A sort of homecoming
on the familiar
Home: a place worn familiar by the tracks of time, and you worn familiar to it by its polishing.
Everytime I come back to my hometown, it seems a little less familiar, a little more strange. It’s the same but changing, but I’m changing too. We grow apart a little more every season. What I tried to capture in the above definition is that home is not just about place and familiarity, but it’s about us in relation to that place. A place can remain familiar and yet we become unfamiliar to it, so that we return as strangers to a place that shouldn’t be strange to us. The classic example is Odysseus returning to Ithaca, after 20 years. The place ought to be familiar to him, and it is but strangely changed by the goings-on there - the suitors have moved in and made it their home, even if ‘temporarily’; but far more than that, he has become a stranger to the place. It’s like he’s been worn into a different shape and he no longer fits.
That is a jarring kind of homecoming, to be sure. When you come to a place that should fit like a glove, and find that it doesn’t. That you aren’t received as you should be, and so the anticipation of coming home falters. Home is a place where you typically need to exert less energy, because you are embraced in the familiar and can just be; a place for introverts to finally recharge).
The church I grew up in, and by grew up I mean from age 17 to 26, is one I have rarely visited since leaving. But it was a decade of my life spent there, in close-knit community, a formative experience if ever there was one. I sometimes feel like I left a year too late, but it was what it was. Not that my leave-taking was badly done, but I stayed on a little long.
I suspect the number of times I have been back is still in single digits. But it’s the church I came to faith in, the church where I confessed faith, the church I first preached in, the church where I preached my one and only funeral sermon.
It’s strange to go back there, as I did this past week. Things familiar yet unfamiliar, the mix of new and old. People who were old when I first met them, still there, faithful saints now 20 years older. People who were my age then, now all grown up. It probably doesn’t help that I have a distorted sense of my own youthfulness. But then the new people, to whom I am the newcomer.
What warmed my heart perhaps the most was entering the doors and seeing the dear mother of a dear friend standing there on welcoming duty, and her immediate recognition and embrace. Oh, that all welcome-homes would be welcome-homes like that! Embraced in the arms of those that love us.1
Home(s) are the places that are perhaps the most familiar to us, which is why the smallest changes seem the most jarring. And yet when home becomes utterly strange to us, it dislocates us to no end. Like the Hobbits returning to the Shire at the end of Lord of the Rings. The violation of the home by the forces of chaos attacks the heart of what we held secure and both inviolate and inviolable. When home isn’t safe, nowhere is safe.2
In one sense, all of life and history is one big nostos, a journey home. I think that’s a way of characterising the redemptive arc of Scripture and the world - humanity was expelled from Eden, and we spend our lives trying to recreate little edens, always ruining them by our own presence. The gospel, in this key, is God coming out of paradise to lead us home. To the place that is strangely familiar, and where we always fit.
And your heart beats so slow
Through the rain and falling snow
Across the fields of mourning
Lights in the distance
Ah, don't sorrow, no, don't weep
For tonight at last
I am coming home
I am coming home
The preacher inside me says that this is when you start talking about the parable of the prodigal son, and the father waiting with open arms, welcoming the wayward son home. And the welcome home of the heavenly father at the end of our earthly lives, and the words, good and faithful servant.
It’s at this point of the article that we could start a conversation about domestic violence; or about leaving your home because it’s been bombed out of existence. But I set out to write a less grim reflection this week, so let’s leave those for another day.