An Easter Meditation: Home

At a deepening
Of the Isinglass River
I lie down in stones and tea-colored water,
I think: be careful, do not say
Home,
The the bones of that word mend slowly.

This lovely little piece by the New Hampshire poet, Marie Harris, has plunged itself into me seizing my heart in its painful and powerful grip.

In thirty-two words (thirty-one if you count "tea-colored" as one word) it manages to touch some of our deepest human longings, fears, memories, and hopes. It catches us in our many acts of longing and fear, where we are balanced between the child-like hope for joy and the all too adult condition of recollection of shattered expectations.

And, it manages to cut into one of the profoundest and most atavistic yearnings of the human heart: The yearning for Home. This longing is the longing for the lost Eden of our primeval parents. It is the yearning of Israel by the waters of Babylon for the Holy Land. It is the homesickness of Wendell Berry in all his work for the land and people he glimpsed in his childhood seventy years ago. It is my own mental geography that tends backwards to the red clay and ancient post oaks of Love County, Oklahoma.

To state this theologically, we would be compelled to say that home-longing is the human heart's longing for God. "Thou hast made us for Thyself, O God, and our hearts are restless until they rest in Thee" Augustine. We are strangers and aliens- to ourselves, to others, to our place on the earth. Our anxieties, fears, sleeping dreams, and waking fantasies all tell us this. Our best writers (like Ms. Harris) confirm our suspicions. Listen to Stevenson

Under the wide and starry sky
Dig the grave and let me lie:
Glad did I live and gladly die,
And I laid me down with a will.

This is the verse you 'grave for me:
Here he lies where he longed to be;
Home is the sailor, home from the sea,
And the hunter, home from the hill.

Which echos Job's anguished cry, "Naked I came from my mother's womb, naked shall I return thither!" Job (like Stevenson), the earthy man, made of earth and returning to earth, sees her as his final earthly home.

All of which makes me think of Easter, of Resurrection Sunday.

The message of the Resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead is this: embodiment, earthiness, corporeality are our original state, the state for which we long, and a new embodiment is promised us in the reality and corporeality of his resurrection. The grave (our entombment in the earth) is not the final home of the Christian. What is promised is a new life, an embodied life, in a new heavens and a new earth where righteousness will finally pervade all things.

In this promise is hope: hope that assuages our longings, fears, and nightmares, hope that supports us in our homesickness, hope that assures us that death in all its forms shall be swallowed up in the victory of Jesus.

O Death, where is thy sting?
O Grave, where is thy victory?
The sting of death is sin,
And the power of sin is the law.
But thanks be to God who giveth us the victory
Through our Lord Jesus Christ.

This is the promise and assurance of Home.