Words to live by: Homecoming

In the second of three reflections, Major Barbara Sampson paints a picture of what it means to come home.

I’ve been keeping company with a young man in recent months. It’s okay, there’s no need to tut-tut or send my husband a shocked ‘Did you know?’ message. The young man in question has no name, but his story has gripped and held me firmly for weeks now.

It all started when I was asked to speak about prayer at a nearby Brethren church one Sunday morning. I went along with two questions and a painting. The questions were: Who are you, God? and Who am I? It seems to me that these two simple questions are foundational for an understanding of prayer. The painting answers them both.

The painting is ‘The Return of the Prodigal Son’ by the famous artist Rembrandt. It captures the moment when the younger son of a wealthy landowner returns home after his sojourn in a far distant place where he squandered his share of the family fortune. At the edge of the village the father, wearied by long years of waiting for his son’s return and anxious to get to him before his angry neighbours do, meets the boy. Rembrandt has painted a moment of infi nite tenderness as the old man lays hands of forgiveness and blessing on the boy’s slumped shoulders.

Deep in the shadows of Rembrandt’s portrayal there stands another figure, scarcely seen. It looks like a female figure. Could this be the boy’s mother? She has no mention in the gospel story but she must be there somewhere. Maybe she had a parallel experience of her own—a sudden departure, a far distant country, and eventually a homecoming. Is this why she is silent, even invisible in this story?

There’s no place like home

Home—for better or for worse, there’s no place quite like it. Home is where you can turn up at the darkest hour or at the darkest moment and they have to take you in. You’re family after all. Home is more than a place, it’s where your roots are, where your story began, where you grew up from being just a kid on the block to being someone in the world.

I remember some years ago sitting outside my childhood home at Kamahi, near Edendale in Southland, and feeling full of emotion. This is where I began. This place, even 50-plus years after I left, is still home where my deepest roots are buried.

We can wander the world and still carry home in our heart. We can just as easily never leave yet have no sense of a home where we belong, a place to hang up the jacket of our soul or kick off our shoes of weariness. In the vocabulary of the spiritual life, ‘homecoming’ is one of those winsome God words that beckons and calls us to a deep place of rest and welcome. No matter how far we have wandered or strayed, God is always waiting, watching for our return, just like the father in the gospel story.

Come Home, come Home!
Ye who are weary come Home!
Earnestly, tenderly, Jesus is calling
Calling, O sinner, come Home!

Salvation Army Songbook No. 436

Place and people

A few years ago I worked alongside a man who had a checkered career. He had been in and out of prison, but he had huge potential for making a difference for good in the world. As the end of one year approached we both sensed that the coming year would be a year of homecoming for him—connecting with his family again after years of living apart. Not just physically, but also as far as relationships were concerned. He had children he had not seen for years and grandchildren whom he had never met.

The following year he did a Salvation Army 12 Steps course and in the process got in touch with the little boy he had been at the age of five when he was yanked from under a bed and taken off into foster care. He had been forced to grow up without his family, using his fists to make his way, always feeling angry but never understanding where the anger came from. When he told me his story I wept.

At the end of the course he met up with some of his children and an ex-partner. They came and visited, stayed for a long weekend, talked all day and all night, telling the stories of that huge gap of years that had separated them. They listened to each other’s explanations and found a new love that bound their hearts together—tentatively at first as they were strangers, after all. But gradually the bonds strengthened and became meaningful for them all.

It was beautiful to watch this happen over a period of months. They still live in separate cities but a homecoming has happened between them—a return to the roots, a discovering of place and a people (also known as ‘family’) to belong to.

The welcome of homecoming

The story is told of a man who lived on a steep slope. One morning as he looked out over the valley and up the other side he saw a house with gold in its windows. He decided to go and look closer at this wonderful place. It took him all day to trudge down the hillside, cross the valley floor and clamber up the other side.

By the time he got to the house it was late afternoon and he was disappointed to find the house did not contain gold at all. It just looked like an ordinary place. But when we looked across the valley to the house from where he had come, he saw his own windows were lit up with the golden blaze of the afternoon sun. In that moment he realised the treasure that lay in his own home.

A friend of mine has a sister living in England. She is unhappy in her job and her living situation is becoming increasingly unsuitable. What should she do? Move half way around the world to come home to this country and to the sisters and extended family that she knows and who love her, or move closer to the man she is fond of but who cannot hold his drink?

Author Frances Murphy writes, ‘An exile is someone who is separated from the place they call home.’ Where is home for this dearly loved sister? Does she have the sense that she is in exile? What kind of homecoming could this year hold for her?

What kind of homecoming could this year hold for you or me? In those moments when we have a sense of exile or dislocation may we hear God sing his words of welcome and homecoming over us.

NEXT TIME | Restoration

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by Major Barabara Sampson(c) 'War Cry' magazine, 11 March 2017, pp20-21