Knowing Home Now. . .and for the First Time

"What do you want to do with your life?" someone asked me recently. Without hesitation I replied that I wanted to do what I am doing. Living life, loving God and people, liking my job, writing, and hiking. Perhaps I should have said more accurately—and succinctly—that I wanted to do with my life whatever God calls me to each day. That doesn't mean I'll stay in this house or this job forever and always. It doesn't mean that I will get to have the same friends all of my life. It means that I will seek to live each day to the full, to "suck the marrow out of life"¹ as Thoreau says.

My answer may sound transitory, thoughtless, or hopelessly mangled—wanting the now without thought for the future. But I have a few things in place for the future, and I see no reason to worry about something I don't have when I could enjoy what I do have. We aren't called to always quest after what may or may not be on the horizon. We are called to live where we are—and who we are—now.

I was once told that I have the pioneer spirit of a first-born—which is rather interesting, considering I'm a youngest. However, the comment was, in part, true. I want more out of life than the homeland of my youth could offer. I longed to go West and live amongst mountains. I had not yet figured out what it meant to live fully wherever I was. I still haven't. Wanderlust plagues my blood sometimes and I must fly down the two-lane highway to chase the wild geese, to breathe in mountain air, to get away from my little cabin, so that I can experience the joy of coming home again.

Chesterton talks about sailing away from Christianity to figure out what he believed, only to find that his beliefs lined up with orthodoxy. In The Everlasting Man he explains it as leaving one's homeland to fight giants and seek adventure, only to realise one's home rested atop a slumbering giant the whole time. He says, "There are two ways of getting home; and one of them is to stay there.  The other is to walk round the whole world till we come back to the same place. . .”² Much like Lewis's, John, in Pilgrim's Regress, learned. He left his home at the foot of the mountains to seek the pull of Joy (an elusive island in that book) and found that he had circumnavigated the world and returned to his mountain home, where the island/Joy had been all along. Or as Eliot so adeptly explains it,

"With the drawing of this Love and the voice of this Calling
We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time."³

These men all knew and wrote about the experience of leaving home to find it. It was not easy, the road was long, but in the end, they arrived home—knowing its value for the first time. The hearts of men long for our true home—the New Heavens and the New Earth, yes—but more specifically, we long for God. Augustine was right to confess that, "Our hearts are restless until they find their rest in Him." 

So, how do we live where we are now, while our hearts long for completion in God? How do we live in the present? How do we walk the balance of wanting to be complete now, but living in the not yet? Part of the answer—because I certainly do not have the full answer—is simply to be present. For me, this means I need to not plan one event after the other. I want to be present where I am with the people there, not be thinking about the next event in the back of my mind, hurrying myself along. Part of being present—counter-intuitive to this being written and viewed on a screen—means being face-to-face with people or the world around us, not being at the beck and call of technology. 

Perhaps the biggest part of being present, living in the now but not for the now, is savouring things. Swallow slowly—both food and the world. I love cooking. I enjoy chopping all of the ingredients, serving things as fresh as possible. It takes time and effort to make a meal. I want to savour what took me thirty minutes or more to make. But I want to savour the time it took to make the meal, too. I don't want a dozen labour-saving devices. One or two are sufficient (mostly, a garlic press is sufficient, so my fingers don't reek of garlic for days on end). I want to spend the time chopping, arranging, mixing, letting every flavour meld within my cast-iron skillet. There is deep satisfaction in the process of making a meal from scratch, and at my own pace. Confessedly, I do love my slow cooker for winter evenings of stew or tenderised meat—but I still put all the ingredients in as slowly and deliberately as ever (most of the time).

With the changes made to things like cooking or farming or travel, I wonder what we modern folks do with all of our saved time. Do we dance more and read more? Do we spend more time in conversation or in contemplation? Though e-mails save time and cutting and pasting is helpful, there is nothing like the joy of a real letter—handwritten, not typed—in our mailbox, and the feel of it in our hands and under our eyes. 

What do we do with all of that time we have saved?

"Good morning," said the little prince."

Good morning," said the merchant. This was a merchant who sold pills that had been invented to quench thirst. You need only swallow one pill a week, and you would feel no need of anything to drink.

"Why are you selling those?" asked the little prince.

"Because they save a tremendous amount of time," said the merchant. "Computations have been made by experts. With these pills, you save fifty-three minutes in every week."

"And what do I do with those fifty-three minutes?"

"Anything you like . . ."

"As for me," said the little prince to himself, "if I had fifty-three minutes to spend as I liked, I should walk at my leisure toward a spring of fresh water."⁴

What do you want to do with your life? The question hangs in the air. I want to use my time saved to cook slowly, to hike long, to be with friends and family, to sit on my porch and watch the twilight fall, to smell the seasons' scents, to dance in the snow. . .In these things, I am learning to love God and enjoy Him forever—because He is Home.

_________

1. Thoreau, Henry David, Walden (New York: Penguin Group), 72

2. Chesterton, G. K., The Everlasting Man (Garden City: New York, Doubleday and Company 1955) 11
3. Eliot, T. S., Collected Poems (New York: New York, Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, Inc. 1971) 208

4. de Saint-Exupéry, Antoine, The Little Prince, translated by Katherine Woods (New York: New York, Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, Inc. 1971) 73-74

Wanderlust

All those golden autumn days the sky was full of wings. . . The wings and the golden weather and the tang of frost in the mornings made Laura want to go somewhere. She did not know where. She wanted only to go.

"Let's go West," she said one night after supper. "Pa, can't we go West when Uncle Henry does?"

. . . "I know, little Half-pint," said Pa, and his voice was very kind. "You and I want to fly like the birds. . .”¹

Wearing long-sleeved flannel shirts and seeing snow geese—all glossy white with black-tipped wings—are among the signs that September has arrived in all her tawny glory. The incense of woodsmoke, the vaulted vibrant blue skies, and the slant of the afternoon sunlight all beckon me to come out and play. “Come West,” they whisper. And I do. I nose my car through fresh winds, snaking over mountain passes until I find a place to get lost in the wild and the beauty. Like little Laura, I ache to go West, to live freely. Free from schedules—the ever-pressing fist of time—and free from others’ expectations.

Familiarity feels like the level ground I need to leave behind on the hunt for paths that climb ever-upward. What is it that I long for, that I can’t get out of my blood no matter how often I hike until the stars wink open? The leaves of my favourite books rustle with the answer. I would never have believed just one of them; but when the overflowing shelves all carry me from an unassuming front door to wild lands, beasts, and men, only to arrive back at home, I take notice.

Home revolves around the familiar, the mundane. It is family and friends going deeper, butting heads, holding hands, reaching out, being still, being vulnerable. Though the familiar and intimate draw things out slowly and graciously, I often find myself like a ruptured seed buried in the earth. I struggle toward the surface, feeling the urge to keep pressing upward, though I don’t know why or what lies ahead.

Often I vacillate, wanting the routine and familiarity of the daily—yet restlessly craving the freedom and thrill of the untamed, the unexplored. I want to run away from all I have known and taste something wild and fresh. Restlessness, however, stems from dissatisfaction—named or unnamed; whilst imagination breathes life and satisfaction into the daily and the anomaly—the level ground and the arduous uphill climb.

How little I have learned from those tales of adventure—everywhere I turn, home is the way things end. Like Chesterton’s farm boy seeking a giant only to find he always lived upon one, or dissatisfied John in Pilgrim’s Regress, I suppose I will have to hike the whole globe ‘round to wind up at my own front doorstep, with my own mountains out the window.

“There are two ways of getting home; and one of them is to stay there. The other is to walk round the whole world till we come back to the same place. . .”²

Tolkien ends both The Hobbit and Lord of the Rings with the Hobbits’ return to the Shire. To be sure, the quest challenged and forged those who dared to go on it—fitting them for both the scouring of the Shire and the honest work of rebuilding and guiding it. But it is the cosy hearth fires of home and the minding of one’s own garden that the Hobbits are about for most of their lives. The quest of the Ring made each character wiser, nobler, and deeper—fitting them richly for the quotidian tasks of Shire life. The love of home is worth leaving it and fighting for it, in order that others might have that very home, even if they are unaware of those who have gone to great lengths to keep it free, peaceful, and beautiful.

If our ancestors and those in our military have sacrificed what is most precious to them that we might have a home, why do we often fly from it like so many birds on the wing? It is not the familiar and comfortable that stop my ears and blind my eyes to the gifts I have here and now. It is my own sins that make me “grow old” as Chesterton puts it. Adventure sounds alluring, but the heights are so windy that tears blind us, the ground is rocky and hard to sleep on, the uphill climb makes our lungs and legs burn. Do harshness and denial make us grateful for our everyday gifts of running water and a comfy beds? Does the beauty of a new place resonate in our hearts because it calls to mind that which we first loved, the beauty learned at home?

How do we live on the level ground, the familiar and cosy, whilst still pursuing the upward trek of adventure and all its hardships? We need both. The adventure takes us far enough away to see that what we have been looking for is in our own gardens, as Dorothy says in The Wizard of Oz: “If I ever go looking for my heart’s desire again, I won't look any further than my own backyard.”³ It took quite the journey for her to gain that perspective.

Some find home by staying there, but others of us must circumnavigate the globe all the way back to our own cosy Hobbit holes. It is a long journey, but perhaps when we land, we will learn to appreciate what we had all along, rather than taking it for granted—to see life abundant in the mundane, and beauty all around. After all, “there’s no place like home.”⁴

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1. Wilder, Laura Ingalls, By the Shores of Silver Lake (New York: Harper & Row, Publishers) 126, emphasis mine
2. Chesterton, G. K., The Everlasting Man (Garden City: New York, Doubleday and Company) 11
3. Dorothy Gale in The Wizard of Oz (Directed by Victor Fleming and George Cukor. 1939 MGM studios)
4. ibid

Further Up and Further In

Learning lessons is a slow process for me. There are so many facets to a lesson that I often have to be taught the same thing from multiple angles. Perhaps this is why I never went to college; I was too busy re-learning lessons others learned the first time.

Christmastime has arrived in yet another year of my life; a perfect time revisit a lesson. If you are like me, you vacillate between hating the trappings of Christmas, yet loving the reason Christmas is celebrated. How does one explain this dichotomy?

Too often it comes out of my mouth as, “I hate Christmas.” Inaccurate. I hate ridiculous noise labeled “Christmas songs” (carols and hymns are fine, the Winter Wonderland and the Santa variety are not). I despise whiny children in retail stores and nasty grown-ups in the same (at any time of year this is true, in my experience it happens more at Christmas). I loathe the guilt and pressure to buy someone a gift because they are related to me, bought me a gift, or because I “have to.” Like most of my fellow Americans, I deplore the near-inevitable sugar rush and weight gain that takes place during the “holiday season.”

Do the above reasons really mean that I hate Christmas? Well, no. There are good things about Christmas: watching White Christmas with my sisters, making Mexican wedding cakes with my mom, building fires (as taught by my dad years ago), Christmas Eve midnight service with my dad and grandma, reading Christmas stories that make me cry, getting songs from The Muppet’s Christmas Carol stuck in my head, a plethora of good Christmas albums to listen to, spending time with family, etc.

Does this last list mean that I love Christmas? Again, no. Amy Grant’s Tender Tennessee Christmas and the smell of the woodstove burning while making Christmas decorations don’t make Christmas what it is. Reading Luke 2 with the family doesn’t either. Contrary to what many persons, even Christians, believe, Christmas is not about being with family. Christmas isn’t based on how I feel or if things are “like they were” when I was younger.

I’m not the first to say that what we call “nostalgia” is really a horrible imitation and corruption of one of God’s greatest gifts: Joy (as titled by C. S. Lewis) or Beauty (as described by Sheldon Vanauken). I probably won’t be the last to say such, either.

Often we long to go back or we wish that certain events were like they were when we were in our rosier days (what ever and when ever they might have been). We want what movies call “magical” moments. What we really want is not the experience, but the feeling that went with the experience. This is not magic or nostalgia. Inside we truly and desperately crave Joy or Beauty.

In Pilgrim’s Regress, Lewis captures well what happens when we revisit a place or memory, or attempt to recreate an experience: lust or idolatry. The two are really the same and neither are good or truly desirable. You might think that you are a “good person” who has not done such an atrocious thing, but tell me, do you ever desire to revisit special memories? Do you remember the excitement that went with many “firsts” in your life? Those were special things or times, but neither your nor I can live in our memories or go back to our “firsts.” When we miss out on the here and now for either something good in our memories or some hoped-for thing in our future, we make the past or future an idol. We lust after what we do not have rather than enjoying what we do. Lust and idolatry ensnare, whereas Joy and Beauty bring freedom.

How does one pursue Joy or Beauty when it come to Christmas? Should one abandon traditions? I’m not going to quit watching my favourite Christmas movies, or making cookies, or listening to Christmas carols. I may not send cards at Christmas (letters throughout the year are more preferable for me anyway), and I may not purchase gifts (even for the persons I am “supposed” to) unless someone is in need or I find something fitting. Of course, none of those things are particularly related to Christmas.

I can’t go backward seeking a feeling. I could just sit idly by as the whirlwind of Christmas passes me. Thankfully I am not limited to two options. I can do something rather different from what the majority (of Americans) does: I can move forward. I can go further up and further in to the life and world that God has created. But more than that, I must go further up and further in to the LORD Himself.

Even as I type I am moving further up and in. I wanted this essay to somehow capture a conversation about this very idea that I had in the Autumn. But that conversation was a one-time gift. I do wish it had been recorded so I could remember all of the neat things I was learning. Conversations are like much else in life, they are fluid. You can’t take a snapshot of a conversation. They live and breathe as-it-were, they move, they finish and die away. All of these things are natural.

Perhaps I am learning a little of what it means to go further up and in. I will miss new thoughts and feelings and vistas if I remain where I am or forever try to recreate something past. I must reach higher. I must look further. I must learn not to be afraid of losing what I had, rather, it is time to rejoice in what I am being given and what I will be given.

Come friends! Let us go further up and further in!!