Have you ever noticed how many songs there are about home?:
Homeward Bound (Simon & Garfunkel) I wish I was, Homeward bound, Home where my thought’s escaping, Home where my music’s playing, Home where my love lies waiting Silently for me.
Take Me Home, Country Roads I hear her voice in the morning hour she calls me The radio reminds me of my home far away And driving down the road I get a feeling That I should have been home yesterday, yesterday
Can’t Find my Way Home (Steve Windwood) You are the reason I’ve been waiting so long Somebody holds the key Well, I’m near the end and I just aint got the time And I’m wasted and I cant find my way home Green, Green Grass of Home (Tom Jones) It’s good to touch the green, green grass of home. Yes, they’ll all come to meet me, arms reaching, smiling sweetly. It’s good to touch the green, green grass of home.
Home (Chris Daughtry) I’m going home, Back to the place where I belong, And where your love has always been enough for me. I’m not running from. No, I think you got me all wrong. I don’t regret this life I chose for me. But these places and these faces are getting old. So I’m going home.I’m going home
I know there’s many, many more songs about home. But, really — what is this mysteriously place we call home? I don’t really buy that old expression “Home is where the heart is” unless the Holy Spirit has taken up residence within that heart. And even then, there is a longing for this seemingly unattainable peace, this distant memory just beyond my reach where I am safe from harm.
I mentioned in yesterday’s post that I am originally from Virginia. My family also lived in Charlotte, NC. Of the three places I have called my home, I spent the least amount of time there. So, why do I long for that home? What is it about that place? I think I’ve finally figured it out. It has nothing to do with the place. It has to do with the circumstances. This is where I lived with my intact, traditional family shortly before everything went to sh*t. A house where I felt safe and protected — and even that was an illusion that would soon come crashing down. I used to sneak into my big sister’s room and listen to this song on her record player, which is my very favorite “Home” song:
“Sometimes I wonder if I’m ever gonna make it home again. It’s so far and out of sight. I won’t be happy until I see you alone again. Till I’m home again and feeling right. I want to be home again and feeling right.”
I want my children to grow up in a place where they feel protected, cherished and loved –knowing full well that a home here on earth is an illusion. God created us with a longing for our eternal home. Whether or not a person buys into that explanation doesn’t change the reality that within each of us that longing resides. In “The Weight of Glory”, C. S. Lewis writes:
In speaking of this desire for our own far off country, which we find in ourselves even now, I feel a certain shyness. I am almost committing an indecency. I am trying to rip open the inconsolable secret in each one of you—the secret which hurts so much that you take your revenge on it by calling it names like Nostalgia and Romanticism and Adolescence; the secret also which pierces with such sweetness that when, in very intimate conversation, the mention of it becomes imminent, we grow awkward and affect to laugh at ourselves; the secret we cannot hide and cannot tell, though we desire to do both. We cannot tell it because it is a desire for something that has never actually appeared in our experience. We cannot hide it because our experience is constantly suggesting it, and we betray ourselves like lovers at the mention of a name.
Our commonest expedient is to call it beauty and behave as if that had settled the matter. Wordsworth’s expedient was to identify it with certain moments in his own past. But all this is a cheat. If Wordsworth had gone back to those moments in the past, he would not have found the thing itself, but only the reminder of it; what he remembered would turn out to be itself a remembering. The books or the music in which we thought the beauty was located will betray us if we trust to them; it was not in them, it only came through them, and what came through them was longing.
These things—the beauty, the memory of our own past—are good images of what we really desire; but if they are mistaken for the thing itself they turn into dumb idols, breaking the hearts of their worshippers. For they are not the thing itself; they are only the scent of a flower we have not found, the echo of a tune we have not heard, news from a country we have never yet visited.
Do you think I am trying to weave a spell? Perhaps I am; but remember your fairy tales. Spells are used for breaking enchantments as well as for inducing them. And you and I have need of the strongest spell that can be found to wake us from the evil enchantment of worldliness which has been laid upon us for nearly a hundred years. Almost our whole education has been directed to silencing this shy, persistent, inner voice; almost all our modem philosophies have been devised to convince us that the good of man is to be found on this earth. And yet it is a remarkable thing that such philosophies of Progress or Creative Evolution themselves bear reluctant witness to the truth that our real goal is elsewhere. When they want to convince you that earth is your home, notice how they set about it. They begin by trying to persuade you that earth can be made into heaven, thus giving a sop to your sense of exile in earth as it is. Next, they tell you that this fortunate event is still a good way off in the future, thus giving a sop to your knowledge that the fatherland is not here and now.
Finally, lest your longing for the transtemporal should awake and spoil the whole affair, they use any rhetoric that comes to hand to keep out of your mind the recollection that even if all the happiness they promised could come to man on earth, yet still each generation would lose it by death, including the last generation of all, and the whole story would be nothing, not even a story, for ever and ever.
This is not our home. As my Aunt Phyliss might say, “Sugar, our home is Way Over Yonder
For the record, I’m the younger sister, not the one holding the cat. That cat hated me. This might have something to do with the fact that I dressed him in Baby Tender Love dresses and forced him into my toy baby stroller. I suppose I’ll never know for sure…
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