You Can Go Home Again

You have no doubt heard that you can’t go home again (a Thomas Wolfe title). When I go back to visit the city where I grew up, it isn’t the same. Strangers live in the house where I grew up. Upscale suburbs have obliterated the miles of fields and forests where I rode my horse bareback in the summer heat to the pond where we could splash in the cool, muddy water. New highways are disorienting and I get lost. The home I knew is gone.

But it’s said that home is where the heart is. (My computer says that Pliny the Elder said this first.) So where is my heart? The Bible tells me that where my treasure is, my heart will be there, too. So where is my treasure? Probably in different places at different times. But when I really think about it, what do I value more than anything else? A story immediately comes to mind (a story I wrote about earlier in Life in Four Words).

One day, soon after Buddha’s enlightenment, a man saw Buddha walking toward him. The man had not heard of Buddha, but he could see that there was something different about the man who was approaching, so he was moved to ask, “Are you a god?”

Buddha answered, “No.”

“You’re a magician, then? A sorcerer? A wizard?”

“No.”

“Are you some kind of celestial being? An angel, perhaps?”

“No.”

“Well, then what are you?”

The Buddha replied, “I am awake.”

That’s what I treasure most. I want to be awake. I don’t want to be a seeker. I want to be a finder. A be-er. A being. That is where my heart is. And thus, my home.

Robert Frost said that home is the place where, when you go there, they have to let you in. So I’m knocking on the door of home. I’m going to hold Jesus to his promise that if I knock, the door will open. And I believe that when the door opens I will find myself where I’ve been all along. Right here, in this holy instant, in an eternal state of grace.

You can go home again. Indeed, it is the only place we can go because, when we get there, we realize that we never left.