Making Our Way Home

Home is the place that they take you in. Without reservation. No questions asked.

There was no bus station in that tiny South Georgia town. Once a day a Greyhound would stop in the parking lot of a shabby convenience store. That’s where my mom and I boarded the first of several coaches that would eventually take us to Miami. We were fleeing my abusive father.

We weren’t going anywhere in particular, really. We were escaping, with only the vague notion that we would land in what we could call home. I was eleven.

Photo by Victor Chaidez on Unsplash

In Miami, we shared a cramped, one-room efficiency for a few weeks. Eventually, we wandered north, rolled through a stretch of homelessness, and eventually camped in Atlanta. There, some kind people took us in. They helped my mother find a job. That fall I enrolled in a nearby Catholic school with their help.

The transition from rural Georgia to urban Atlanta, from public school to Catholic education, and struggling to fit in with a bunch of new kids who had known each other since conception left me feeling unsettled. I had escaped, but I still longed for home.

As I look back, I think that one of the most significant lessons of those days was just what home is. Home is not so much a geographical location as it is a spiritual condition. Home is constructed of relationships, not bricks and mortar, byways and streetlights.

Maya Angelou once described home and our ache for it like this: “The ache for home lives in all of us. The safe place where we can go as we are and not be questioned.” (see All God’s Children Need Traveling Shoes) Home is the place that they take you in. Without reservation. No questions asked. Home is less a where or a what than it is a who.

I’m brought back to this time in my life, and the insight that it brought, when I read about the Israelites wandering in the desert. They had escaped Egyptian bondage and plunged into the wilderness following the promise of a home they could call their own.

The hardships, uncertainty, and grinding monotony of their journey had worn them down. Home was seeming like an impossibly distant destination. Settling for Egypt was starting look good. Here’s what it says in Exodus:

The whole congregation of the Israelites complained against Moses and Aaron in the wilderness. The Israelites said to them, ‘If only we had died by the hand of the Lord in the land of Egypt, when we sat by the fleshpots and ate our fill of bread; for you have brought us out into this wilderness to kill this whole assembly with hunger.’ (Exodus 16:2-3)

I can’t really fault them. Day after day, they walked, walked, in the heat and the dust. Water and food were scarce. And let’s face it, none of them had training in wilderness survival skills. They were facing a treacherous, entirely unfamiliar set of circumstances. Every day.

Photo by Peter Syme on Unsplash

They had looked forward to a land of milk and honey. The rocks and the sands and the snakes and the scorpions of the Sinai were not what they had bargained for. This was not their dream home.

We readers know the rest of the story. After forty years, the Israelites cross the Jordan and claim the land as their own. But if you keep reading, you see that there’s never smooth sailing. Where they are is not the key to being home.

Who is with them makes wherever they are their home. God—the God who loves them with unrelenting abandon—is with them. In the desert no less than in Jerusalem. God’s response to their grousing shows them as much. “I am going to rain bread from heaven for you, and each day the people shall go out and gather enough for that day.” (Exodus 16:4) In other words: “Have some manna! It’s on me. Let’s just keep moving. I’m with you. Every day.”

Our home, the home for which we long, is intimate relationship with God. And, in this life, we will always be making our way home. That’s because there’s a paradox at the center of our spiritual lives. God is always with us and yet we also long for God. After all, we long for what we do not have.

It is not that God goes absent. And neither are we necessarily failing to pay attention. Instead, God is infinite. We are finite. We are too small to contain the infinite depths of God’s love. And yet we yearn for more. And so God obliges. God stretches our soul to receive more of the divine. One day, one step, at a time.

A Full-Hearted Life

A Full-Hearted Life: Following Jesus in a Secular Age is now ready for preorder (click this link to learn more and grab a copy). Here’s one comment about it:

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—The Rt. Rev. Sean W. Rowe, 28^th Presiding Bishop-elect of the Episcopal Church