Goin’ Home – Sunday, June 07, 1981
Most of us believe that there was a time somewhere in the past that was far better than today. It was a time when cares were not so heavy or pressures so intense, a time when colors may have been brighter or love more enchanting. It’s the idea we have of that summer or of the Fourth of July years ago, that today’s summer or holiday never seems to quite live up to. The details don’t matter, but most of us carry a vision just beyond recollection of a sweeter yesterday.
Now, some scholars say that those almost universal feelings are a hark back to our own childhood, those sunshine days that trail behind us however old we get. We think of going home and we remember quilts patterned with the history of the family’s clothes, the good wool suit, and daisies from a cheerful housedress. We remember pies cooling on the windowsill or old trees that were young when father first watered thirsty roots. Mother’s work-worn hands could soothe away the world, and life held a security so warm we didn’t know how fragile it was. Goin’ home. A cascade of different images, but always one common denominator. When we were divided and shaken, or when the world dealt us a cruel blow, we could limp home and be made whole.
So home, from our first awareness has a special meaning for us, and homeless is the saddest term we call another.
And it comes as no surprise that “goin’ home” also means returning to the Lord. “Goin’ home. That’s the place I want to see. Now my work’s all done; that’s the place I want to be, that’s where I belong”1 That other home, in ways we probably don’t yet understand, must have all the heart and passion of the best of this world’s homes. A father and mother who sense our slightest need, first awareness’ that burst upon our senses with incomparable joy, and arms outstretched to us so that when we are divided and shaken, or when the world has dealt us a cruel blow, we can limp to that other home in prayer—or perhaps in passing from this mortal life—and be made whole.
Scholars may not be entirely right, then, when they say our sense of a lost golden age, the good old days, are merely a shadowed memory of our childhood. It may be a memory of something even before that; of another home and another Father who loves us still.
1 “Goin’ Home”, Dvorak, Antonin, Choral Adaptation by Welch, Jay, 1964.
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June 07, 1981
Broadcast Number 2,703