Remembering Home

Sabbath is like remembering home.

image courtesy of Thomas Hawk (via Creative Commons)

Singsong voices ringing in the air. Running through the house, out the back yard and circling round again. Burnt leaves lining the sides of the streets. Aromas of autumn float in the air. Rolling pastries to the hum of Christmas songs. Family and friends crowded around the dinner table. Long stories. Loud laughter. Drooping eyelids.

Longing for an innocence, a wonder, a place before.

Abraham Joshua Heschel tells the story of a prince sent away from his home, his father. He wanders the world alone, longing for his Father’s love and approval. One day a messenger arrives outside the lodging of the prince and announces, “Prepare to come home.” Filled with joy, the prince runs through the village and into the local tavern. “Food and drinks for all. Today is a day of great joy for I’ve heard the call to come home.” Heschel says that Sabbath is a day of great joy for we are going home to see the Father.

The image of going home haunts music and stories from age to age. On her recent album, The River and the Thread, Rosanne Cash sings,

“You thought you left it all behind
You thought you’d up and gone
When all you did was figure out
How to take the long way home.”

Throughout the album, characters come and go, run away, even travel the world, but they always end up driving back home.

I tore up all the highways
Now there’s nothing left to say
A mile or two from Memphis
And I finally made it home

And again,

I went to Barcelona on the midnight train
I walked the streets of Paris in the pouring rain
I flew across and island in the Northern Sea
And I ended up in Memphis, Tennessee

Sabbath not simply a longing for home, it is actively remembering home. Instead of the prince banished from home, think of the young man who demands his inheritance and then leaves home. Abandoning his roots, he wanders into the ravines of a broken world. He is lost and has forgotten the way home.

Sabbath rehearses the story of a people who have not only left home, they’ve forgotten the way back. They’ve forgotten their names, their father, their identity. IN Sabbath, we meet the Father who remembers us, who calls us by name, who leads his children home.

G.K. Chesterton once suggested that sometimes people still live at home, but have forgotten their home, their identity, the wonder of their lives. Exile might be their only hope of getting home. In The Everlasting Man, GKC says,

There are two ways of getting home; and one of them is to stay there. The other is to walk round the whole world till we come back to the same place; and I tried to trace such a journey in a story I once wrote.

We live in an age of exile.

The pain of exile echoes through the writings of the poet Czeslaw Milosz. Born in rural Lithuania, his homeland was swallowed by Poland. “I am a Lithuanian to whom it was not given to be a Lithuanian.” He lived through the chaos of Nazi occupation and Soviet rule. Eventually, he emigrated to the West and began teaching at Berkley in 1961. 

Listen to resonance of exile in his words. “Let my case stand as a lesson: behold the enduring image of a poet, ill at ease in one place, ill at ease in the other–“always and everywhere ill at ease”–who managed to distance himself by spinning cocoon-like, his incomprehensible language.”[2]

At age eighty, Milosz returned to visit his childhood land. His reflection may help us get a sense of the longing inherent in Sabbath.

In a world dominated by technology and mass mobility, most of us are first- or second-generation immigrants from the country to big cities. The theme of homeland, the whole nostalgic rhetoric of patria feed by literature since Odysseus journey to Ithaca, has been weakened if not forgotten. Returning to my river valley, I carried with me the heritage of these venerable cliches, already grown somewhat pale, and I was rather impervious to their sentimental appeal. Then something happened–and I must recognize that the myth of Ithaca stems from profound layers of human sensibility. I was looking at a meadow. Suddenly the realization came that during my years of wandering I had searched in vain for such a combination of leaves and flowers as was here and that I have always been yearning to return. Or, to be precise, I understood this after a huge wave of emotion had overwhelmed me, and the only name I can give it now would be–bliss.[3]

Stepping into the memory of home surprised Milosz with bliss. The joy of Sabbath is the joy of remembering home. This is not a sentimental reflection. It is a hope that lies beyond us, looking back and forward.

Sabbath looks back toward a home we only know in stories, Eden. Sabbath looks forward to home that is coming, New Jerusalem. On most days, we walk and live and shape our lives with a sense of exile. Some respond to this sense of lack by mastery of the world in business, government, and even religion. This mastery has an ancient name: Baalism. It will use the world and the people around me to fulfill me, my goals, my longings. It will always result in oppression.

Sabbath chooses the way of trust instead of mastery. I cannot find my way home, my way to very reason I exist, but I can trust the father who created me to restore me and lead me into the fullness of love.

Sabbath is a way of weakness. It is a way of remembering home. It is way of turning and returning to the lovingkindess of God. In Heschel’s language, it is a “palace of time” where we taste the coming hope to live and move and dwell in our only true home.

So we pause weekly, daily and even in the moment to look out to a hope that lays beyond us in the grace of God. We remember his lovingkindness is everlasting. We trust that He is faithful and will lead us into the fullness of love. He roots us in his life and reveals his fruit, his joy, his peace in our lives as we wait and walk toward home.

[1] From Wikipedia. (Lithuanian) “Išėjus Česlovui Milošui, Lietuva neteko dalelės savęs”. Mokslo Lietuva (Scientific Lithuania) (in Lithuanian). Retrieved October 16, 2007.
[2] Czeslaw Milosz. To Begin Where I Am. Farrar, Straus & Giroux, NY: 2001, p. 11.
[3] ibid. p. 25-26.