Where Is Home?

“I am a stranger and an exile living among barbarians and pagans, because God cares for them." (St. Patrick’s Confessions)

I experienced my first airplane ride the day before my sixteenth birthday. It was not a pleasure trip; I was with my family on our way to Ecuador. We changed planes in Atlanta and then continued on to Miami where we spent the night.

Late the next night we boarded a Braniff jet (the first company to paint its aircraft in bright colors). We landed in Panama about daybreak and got out for a while to stretch our legs. Then we got back into the plane for the trip to Quito. In those days, the Quito airport was a small and modest building. The immigration officer sat at a crude desk. After a brief conversation, he would personally stamp each passport.

Soon we were in the front of the airport, several miles from the city. (Now, of course dense housing and business districts surround the airport.) My father hailed a taxi and soon we were riding on the old cobblestone covered Pan-American highway.

The sights and smells were so unfamiliar. In the center of town, the people who filled the sidewalks were dressed in clothing I had never seen before, brightly colored ponchos, strange hats and shoes made of rope. Others were cooking on the street and the fragrances of the food startled me. The buildings were older than any I had ever seen. Everyone was speaking words that I did not understand. I was now an immigrant. I was in a country where I did not belong.The first night we slept in an old adobe home near the center of town.

I awoke shortly after daybreak, hearing people laugh out in the courtyard. Several houses opened up to the same courtyard, and people were washing their faces in the cold mountain water of the fountain. I could smell coffee and freshly baked bread. Soon our host offered me papaya, some toasted bread, and the strongest but most flavorful coffee I had ever tasted.

After a few weeks of continual strange experiences, I began to experience what we now call culture shock. It is a sense of social vertigo, an intense feeling that the world is not right and that one is out-of-place.

In the grip of culture shock, one begins to feel a profound longing for home. That is what happened to me. I longed for the Appalachian mountains and for familiar sounds, smells and foods. I dreamed of home. I cried myself to sleep thinking about home. My mind recreated West Virginia as a mystical, Garden of Eden sort of sanctuary. If only I could get back there, all would be well.

I have been back to West Virginia many times since those days. I even lived there for a brief time.

While I still love my boyhood home, it is no longer home. Alas, I have never quite recaptured the same sense of belonging anywhere I have lived. I have liked in Nashville longer that anywhere else; but in a sense, Quito is home, Montreal is home, and Phoenix is home. I left a part of myself in each city, and each city gave me something new. However, when in any of them, I long for things I experience in the others.

Both St. Patrick and St. Augustine speak of this sense of homesickness and dislocation.

“Why is the heart of the Christian heavy?” Augustine asks in his Confessions, “it is because he is a pilgrim and seeks his own country.”

Like me, Patrick also experienced a traumatic dislocation on his sixteenth birthday. One day he was playing in the fields beside his father’s house; the next day he was in a boat in chains, traveling to Ireland. He hated Ireland every day he was there and prayed constantly for his release.

When God finally answered his prayer, how he rejoiced to be going home! But home was no longer home.

After a while, a voice came in the night, calling him back to Ireland. When we think of Patrick, we can only think of Ireland. Late in life, he writes the Roman churchmen, lamenting that “you mock us for our backwardness and ignorance because we are Irish but I remind you that we are the children of God.” He no longer thinks of himself as an outsider. He has become a defender and advocate for the people and the nation that he once despised. As we mature, a Christian begins to realize that “here we have no continuing city but we seek one to come.”

We love our country; we love our birthplace.

However, the people who once filled those landscapes with laughter slowly slip into eternity. The places they once occupied become like picture albums on our coffee tables: reminders of what once was. As this happens, our grasp of a geographical place as sanctuary loosens its grip.

We begin to find our sense of home in God, in the work He has given us to do, and in the people that He has given us to love and serve.

Time, History, and Focused Attention

While in Ireland, Trish and I stayed in a little cottage several miles from Galway. We traveled the narrow roads every day in our rented car.

Each day, we passed the ruins of a church built in the seventh century. The seventh century!

For 1,400 years that little church has witnessed the comings and goings of worship services, weddings, funerals, baptisms and ordinations.

Generations have come. Generations have passed.

Each day, driving to meet other believers to learn more about the Lord and life, we drove by those ruins. We noticed the graves and the crosses. Then we went on about our business.

For fourteen hundred years, people have passed by that property, on their way to do important things. What those things were, we do not know. They would probably not seem very important to us now. Most of those things would seem trivial or even a waste of time to us. It makes you wonder what people in the future will think of our efforts and preoccupations.

Here is the truth: every person alive today will be dead in a few years. That is a fact. It is such an unpleasant fact that I have likely lost half of my readers by mentioning it. People will soon be passing by our remains on their way to do things they think are important.

Morbid? No!

Maturity.

Realizing that our lives are brief and that our deaths are certain is the first great step towards acquiring wisdom. No recognition of mortality; no wisdom; it's that simple.

Without recognition of mortality, we waste our time, our relationships and our talent. One study of people who acquire wealth revealed a single common trait: they all had made wills. Most of them did not make wills after acquiring wealth but acquired wealth after making a will.

Why? Because the same trait that motivates a person to make a will motivates him or her to form a long-range view of life, meaning and productivity.

Without such things, wealth does not accumulate; it drains out through all holes in our attention span.

We intend but never do; we desire but do not focus; we wish but do not plan. Two habits form in the lives of those who become wise: attention on the future and attention on the past – in that order. Attention on the future moves us to think about what comes after us and because of us. When we think that way, we begin to plan and to organize ways to execute those plans. Attention on the past teaches us to learn from the victories, defeats and strategies of those who came before us.

We cannot add to the number of years we will live into the future but we can add to the number of years we have already lived by studying history. We can become 150 years old by studying the civil war and the years that separate us from that era. We become 2,500 years old by studying the rise and fall of the Roman Empire and the rise of the European states that followed.

Christian life is a life lived in the light of eternity. The kingdom of this world will become the kingdoms of the Lord and His Christ. The Roman Empire came and went. The Soviet Union came and went. All countries and empires are transitory things. Only he that does the will of God lives forever. Prophetic vision has always been the fuel of Christian accomplishment. Christian life is also lived in the light of covenant. We did not save ourselves. We did not invent our faith.

All that we have, we have received. Our faith is a heritage. It was passed to us; like runners in a replay race. We would not have had any faith to practice had it not been for the little church we were passing each day, now in ruins but still elegant and beautiful. Our descendants will have no faith to practice if we do not think about them.

We have to lay foundations for buildings we will not see completed, save money we will never spend, and teach lessons that we may never see take root. The people at the end of the race are counting on us. The people at the beginning of the race are counting on us.

Their success is determined by ours and ours is determined by whether we will or will not turn our hearts toward wisdom.

Mardi Gras Hangover?

In many cities of the world yesterday, people celebrated Marti Gras – Fat Tuesday. It’s the day that ends Carnival – the period between Epiphany and Ash Wednesday.

Ash Wednesday kicks off a special season of fasting and prayer that Christians have celebrated through the centuries, usually referred to as Lent. I can write more about Lent as the season progresses.

Today, I want to talk about Marti Gras, and the need for Ash Wednesday. In Rio de Janeiro and New Orleans, the Mardi Gras festivities are especially famous. In those cities, the costumes (for those who wear any) will be colorful, the dances will be sensual and the food will be plentiful. It is a day of indulgence.

It’s funny in a way, this celebration of Mardi Gras. I mean, the whole idea of Lent is to teach oneself to live a different sort of life. It’s the season when we “try on” new behaviors and put away behaviors we want to change.

Some people give up smoking for the forty days of Lent because they hope that by doing it for forty days they may learn how to do it forever. People do this with gossip, promiscuity and all other kinds of sin and vice.

So what’s the point of Mardi Gras? Why indulge on the evening before the fast?

I suppose the original idea might have been to smoke that last cigarette, get drunk that last time, or tell that last lie before one gave such behaviors forever. That rarely works, of course.

We can’t really give up something we are still in love with, which is what an addiction is.

I took my daughter Talitha once to see a movie called 40 Days and 40 Nights. It was loosely about Lent; I figured it would be good for us to see what the secular viewpoint of Lent looked like. As it turns out, the guy in the movie was giving up sex for forty days and the movie was about his struggles to resist the urge. That guy saw sex in everything! Wherever he turned his eyes, he could only see sexual things. Flowers, coffee pots, the pot roast and oatmeal were all suddenly sources of temptation. (Well, not oatmeal, I made that up.)

I kept thinking the movie would turn the corner but of course it didn’t; until the very end anyway. (And by the way, I don’t necessarily recommend that you go rent this movie!)

Later, my daughter told people how weird and awkward it was to watch that movie with her dad. As we were leaving the theater, she said, “Dad, I don’t ever want to talk about this!”

Truth be told, it was no better for me!

But that’s the way it is. Repentance can be difficult and requires a willingness to face temptation with a resolute decision that one has already made.

I think Mardi Gras is a sort of pagan alternative to Lent. Perhaps in the minds of non-believers, they just see us Christians making a big deal about fasting and prayer for forty days...and why? Well, they think, tonight let’s rub it in their face! Let’s do everything pleasurable that comes to mind!

Of course, there is always the possibility that some people might actually get sick of sin. They may become revolted by the debasement of human life that occurs when people drink too much, give their bodies away to too many people, expose themselves to strangers and conclude the evening puking their guts out.

So in a way it’s fitting for sin to overreach and thus expose its toxicity to human life and joy.

That’s why this morning, millions of people – some of whom participated the night before in Mardi Gras – will get up and force themselves to ignore the hangover and go to church.

They will go forward and feel the ash being applied to their forehead and hear the words of the pastor: “Remember O man; from dust thou art and dust thou shall return; repent then and obey the gospel.”

They will respond “amen.”

And some of them will say to themselves and God, “I mean it this time. I’m finished with that way of life.”

And God will say, “welcome home.”