Home. Home for the holidays.
In the coming days hundreds of millions of us will hit the
road or fly the skies, or take a train or board a bus, or travel to the next
town over or travel across the country, all to get home. Home: a physical
place, a real point on the map, the three decker house in the city where we
grew up, the leafy suburban neighborhood where we came of age, the place we had
to leave in order to grow up and then come back. So our kids will return from
college, our adult children will come carrying tons of presents with their kids
in tow, or we will pile into the car and drive.
That trip home will be spiritually bumpy for some of us. We
miss a loved one who won't be at the holiday table this year and our hearts
break at their absence. We are in conflict with a loved one and so we stay away
or they stay away. We are just too far away and can't get home. We are among
the hundreds of thousands who don't get a day or a week off: soldiers on the
front lines, nurses at the hospital, firefighters staffing a quiet station,
folks who serve tables and drive the bus and pump the gas and pour the coffee.
Still everybody wants to get home.
No matter what the ideal vision of home conjures up for each
of us this twelfth month, always as humans, there is this deep desire to go
home and to be at home in the world. Home: not just a geographic location but
even deeper, home as a place in the heart, a state of the soul called home
where we feel loved and accepted and welcomed, fully, completely, for who we
are. No questions asked. Home: where we are safe, where we are found, and with
a bit of God's grace, we know joy. Home: where someone knows our name and knows
our story and welcomes us in.
In the church I serve, on the eve of the 25th, our pews will
be much fuller than usual, as candlelight flickers in the frosty windows. It happens
every year. I will look out upon the well dressed congregants holding squirmy
kids, and families sharing a hymnal, and travelers coming in for the first time,
and I absolutely get why they come. They seek a home in something bigger than
themselves, in a power greater than themselves that somehow holds all Creation
together. They seek the comfort of the carols they've sung year after year on a
silent night. They want to come home and
to be at home in a 2,000 year old ancient story. They hope to find a home in
the very heart of God.
It's a universal yearning, a tug within the soul, especially
in December.
Yes, we are so different from each other, we humans. We are
poor and rich, gay and straight, married and single, immigrant and blue blood.
We have lots of kids or no kids. The tables of our holiday feasts are packed
with so many relatives or feature two or three gathered as family, some bound
by blood, some by memory and experience.
We are Christian or Jewish or Muslim or agnostic or maybe even not so
sure about this God idea.
Yet still we all seek just one holiday gift: to find a home
and to be at home.
So my prayer and hope for all of us, dear readers, is
simple. May we all get home this holiday, in these holy days. May the roads we
travel bring us to a place of spiritual calm. May the joys and the sorrows of
this season open our hearts to realize the miracle that is daily life. In the words of the poet Max Erhman, from his
poem "Desiderata": "...be at peace with God, whatever you
conceive [God] to be, and whatever your labors and aspirations, in the noisy
confusion of life keep peace with your soul....it still is a beautiful
world."
There is no place like home for the holidays so may God
bless all of our journeys.
Home.
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