Homecoming

It's homecoming week in my little town. I don't know how many people actually come home for it, or how many people ever left but it has a lovely ring to it: homecoming. In the midst of our local celebrations I've been thinking a lot about "homecoming":

This month marks the anniversary of the death of a friend who introduced me to another use of the word homecoming: the day they brought their adopted child home. Their family celebrated Homecoming Day with all the excitement most birthdays garner.

Another homecoming happened this week: a child of my former church, now 17, abducted by her non-custodial mother 12 years ago was found in Mexico and returned to Texas. It felt like a homecoming to all of us who have waited and prayed these last 12 years, but to her it must feel as if she has been torn from her home.

Resurrection returned from its summer break and the haunting melody of its theme song adds a bit of melancholy background music to my week. Searching for the source of the theme song I found this video of the song. It's called Coming Home, Part 2, which led me to another kind of homecoming: the soldiers.

The homecoming experiences of returning soldiers must be as myriad as their service experiences; none of them are coming home unchanged. Is it still home when you are different?

Just over a week ago I "virtually" celebrated the homecoming of a friend who had a brain tumor removed. She's not home free, but she's home from the hospital and healing.

When I went to my high school class reunion this summer another reality set in - most of us had no home there any longer. Parents had moved away, passed away, or were infirm and cared for at the "nursing home". The houses we lived in back then were occupied by others, or standing empty.

Though it clearly dates me, and kind of embarrasses me, I have always resonated with the poetry of John Denver's Rocky Mountain High: 

"He was born in the summer of his twenty-seventh year,
Coming home, to a place he'd never been before.
Left yesterday behind him,
You might say he was born again.
Might say he'd found the key to every door."

Home is the place where we have the keys. The place where we know the rules, and where things are kept, and what the idioms and the silences mean; a place where we understand the values and the context. Sometimes home is a place we recognize, even if it's a place we've never been before.

Throughout my life, church has been home. Though my childhood was spent moving from place to place, church remained familiar. Though the buildings, the liturgies, the preachers and the hymns changed, God the source of all that is home remains. Wherever I find myself, church is coming home to a place I've never been before, and one I've never left.

I no longer live where my children grew up, but they have homes of their own, and church homes where they belong. My mother hasn't lived anywhere that I ever lived for over 35 years. When my daughters visit me, or I visit my mother, we are not coming home, but when we worship together we are at home, with God: our true home.

Where is your homecoming?