Homer told best the quintessential human experience. All we really want is to go Home, and we exhaust our lives clinging to the delusion that we can. We work in factories or corner offices; we make money and we spend it; we travel the world or erect fences on our borders; we build monuments and tear down walls only to build them again somewhere else; we make war and pretend to seek peace; we fall out of love and into it and back out again; we have children and they have children and grandparents tell grandchildren how it used to be; we are born and we suffer and we die; we are ever running forward looking backward. And we never make it. Vanity of vanities, all is vanity.
It is the central tenet of Christian faith that we are sojourners in a strange land, wandering the mysterious tracks of a fallen world. And we do not hope to find Zion, not here, in Babylon. And yet it is hope that inculcates us against the absurdities of a listless existence. Hope in something beyond life, beyond the incessant and futile monotony of living and achieving nothing that time does not instantly sweep away. Hope for a time when our aching desires may be truly sated. Hope for a place where we can rest and think and let time stand still. We hope to go home. And it is that desperate hope that gives us faith that somewhere in that undiscovered country we may realize that hope. It gives us faith that there is, indeed, a home to go to. This is the Christian's teleology, the only shield against the whips and scorns of life.
But we have not hope of finding it here. Here is only to be endured. We must not hope that we will find that promised land here. Home is beyond the grave, not before it. Mortal life is only an imitation and a lie, to be suffered not lived. Only death requites the hope. But the Siren's Song is so powerfully seductive. And if we pause, if we allow ourselves to hear the faintest melody that reminds us of Home, if we turn to listen, if we turn to look backward, then we are caught and we waste our lives chasing a delusion. We believe it. We believe we can go Home.
I knew I could not go back home, but I didn't believe it, not in my gut. But I believe it now. Coming Home after coming out is the final, incontrovertible evidence that dispels the illusion: The past is barred and gated. My childhood Home is still familiar to me, but I find it very, very cold. Home is haunted by the one who left it, not the one who returns. In my Home lives the Ghost of who I was, not who I am. And the Ghost abhors me. The Ghost is still in the closet having tea with Tumnus. The Ghost still believes in a Narnian theology. The Ghost is still Mormon, devoutly Mormon. He is the suffering saint who swore he would ever be true, who swore he would never abandon the faith, who swore upon the holy sacraments that though the very jaws of hell should gape and all his friends betray him, yet even then he would hold to the oath made in the name of Christ Jesus.
And so he hates me. He boils with fury that I would dare even cross the threshold. I am not welcome in that Home; the very walls scream my infamy, my betrayal, and my failure. I am not a guest in my own Home; I am an enemy. I am an oath-breaker, a murderer, and a traitor. I am banished.
I have no Home. I know that now. I believe it. I do not hope. The delusion no longer deceives me. I have mourned the dream and left it buried in my past. I am numb to the Siren's Song. I don't look backward, but I don't look forward either. I suffer life as it comes and live the absurdity, knowing it is absurd. And that is my bitter victory, the victory of a well-traveled man.
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You told me once that you can never go home again and your right. Leaving a place and coming back to to it is always different, because you are different. The old home isn't really home, because you aren't the same. Then make a new one, one where you can be happy and content with the life you have chosen, for there is no shame in that.
ReplyDeletetdj
The radical future of love, without the bondage of the (false) belief that love and community and--even--family are possible only in the confines of the "traditional family," is hard, if not impossible to imagine. But it is possible to know. Jesus knew this, when he looked around a room one day and said, "Here are my mother, and brothers, and sisters." Jesus knew it in pain when he said, in that most painful and radical saying, "Let the dead bury their dead." Jesus knew it in pain when he said, "Behold your mother. Behold your son." The disruption of the family and household, which is unfortunately so necessary sometimes for the springing forth of new families and communities, is painful. But it is not hopeless. It is the ever new struggle in the creation, ever new, of love.
ReplyDeleteYou don't "go home again." But it is not because there is no home. It is because God is busy creating a new home for you. Trust God.