"Cause it's colder than hell
Out here on your own
But I'm moving fast
I'm almost home."
Home is a slippery concept for me. There have been places I've lived for months and years that never quite felt like home, and other places where I still feel like I am part of the very earth, though I haven't lived there in a long time. I have visited places in which I have felt more at home in one visit than I have at others, after a life time of visiting. What is it that tells us when we've found home?
General wisdom would suggest that feelings of being home are more about the people you are with than the place you are in. More about our level of belonging and comfort, how well we feel ourselves known and accepted in these home-places. This makes it harder to predict, I think: some of us find a sense of home with our relatives and some with chosen family, some in places of deep familiarity and some on sojourn or many worlds away from where we originated. And sometimes it changes, and we lose our sense of home or find it anew.
Christmas time brings to the surface the power of home, which christmas-pop-culture is happy to reduce into the jolly hallmark images of perfect families laughing over train sets or singing at pianos or sipping hot cocoa by a fire. But what comes up for most of us is more complex than that, it's fraught with joy and disappointment, nostalgia and regret, loneliness and our deep longings, all the brokenness and the blessedness that can be mixed up in going, or thinking about or missing home at Christmas time.
Today's song names both the longing and the hope. Singing not only about a desire "to be with you for Christmas," but also about the belief that the miles of the journey will "lead to the day you let go of the past, where there's joy inside and there's peace at last."
The lyrics remind us that in this season which heralds Peace on Earth, part of our hope is that that peace might come to our personal lives too, to our families, our relationships, the places we make home; and more importantly to our hearts as we navigate those places and relationships, however we find them from year to year.
As we were reminded yesterday, Christmas' only requirement is that we show up at the stable. When we do, we see the ragtag group that is assembled at God's birth: dirty, poor, rejected, foreign, laying before the Christ child whatever strange gifts we have carried in from our journey. We gaze upon this assembly and see the good news of Christ's coming, that like that motley crew gathered in the manger, there is a place for each one of us in the chosen family of God. For God invites everyone into the warm light of that manger, to be assembled into a home of sorts, a welcome space for all people.
"...like living stones, let yourselves be built into a spiritual house..."
-1Peter 2:5
God our Mother, God our Father, guide us as we journey toward home. Draw us all to the light of peace and let us find family among those who gather there.
-Lindsey
