Where The Heart Is

Since the secular celebration of Christmas starts around Thanksgiving time, it is perhaps understandable that I grew up uncertain whether "Over the River and Through the Woods" was a Thanksgiving song or a Christmas song. (One of our monks, who taught music in the grades in which I sang that rollicking number, assures me it is the latter.) My confusion was aggravated by the fact that both holidays hold some imagery in common: turkeys, for instance, and the subject of this very song, a visit to snowy-haired grandparents on a snow-covered farm.
    In my North Carolina childhood, I had grandparents who lived on a farm. My grandmother's hair was white, too--magnificently white. My folks would cut our Christmas tree at the farm, always a red cedar. We also might gather some holly branches, and mistletoe. This last was the exciting part. We didn't climb a tree and cut the mistletoe. We were Presbyterians, not Druids. The men shot it down with a rifle. But visits to my mother's parents weren't restricted to the holidays. Their home was just a few hours drive away, close enough for us to visit frequently. When the time came for one of these visits, my mother would tell us to get in the car, we were going home. We kids played and fought in the back seat. We counted cows and read Burma Shave signs. And the whole family sang. Long songs, mostly: "Down by the River Side," for example, and "When the Saints Go Marching In." When we sang that last one, we included the stanzas about the stars beginning to fall, the sun refusing to shine, and the moon turning into blood. That was fun because I never got to sing those bits at school or at camp. There were secular songs, too. It was years before I realized that when my father sang "Hinky dinky parlez-vous," it wasn't because he had forgotten the words for that part of "Mademoiselle from Armentieres," but because those were the words.
    When we arrived, there were our beloved grandparents to visit, as well as other relatives in the area. And we would play, either by ourselves or with cousins. My grandmother had a gallon jar of old buttons we would sort. And there were shelves of books from an earlier time. I recall the stamp album with page after of page of countries that no longer existed in my childhood, countries that have reappeared in the last decade. Outside, we were constantly building forts and camps, and defending the barns from invisible invaders. Or we boys would cut cane spears and throw them into wasp's nests the size of dinner plates. The wasps had their own way of dealing with invaders. There were also things that involved the oversight of an adult. We might go fishing or swimming in the pond. Or we might hunt for stone arrowheads in a freshly plowed field. We might pick beans, a thing I hated to do, and string them, which I hated even more. Or sometimes we would gather eggs, a thing which I loved to do. Hens would lay eggs in the most peculiar places. They were especially fond of the soft dirt under the porches. But, whatever we did on a given visit, our time on the farm, our time with our extended family, would run out. My folks would load up the luggage and tell us it was time to go home.
    That announcement had me stumped. If my mother called going from our house in Gastonia to the farm in Eagle Springs "going home," how could traveling in the opposite direction also be called "going home"? This was one of the great linguistic mysteries of my childhood. I understand it well enough now, of course. Because when I leave the Abbey to visit my folks in the house where I grew up, I'm going home. And when my time there is over, and I get on the airplane for Michigan, that's going home too. So, those are my homes.
    But where is God's home? A quick answer is "heaven." But quick answers aren't always reliable when we're talking about the one who is omnipresent and eternal. In reality, God doesn't have a home any more than he has a bedroom. All the definitions I've seen of home make it out to be a place that is somehow the proper place for a given person, as distinct from all other places. But there is no place where God doesn't belong. I think God's home (since I am speaking so) must be God himself. The holy Trinity dwells in perfect and changeless unity and simplicity. God dwells "in light inaccessible from before time and for ever."
    When the baby Jesus was born in Bethlehem, God, the eternal Word, gained a second home. The earth was now his home, the children of Adam were now his blood kin. There was a particular place where he grew up. He played there and learned there. He knew the sounds and smells of that house, of that village. He knew which words Joseph sang to which tunes. Of course, the eternal Logos knew those things eternally. But when the baby Jesus grew up, he remembered them.
    Or should say that when Christ was born, he began to have many homes? As a man, he lived all the ambiguities and complexities around that word that so confused me as a child. Certainly, Nazareth was his childhood home, as Gastonia was mine, and Eagle Springs my mother's. But he left Nazareth. Did he think of Capernaum as home? Or did he think of home as a place he had left, without ever finding another home as an addition or a replacement?
    That's the sort of thing we'll have to wait to find out. But our faith has given us a few answers about Jesus' homes already. Because we call him the Messiah, we must call Israel his home. And because we call him the fully human son of Mary, we must call this earth his home, too. And because earth has become his home, Jesus, like so many of us, can be going "home" on each leg of a round trip. He went home when he ascended into heaven. But when he returns in glory (and the sun refuses to shine, and the stars begin to fall, and the moon turns into blood), he will be coming home then, too.
    But he won't be coming home to a very nice place, I'm afraid. This world is a place of sin and suffering and death. And that is actually why he made it his home. He was born among us, as one of us, to save us from just these things. In order to save us, the one who assumed our flesh has called us to be members of his body. And when we do that, we make a Ruth and Naomi sort of commitment: "Intreat me not to leave thee, or to return from following after thee: for whither thou goest, I will go; and where thou lodgest, I will lodge: thy people shall be my people, and thy God my God."     In other words, Jesus' homes are our homes, his everlasting home is our everlasting home. And when the saints go marching in, they will be going home. That's odd in a way. Heaven is a place we've never been. And how can a place we've never been be our home?
    Look at the manger scene you've arranged for Christmas. See where the baby is now. This isn't home. Home is Nazareth. The manger is in Bethlehem. And after Bethlehem comes exile in Egypt. Nazareth is a long way from Egypt--over the river Nile, and through the woods of Galilee. When the Lord Jesus finally enters his earthly home (walking in, it wouldn't surprise me, on his own two feet), he is coming home to a place he's never been before.
    In his new home, the child will have new places to explore, new things to learn. And he will know his parents' love in a new setting, where it will be expressed in new ways. When the glorified Jesus leads his adopted family into their new home, they'll have those things, too. I want to be in that number. I want to see him in the flesh he assumed for our sake. And I want to see beyond that flesh, to see the glory of the God who made this world and that one.
    Jesus wants me to see that glory as well. He wants us all to see his glory in our new home. On the eve of his death he prayed, "Father, I desire that those also, whom you have given me, may be with me where I am, to see my glory, which you have given me because you loved me before the foundation of the world."
---Fr. William