Home

Home. "I want to go home."

Home Is the Sailor

Home is the sailor, home from sea:

Her far-borne canvas furled

The ship pours shining on the quay

The plunder of the world.

Home is the hunter from the hill:

Fast in the boundless snare

All flesh lies taken at his will

And every fowl of air.

'Tis evening on the moorland free,

The starlit wave is still:

Home is the sailor from the sea,

The hunter from the hill.

A.E. Housman

I saw that poem first in Cynthia Voigt's Homecoming. The children knew the truth of it when they had come home to the crusty, prickly, wounded grandmother whom they had never met before.

I know in my bones and cells and breath that I have come home when I drive into the wet, green canopy of fir and oak and alder and ferns in the Gorge. And I know it when I round the corner on the way to the beach - the first corner that opens to the horizon of sky and ocean. That is a homecoming.

It happens when I step into the nave of our parish, too. I think that must be because any place on earth that has held our tears and our joys, and witnessed our railings and pleadings and confessions, and heard our laughter becomes home to us. Perhaps our souls become part of these places as much as these places become part of our souls.

"Home" as an idea and as an ideal, and home where my house is or at the beach or at church ... those things make sense. There is a history there, and an investment of time and attention. There is a relationship. Home has to be earned. For grownups, at any rate, home has to be earned. Grownups are people who have had their homes torn and pulled up and re-planted, and grownups are people who have learned to be at home inside themselves. Grownups do not find home - they make it.

Right?

Usually, yeah. Usually, grownups have to build their homes.

This morning I am home from another state, a different city, an unfamiliar bed, a parish that had never seen my tears. This morning, in my own office, I have come home again ... and yet, just as an orphaned child miraculously adopted -- or like Oliver Twist!

Hm. Look at that. I've hated reading this novel for my Lit class. It is just too grueling to read about nineteenth century childhood - especially for the orphans, it was a nightmare. But now I have found out - just like Oliver - that I have had family all along. At my first Synod of the Province of Christ the King, I came home. The oceans of love that moved in tides and waves between clergy and clergy, clergy and people, people and people ... the clean and holy absence of any critical spirit or earnest judgementalism (or worse, preening name-dropping) ... the good solid and happy work being done ... I know these people. And they know me. And I am home.