Home for Christmas

In the midst of preparation to lead a retreat this weekend, with “Home for Christmas” as its theme, I’ve been reminded of the old adage about how the more things change, the more they remain the same.

The idea for this particular retreat came to me as “the holidays” were drawing to a close a year ago.  I had taken a hastily scheduled trip to Portland to spend a week with my younger sister, as she prepared to begin radiation and chemotherapy for pancreatic cancer.  That ordeal was to begin in January.  Meanwhile, we were to have a week of “sister time,” the week we usually had in August, but this year August had been consumed by our joint effort to connect, or reconnect, cousins – - her children, my children, their children – - whose homes are on opposite coasts.  That was before the cancer changed everything.

I had moved through multiple airports, coming and going, caught up in the Christmas sounds, smells, and sights.  I had been in and out of stores with my sister, helping her finish her Christmas shopping.  We got to church for the annual Christmas pageant, and a couple of important Christmas gatherings with friends or family.  We reminisced about Christmases past, and dared not look ahead to Christmas future.  And everywhere, a common theme was family and home, and one old chestnut of a song seemed to sum it up: “I’ll be home for Christmas.”

 Sung by many different voices – - but my sister and I could remember when it was first sung.  We were little girls who knew other little girls whose fathers were fighting a far-off war, and we were grateful that our father’s eyesight disqualified him for anything more important than being a Block Warden.  His was the responsibility to make the rounds every night ensuring that the windows on our block were securely covered with the dark wool blankets, that no light could be detected from the skies above.  Portland was a city that lived in dread of Japanese bombs.

But it doesn’t take a war to make one want to be home, to reach out to gather all of our loved ones in, or to move heaven and earth to make it home for Christmas ourselves.  The old song speaks to something very deep in us all.  We talk a lot about the individualism of our age, of our national wanderlust that has fragmented families and undermined churches and other social institutions.  And we belittle that lone spiritual journey that nobody can really take alone, those spiritual nomads that Diana Butler Bass reminds us can and often do become pilgrims.

Fifty years ago my sister’s life and mine went separate directions, and we each began new lives and our own families, so that now we are all enmeshed in different worlds with roots that run deep, several thousand miles apart.  What does family mean?  Where is home?  After the week in my sister’s home in Portland, and after I returned to my home in Richmond, I began tossing ideas, scraps of paper, notes to myself, into a file folder in preparation for this weekend’s retreat.  Now, a year later, as the shape of the retreat begins to emerge, I have rediscovered in that file a quote from Reinhold Niebuhr.  The human Spirit, Niebuhr wrote, is incapable of ridding itself of an abiding sense of homelessness.

Whatever “home” means to us, whatever it means to leave home or come home or be homeless, perhaps it is what we have made of Christmas that accentuates the joy and the pathos of our state.  Yes, we live in the midst of unrelenting change, and, yes, the forces of globalization uproot families and destroy communities as they redistribute resources.  But Niebuhr reminds us that we’ve been this way before, that we’re all spiritual nomads, trying to make our way home.

As educators encountering the spiritual nomads among us, we might want to be on the alert to those who aren’t sure where home is for them this Christmas.  We’ve got some great biblical family reunions to draw on – - from God’s promised homecoming through the prophet Zephaniah, to the prodigal sprinting the last few yards into his father’s outstretched arms.