  It is the landscape, the river valley that greets me every time I return.  It is the ball fields—where young men willed themselves into existence, forming friendships that they wouldn't understand for years.  It is the streets I've roamed: first on bike, then car, and then again on foot, wandering as an adult and trying to conjure, once again, for only a moment that place called home.

But that is the home of memory.  The town has changed.  The people have left, or grown older, or died.  They have changed and I have changed and home just isn't home any longer.  Yet that memory lives on within in me, is a part of me somehow.  It is a memory that longs to be recaptured or recreated in full, but, like all memories, is no longer accessible.

Yet we try—I try—to find again this place called home.  I want it for myself, and I want to provide it for my wife and our children. I want to give them a sense of home that is so utterly safe and secure and peaceful that they naturally grow and thrive to their absolute fullest potential, and that they never doubt their place in this world.

But the idea of home haunts me. I haven’t felt at home for years.  Not in college or seminary, not in the previous neighborhoods or cities in which we have lived, not in my vocation…  So how can I now as a father provide this elusive, fantastic place?  And yet, when I take the time to look around, I do recognize a new sense of home being born into my life.  I find it in the small pleasures of life.  They hint at and somehow echo that memory of home that lives within me.

Home.  It is the feel of our bed after a weekend away.  It is my wife’s embrace after a long day (or any old time, really).  It is my three-year-old daughter snuggling up to me in the morning, the image of our son coloring at the kitchen table, the sound of our oldest jumping rope in the driveway.  It is screams of laughter ringing down the hall.  It is all the little acts and moments of love that we share each and every day.

And I realize, as I wrestle with this idea, that as much as the home of memory or the idea of home inspires a yearning to create again or build this place of absolute peace called home, that home—home in its purest sense—is not something that we can pursue, but is only received as a gift.  As much as we try, home cannot be sought out, it cannot be remade, it cannot be built.  At the deepest level, the gift of home can only be recognized, appreciated, and simply received.  And I’m finally learning how to do that.  Learning how to still my heart, open my eyes and, like a child receiving his mother’s embrace, simply enjoy the fact that I already do have more than I ever realized of home.  

Photography: St. Peter, MN by Jordan Powers, used under authority of Creative Commons License 3.0