The hymn was familiar. Its chorus, deeply sentimental, ran:
“Come home, come home, ye who are weary come home!”
I was seven years old and “walked the aisle,” making a “profession of faith” in Christ in response to the hymn. I have no memory of the sermon at all. I have no memory of the Scripture read that day. I remember the hymn.
Later that week the preacher came to my house and met with me. After a short conversation, he said to my mother, “Well, he’s only seven. But he’s saved.” I was baptized the next Sunday evening. Needless to say, catechesis was not an expectation within the Baptist Church of my childhood
When I think about it, it seems strange that the notion of “going home” should have been so poignant to me at that young age. By every outward measure, I came from a stable home with no pattern of moving. What I have brought forward with me through the years is a deep recognition that our earliest years mark us in ways that are played out in a variety of forms across the decades.
The Psalmist says, “Surely I have calmed and quieted my soul, like a weaned child with his mother; like a weaned child is my soul within me.” A weaned child has, in some sense, already left home (the primal experience of nursing) and must learn to calm and quiet his own troubled soul, having found a mother (Mother?) who can do that which will last a lifetime.
I once read that we are all “homesick for heaven.” If that is true, then it is for something that has yet to be. We cannot go backwards to recover something we never had.
There is a strange movement in time that is expressed in the liturgy. Despite the fact that the Divine Liturgy “remembers” the death and resurrection of Christ, it treats those events as present moments rather than something lost in history. The liturgy goes so far as to describe the second coming in the past tense. And there is this striking phrase:
Thou it was Who brought us from non-existence into being, and when we had fallen away didst raise us up again, and didst not cease to do all things until Thou hadst brought us up to heaven, and hadst endowed us with Thy Kingdom which is to come.
The mix of tenses – we have been endowed with Thy Kingdom “which is to come,” simply blows the entire notion of tense out of the water.
My own understanding of this rests in the eternal nature of the Kingdom of God. It is not bound by space and time. It “tabernacles” among us, and brings with it this quality of timelessness, even as it rests “in time.”
Human beings are not utterly bound in time. We are “of the earth” (made from dust), but our life is “God-breathed.” We are a bridge between heaven and earth. St. Maximus uses the language of microcosm and mediator to describe this strange positioning of human beings. We are a microcosm of the whole universe and mediators between God and creation. Christ, in His incarnation, enters into this position and reveals it in its fullness.
Our homesickness is an echo of heaven itself. That I had some strong sense of that reality as a child can be merely a mark of sentimentality. Though that might largely be the case, there was/is some element of truth within it, an element which God magnifies and causes to grow within me.
Such a movement towards home is not an instinct for the familiar. Indeed, it is a longing for some place we have never been before. St. Augustine famously wrote: “You have made us for yourself, O Lord, and our hearts are restless until they rest in You.” Augustine’s thought also suggests that it is not a place for which we long, but a Person.
That instinct was present in the words of the hymn of my childhood. It was not a place calling me home, but Christ Himself. “Softly and tenderly, Jesus is calling…”
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