The Lenten Hope for Home

Lent has been for me a time of deep reflection on the notion of home.  As part of my work in ministry, I shared a personal story about homecoming on Ash Wednesday with the participants of the Lenten Retreat.  Lent is a journey home, I said, a journey home back into the heart of God.  I talked about Lent as analogous to a road trip I took long ago, from the desert lands of New Mexico to the spring-green hills of Tennessee.  Lent requires us to pack up the essentials, but it also requires us to pare down.  What can we do without?  What just won't possibly fit in my car for the next 1200 miles?  What is the clutter that keeps me from God?  But more importantly, my dad was with me for this road trip back to Nashville, and my mom was there awaiting me, ready to welcome me home.  God with us on the journey, God the open arms ready to embrace.  This is our hope; this is our joy.  Although the analogy wasn't perfect, it reminded me that Lent is the journey and Easter is the WELCOME HOME banner that hangs over the empty tomb (or the warm fireplace, in my own case).

Yet it's been a struggle for me to integrate my analogy into my own life, and at first I couldn't figure out why.  I now think it has everything to do with the necessary, healthy, painfully hard work of word choice.  You see, for the past few months, I have been very deliberate in calling my place of origin (Franklin, Tennessee) just that.  I speak of returning to Tennessee to see my family, of visiting my friends back in Nashville.  It is inevitable and frequently the case that I slip up and talk of "going home," but I always correct myself.  

This linguistic transition is not without the real pain of separation.  To consciously claim that Tennessee is not my home, at least in every way, feels isolating, too independent, foreign, and sometimes just plain wrong.  It is not without doubts.  Am I so quickly willing to let go of my former home to invest in a new one?  Surely I will always feel at home there - that is without doubt.  So why not just call my childhood home "home," without qualification or equivocation?

To put it simply: because I desperately long for the Easter hope of a home that is not over 2000 miles away.  In the midst of doubt, I need hope that is right beneath my feet.  I want investment in the present.  In the Now.  In the Here.  In the This.  I know that home is starting to be built here, just like I know hope is here, because I feel it beneath my fingertips.  I see it in the real, intimate friendships I am blessed by.  I hear it in the cries of those in need - those in my city, in my work, in my life.  Christian hope doesn't look like waiting to return to places of comfort that I know and love.  Rather, the hope of home looks like grounding myself in places of discomfort that I am learning to love through the painful work of relinquishment and the joyful blessings of new beginnings.

Maybe the promise of Lent, and the promise of Easter, is not stability.  Maybe it's not life without change.  The disciples sure didn't receive that come Easter morning!  Maybe it's not even the notion of a new home that will somehow replace another.  Rather, the promise of Lent is captured in one of my favorite song lyrics: "Home is on the journey there with you."  Ron Rohlheiser talks about God as being in what is most deeply home.  And this is the incarnation's promise - that we are already home, really.  That we don't have to get in the car or on the plane and travel back to our roots.  That we don't have to buy a house or rent a certain apartment.  That we don't have to look outside ourselves for the elusive hope of Christ. No.  Christ's idea of home is Now.  Here.  This.