finding home

The soul finds its own home if it ever has a home at all. ~Marilynne Robinson, Home, 282

Dear Katie,

On Sunday after church, you asked me if I ever wondered where home is. You are bright and outgoing and wistful and twelve years old. 

The question caught me off guard, and I answered with my knee-jerk reaction: Yes. I do wonder that, often. And as I wonder, sometimes the only thing that enables me to keep moving forward is the promise that our citizenship – our ultimate home – is in heaven. It seems abstract, but it is more concrete than any other answer I can offer in the space of a brief interaction in the church foyer.

But I’ve kept thinking about it. 

I've lived in nine different cities. Not counting the three places my parents have lived since I left for college. Two continents. Three countries. Zip codes that all run together in my head so that I always have to double-check before writing my return address. 

I'm moving to my tenth city in two months. 

When do I not wonder where home is?

For both of us, home is not a particular house on a particular street in a particular city, state, and country. And there’s a certain sadness to that – a sense of loss that I hear in the way you ask the question. When you ask where home is, I wonder, What would it be like to have one home?

Home is cardboard boxes and moving crates and knowing that this place is only temporary - and I hate that. 

And yet. And yet.

Home is every place I have unpacked those boxes. Would I really want to give any of those places up for the boon of just having one home?

I have a home that is far bigger than one house in one city. I have not one home, but many. I look for hints of home wherever I go, and often I find it in unexpected places. 

I discover a piece of home every time I walk into an art gallery. Also every time I walk into a bookstore.

Home is James Taylor's album "October Road" on repeat from July through November. And my mom's collection of Christmas music. And Handel's "Messiah."

Home is a dorm room filled with more people than is entirely comfortable - a jumble of coats and books and mugs of steaming tea and rich conversation - or silence. 

Home is wherever my parents live. 

Home is Orion in the clear winter sky. 

Home is gathering friends together to cook and laugh and visit.

Home is humid days on a screened-in-porch in North Carolina, swinging in a hammock, listening to the creek.  

Airports are home. And train stations. Any place where people occupy liminal space - in transition from one place to another. 

Home is the sound of the Amsel - the German blackbird with an orange beak that has the most beautiful song in the world. It is also the sound of cicadas whirring in the North Carolina heat. 

Home is the community of believers learning what it means to be pilgrims to the city of God. Sometimes we speak German as we walk through life together. Sometimes English. The language doesn’t matter as much as we sometimes think it does. 

Home is the quilts my grandmother made.

Home is a kitchen in a church basement.

Home is whatever hotel I'm spending the night in. 

Home is the collection of postcards and posters and photos and paintings that I tape to the wall and then take down again when it's time to go. 

Home is a gift that I often find when I least expect it. 

Home the way we want it doesn't exist. There is no place in the world where all the people who are precious to us gather to do life together. And even if there were, a lot of the people we love don't speak the same language. There is no one house in the world that holds all the smells we associate with home and holds all our memories. There is no place in the world that can possibly satisfy the yearning for a place where we are fully known, fully at rest, where all is truly, deeply, profoundly, well. 

That yearning is only fulfilled when Christ's Kingdom is made manifest. And that is why I cling tight to Paul's proclamation that our citizenship is in heaven: because it gives me hope that one day the yearning for home will actually be fulfilled. Though the ache seems to last forever, it will only last a lifetime. A lifetime seems long when you're in the middle of it. Especially when you're twelve. Or even twenty-four. But then there's forever. Forever at Home. What a weight of glory. 

For now, we get to carry around that yearning as we live the live of nomads. And we carry around more than that longing - we get to carry some of the things that make a place a home. My mom puts the Mary Engelbreit "bloom where you're planted" magnet on yet another fridge. I turn on the music that holds sustaining memories. We cook food that nourishes our bodies and reminds us of other meals around other kitchen tables. We schedule FaceTime calls and send text messages and write letters. 

We refuse to be defeated by the reality of how temporary this all is. We choose to put down roots even though we know that when it's time to move on the uprooting is agonizing. Because as long as we are willing to put down roots, we have access to a foretaste of home. As long as we look for them, we will find bits of home that we can carry with us wherever we go.

  

Grace,

Kate