Chapter 4
Our God the Creator: Being at Home
Have you ever travelled overseas for a long period and known that joy of finally getting onto a plane and arriving back on Home Ground? There is an enormous sense of joy and relief and thankfulness that we experience when we finally arrive home.
For me, it comes even as soon as I call the Qantas phone number for confirmation of my departure times, or when I get on the plane and hear that first Australian accent again. I am sure this is true no matter what nationality you are. There must be many foreign students who come to Australia on their own as quite young people, who feel desperately homesick and whose hearts leap as they first hear their own language being spoken on the phone or the plane as they prepare to go home.
“Homesickness” is a term that we use when we are literally “sick” or feeling unwell in our spirits because of our long absence from home. Literature is full of examples of homesickness. In the Bible, David longs for his home while away on a long military campaign, “Oh, that someone would get me a drink of water from the well near the gate of Bethlehem.”
But homelessness is another thing altogether. I have been homesick many times, but thankfully, I have never been homeless. There are three kinds of homelessness. The first and most obvious is when you literally have nowhere to live.
I often look at homeless people in parks and city streets and wonder just how they came to be in this situation. They all started out life with a mother and perhaps a father. They went to school, they had friends, they had some kind of income. But somewhere, sometime, the pressures all got too much. Perhaps some mental illness limited their capacity to access even government assistance, and they resorted to a park bench and a few plastic bags with their meagre possessions. Their very presence in a city speaks to us of our failure as a society to care for these most vulnerable of our community.
There is a second kind of homelessness that has little to do with a physical roof or building. This homelessness is that which is in the human spirit. It is that which makes us feel that there is no person to whom we can closely relate, and in whose company we could find a peace of being at home. Sometimes it is not so much the lack of another person, as the lack of a real place of felling valued and loved and honoured. Immigrants often feel this. They have left their homeland and while they may have a comfortable house, friends and jobs, yet there is a sense in which they are not really at home here in this new place. There is a constant sense of restlessness, of rootlessness.
There is a very moving series of poems written by an Australian poet which is surprisingly little known, even in Australia. The poet is Christopher Brennan, and the series of poems is called “The Wanderer”. It was written almost 100 years ago, so the language is a little old-fashioned now. Here are a few extracts:
How old is my heart, how old is my heart,
and did I ever go forth with song when the morn was new?
I seem to have trod on many ways: I seem to have left
I know not how many homes; and to leave each
was still to leave a portion of mine own heart,
of my old heart whose life I had spent to make that home,
and all I had was regret, and a memory.
and
Surely I do not foolishly desire to go
hither and thither upon the earth and grow weary
with seeing many lands and peoples and the sea:
but if I might, some day, landing I reck not where
have heart to find a welcome and perchance a rest,
I would spread the sail to any wandering wind of the air
This night, when waves are hard and rain blots out the land.
and
But a bitter wind came out of the yellow-pale west
and my heart is shaken and fill’d with its triumphing cry:
you shall find neither home nor rest; for ever you roam
with stars as they drift and wilful fates of the sky.
Do you feel the sense of total despair that this writer is expressing? His problem is not so much in not having financial resources, but in having no sense of belonging to anyone or to anywhere. This same sense of despair is at the heart of thousands of popular songs and art and music. It is a common cry of the human race, when we are devoid of strong family bonds and a sense of purpose.
But there is also a third kind of homelessness. This is of a totally spiritual nature. It has nothing to do with having possessions or family or jobs. In fact, it can be a devastating reality for people who have apparently everything that this world could offer. They may have lots of money, good family relationships, apparent purpose in life, and yet feel deep inside themselves this sense of being totally out of place, of not being at home.
The simplest explanation of this sense of homelessness is that in fact we are not living where we thought we were living at all, in our own home. We are in fact living in someone else’s home. These “someone else’s” who capture us and force us to live in their home may be Fear, Envy, Depression, Atheism, or many other such things. Henri Nouwen writes about just one of these as follows:
Fear can make us upset and angry. It can drive us into depression or despair…it not seldom appears as a cruel tyrant who takes possession of us and forces us to live in his house. In fact, most of the people in the twentieth century live in the house of fear most of the time. It has become…an acceptable basis on which to make our decisions and plan our lives.1
This quality of homelessness is only truly understandable when we consider our origins as the creation of God. When God created mankind, he placed man and woman in the Garden of Eden. He walked and talked with them there. He gave them tasks and purposes there. In other words, everything that mankind needed for a proper sense of being “at home” was there in this original created state.
We had genuine companionship with other human beings, we had purpose and focus to our lives, we had a physical place to be, to belong in, we had a relationship with the Creator God who was capable of being communicated with.
This third sense of homelessness that we are focussing on here is the essential Human Problem. Sometimes we call it the problem of knowing who we are, sometimes of knowing what our real purpose is or what the purpose of life is, sometimes of knowing where we fit in to the scheme of things, sometimes of knowing our place in the universe.
But at its centre, whether we are adventuring on Battleship Galactica, hunting Moby Dick, ruling a nation as Macbeth or King Lear, the problem is all one. We are unable to solve our problem of where we belong, of what country we belong to. We are filled with a restless yearning for the country we have lost.
The French philosopher, Jean-Paul Sartre, said that the big problem with the world is that there is nobody at home in the universe. In his negative pessimism, he got it absolutely right!
Why is this so? Because when we were made, we were made to be at home with God.
But we lost this home. We sold it for the right to live without God. We swapped being at home with God, for having the right to choose for ourselves. Read this poem by Evangeline Paterson2:
Exile
Yes, it is beautiful country,
the stream in the winding valley, the maples and the birches,
and beautiful the mountain’s bare shoulder
and the calm brows of the hills.
But it is not my country,
and in my heart there is a hollow place always.
And there is no way to go back.
Maybe the miles indeed, but the years never.
Winding are the roads that we choose,
and inexorable is life, driving us like cattle
farther and farther away from what we remember.
But when we shall come at last
to God, who is our Home and Country,
there will be no more road stretching before us,
and no more need to go back.
I recently read a book by Cardinal Basil Hume who was Cardinal Archbishop of Westminster, and a Benedictine monk. He was a very high figure in the Church and no doubt was often involved in difficult organisational or political decisions and issues. Yet it was said of him that he practised his faith. That there was no gap between his teaching and his life. This is what he wrote:
“I want someone to know me completely, to understand me entirely, and to want me unconditionally. I want to be someone’s first choice, and I think the only one who knows me completely, understands me entirely, and wants me unconditionally, is God – and I am his first choice. And you are his first choice. The marvellous thing about God is that he does not have second choices. We are all first choices. God never sees crowds, he just sees the individuals.”3
Is this part of your dream? To be known and understood and wanted by someone completely and totally?
The Joyful news is that God has not abandoned us. We may be genuinely homeless, but we are not abandoned. “The house of love is not simply a place in the afterlife, a place in heaven beyond this world. Jesus offers us this house right in the middle of our anxious world.”4
He offers to us the right to live with him, while still in this world. And that choice carries with it the passport to Joy. It is not necessarily that we will automatically gain wealth and happiness and freedom from sickness or accident. But it does mean that despite our circumstances, we can live in the House of God’s Love and know that we are always at home.
So often we find that life is too complex, too confused to make sense. We say that life is absurd. Hear Henri Nouwen again, as he speaks to us about the way to finding Joy in daily life:
we are usually surrounded by so much inner and outer noise that it is truly hard to hear God when he is speaking to us. We have often become deaf, unable to know when God calls us and unable to understand in which direction he calls us. Thus our lives have become absurd. In the word absurd we find the Latin word surdus which means “deaf”. A spiritual life requires discipline because we need to learn to listen to God, who constantly speaks but whom we seldom hear. When, however, we learn to listen, our lives become obedient lives. The word obedient comes from the Latin word audire which means “listening”. A spiritual discipline is necessary in order to move from an absurd to an obedient life, from a life filled with noisy worries to a life in which there is some free inner space where we can listen to God and follow his guidance.5
It is true that the absolute end of the Christian life is to be in heaven, at home with God. It is true that this will be the absolute pinnacle of Joy:
The ransomed of the Lord will return.
They will enter Zion with singing;
everlasting joy will crown their heads.
Gladness and Joy will overtake them,
and sorrow and sighing will flee away.6
You will go out in joy
and be led forth in peace;
the mountains and hills
will burst into song before you,
and all the trees of the field
will clap their hands.7
There is no doubt that in the afterlife there will be a superabundance of Joy. It will so overflow us that we will not be able to help ourselves but be caught up in the entire universe’s rumbling, growing laughter and shouts of praise.
But even in the meantime, the promise from God to us is that we may know Joy, here and now. It will be found in the life of obedience to God, in the life of knowing who I am and whom I choose to serve and worship – the ever-living God, who gave us his son, the Lord Jesus Christ.
Joy is a potential reality in the here and now. When we open our ears and our hearts to hear him and to obey him, we will find joy at every step of our pathway. Try him, test him, and see if it is not so!
Family JoyFinder
Take a stock-take of your family’s “at-home-ness”. Ask each member of the family how much they feel at home in this family. Take careful note of when someone says that they have some struggles in feeling truly at home. This may be a signal for you as parents to work with that person to increase their sense of being valued and wanted.
Take a stock-take of your own sense of belonging in the universe. Do you feel that you are connected with the God who made you? Or do you sometimes feel as if you are a bit lost, uncertain of where to go. Do you substitute for a sense of direction and belonging, the momentary pleasure of going shopping, whether for new clothes or a new boat or car. Shopping is commonly the drug of choice for many people in our society, to take them out of themselves and give them a temporary sense of being significant.
Create together opportunities as a family to locate yourself where you can hear the voice of God. Perhaps you will find a church and worship together. Perhaps you will pray together at home before a meal. Perhaps you will read or watch something together which will connect you with God.
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1 Henri Nouwen, Lifesigns Image Books 1986, p. 4
2 Luci Shaw, Ed. Sightseers into Pilgrims, Tyndale House, 1973, p. 132
3 Hume, Basil, In My Own Words. Hodder and Stoughton, London, 1999, p. 20
4 Nouwen, p 10
5 Henri Nouwen, Making All Things New, Harper Books 1981, p 67 – 8
6 Isaiah 51:11. For other Joyful descriptions of the future, read the whole of Isaiah 35
7 Isaiah 55:12
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