The longing for home. . .

In what passes for art today, words on a canvas, plate, or mug often speaking in glowing terms of home and the yearning for order and place.  The so-called art remains popular even while it would seem that Americans have done nearly everything to distance their own lives from any sense of place, from the order of the past, and from an enduring home.  We are mobile and do not merely travel but move from place to place, house to house, and apartment to apartment.  We trade in jobs faster than we do vehicles.  We have invented desires and genders and mainstreamed them.  At the same time, we live more on screens and the reality of a digital world than the real world.  We love the idea of longevity but we ditch relationships and romances as fast as we replace our phones.  We are enamored of nostalgia and so the popularity of things like Downton Abbey but it is a conditional nostalgia -- conditioned upon including glimpses of the present in the mythology of our past and a non-judgmental view of our core values as a society.  

The longing for home will not be satisfied by technology or digital relations.  It is built in us by our Creator and yearns for the real reality of husband and wife, parent and child, extended family and abiding friendships.  It does not imagine home but builds it whether in house or apartment, establishing the blessing of place alongside the blessing of purpose.  The gift of Christianity is not simply the salvation of the individual but the restoration of this blessing in the shape of vocation.  The problem of the present is that we attempt to embrace the imagery without adopting the theology of creation, the order and purpose of our lives, and its shape in marriage, family, and home.  Art can express many things but the artsy words of pop art fail to deliver to us the things of which they speak.

My grandparents and parents never left home.  They flourished where they were planted.  They lived not for the pursuit of financial gain or the realization of great dreams but they sought to be stable financially in order to take care of those within their duty and to live as a contributing member of the community of church and community.  At my parents funerals, and those of my grandparents, family gathered from all kinds of places to join with the lifetime friends in the community to remember and give thanks that these were part of their home and their lives.  In that moment I longed to be part of them but part of me felt much like an outsider.  I had left home for college and then to seminary and the wisdom of the Church and the work of the Spirit planted me first on Long Island and then upstate New York and finally Tennessee --  a world away from the small town in which I was nourished.  Though I imagined myself one with them, my brother was more than me.  I made my home where I was and did not join my labors and love to the place where I had been born.

The playing of sexual desire and gender as if they were toys and the disconnect between our lives and their purpose and shape with the purpose and shape of those who went before us have left us confused and confounded as a people.  We long for the very thing we have rejected.  We want to be given order in the hope of receiving from it purpose and identity but when confronted with that order we reject it -- forgetting its cost in fueling our longing while keeping us from see that yearning fulfilled.  Retreating to our screens and the imaginary places we might belong, we keep alive the yearning while distancing ourselves even more from its fulfillment.  It is no wonder that depression is rampant among us nor should it surprise us that our melancholy estate finds its ultimate conclusion in the decision to end our lives when we so decide to end them.  The answer does not lie with the digital but with the real, with the surrender of our wills to the Divine Will expressed in the shape of creation, the blessing of redemption, and the purpose of life to glorify God above all things.

When the Church is silent on this part of our life -- the ordered life shaped by God's purpose and will -- we are depriving the people of God of the comfort of knowing their place within God's creation, their purpose grander than self-fulfillment, pleasure, entertainment, or happiness, and their supreme identity as a child of God.  When we go to Church, we find ourselves met by the waiting Father who welcomes us home and to an end for the longing and yearning that threatens to consume us.