It has been almost two years since I left Arizona to go to school in North Carolina. Of course, I have been home several times since then—four to be exact—and have had "home" come visit me three times in the form of friends and parents. My most recent trip back was just this past week (the last week of May 2008) to see one of my favorite people get married (Congratulations Tavya!!!). In addition to a really fun wedding that also served as a Fuller Seminary reunion for me, I had the opportunity to catch up with many old friends. Now, being the way too introspective/reflective guy that I am, I have been thinking about what this trip has meant to me thus far and figured that writing about it would be a good way to do this. If there is any doubt that I am hyper reflective, consider that I just got on the airplane back to North Carolina and already am trying to deal with the "meaning" questions with my computer perched on top of the seat-back tray; it is cheaper than therapy ; ) So, while eating my complimentary honey-roasted peanuts and sipping away at a little plastic cup of Coca-Cola on ice, I will pontificate on what I saw back home and on what I think it means to me in this moment. But first, a brief excursus on the meaning of "home" and its relationship to the self.
When considering what to title this blog entry, I came up with two simple options: 1) "Reflections on Going Home," or, 2) "Reflections on Coming Home." I decided on the latter. While it may seem as thought these are two different ways of saying the same thing, but they actually are not. Generally, in English the difference between "going" somewhere and "coming" to a place is contingent upon where one is at the moment of making the statement or how one thinks about oneself in relation to the place. You "go" to or tell people to go to a place where you are currently not; you "come" to or tell others to "come" to a place where you currently are. For example, in your angry moments you do not tell a person to "come to hell," but rather you tell them to "go to hell." In this you are communicating that hell is a place (whether literal or metaphorical…and if you are being literal here then you are really hardcore and merciless), you are not currently there and have no plans of being there; you wish that the object of your imperative statement would quickly proceed to this infernal place because, presumably, it is a rough sucky location, you are not currently there, and you wish that they were. In this function of grammar, location is everything.
Given the relationship I have outlined between "coming" and "going" to a location, one may wonder if it is really intelligible for me to use the term "coming" in the title of an essay that is being written from a place other than where I went. After all, since I am no longer in Arizona, should not I say, "On the Time I Went Home," or "On Going Home." The reason I am choosing to use the language of "coming home" is that I want to communicate something very particular about the nature of "home." There are certainly many different ways that on can use the word "home." In the way I am using it here "home" is neither simply an idea about the past or present, nor a place, nor a person or set of people, but rather it is the nexus point where all of the above dynamically converge. Home for me is a particular place where particular people have shared the particular experiences of their lives with me and mine with them. For good or ill, home is what God has used to shaped me and create my self-understanding and identity. D.Z. Philips, an expert on Austrian linguistic philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein, explains, "As D.Z. P(hilips) I am one of a human neighborhood. I am given a name by my neighbors. I cannot ask, 'What is history to me?' My identity is my biography. It is one biography among many."(1) Or as Brad Kallenberg explains, "This 'I" [what Wittgenstein calls the "psychological I"] is the human self whose identity is bound up with the history of a particular community."(2) In other words, I am who I know and where I am from (If you think this sounds like philosophical hocus pocus, try telling a stranger who you are without mentioning where you live, where you come from, where you work, where you went to school, who your friends are, what your parents do, etc. It is impossible to tell people who you are without a "story" and stories always take place in a location and always in some way have others involved, even if just in the background.) So, all of this to say, Arizona is a part of my identity, a part of who I am. It always will be. I cannot know who I am and neither can anyone else know me without it. While I live in North Carolina and a new part of me is developing in this new context in relation to new people, the "me" that came here is an Arizonan. Thus, in flying to Arizona, I am "coming" home because a part of who I am is already there.
With the above identity excursus in place, I can now try to describe two notions about the experience that hit me. First, a lot has changed back home since I left. The people I know and love have their own stories that keep moving forward, some in beautiful ways and some in more tragic directions. In coming home, I got see and hold for the first time the baby of my oldest friend, Erin. It was a moment of awe for me. I never could have know that when we both met at age 15 in a high school English class that I would be there one day to see her first child. While home I also got to see two more old friends who are now married to each other—Pat and Lynette—and are expecting their first baby. Again, who could have guessed that this is where we were all heading and yet how wonderful a place to be. In coming home, I got to see my family and how much has changed around the house and how much has not. I got to see and hear about what is new for them. While home I also got to see and feel the big void of my old church, the Gathering, being gone. Thankfully I got to meet with several folks that were a part of that community, but the particular place and excuse for a particular group of people collectively known as the Gathering is now fully and completely dead; this particularly makes me ache because this part of "home" I can never fully return to because it is no longer there…though I suppose like Arizona it is always a part of who I am. ; ) And with all of the above people as well as my other friends that I got to see, I was able to tell them about the strange new world of the American South that I now live in. The sad part for me in all of this, of course, is that in living far away now, I no longer get to be as much of a prominent character in the lives of the people I love there; our stories are all still connected but we become more of background figures to each other. With all of these big life changes for the people and context from which I come, I am left to wonder if the continuity slowly gets over taken by discontinuity as our lives change and we remain disconnected by time. If I do not end up moving back home, will the part of me that is Arizona and is defined by the people I love there slowly be overtaken by the changes that time inevitably brings. As I said earlier, if home and identity are the nexus of a people, a place, and the actions of our lives that create a story there with each other, what happens when the people move away, break apart, or stop interacting with each other. For me in particular, will I get to a point in time where I cannot find my way home because there is no home to go to anymore? Will I lose much of who I am in the changing dynamics of life through the passage of time?
Before the introspective gloom completely takes over, I should say a bit about the second notion that hit me about going home. This is the notion that rescues the first from the inevitability of decay that time brings. I am, of course, talking about God. Not just any god, but the particular God that is the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. (3) God has a story that is much bigger than the stories of all of my friends, family, and my own combined. The same God that has made me and has made my story possible—a story that would be impossible and could not be told without other people—has made the ones I love and their stories too. God is the continuity. The same God that keeps my story going when I feel alone and uncertain of who I am is the same God that keeps my friends and family's stories going. He is the God who blesses them with marriage and children. He is the God that makes it possible for me to hold my oldest friend's new baby as I marvel at the new story that is there in my arms and that is connected to my own. And while my particular story will one day end as will the stories of all of those whom I love and who are intrinsic aspects of my "home" and self, these endings are not permanent. They are not so because our stories were taken up into God's story through the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. Someday we will be resurrected into the fullness of the one continuing eternal story that always is and always was: the story of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. So, in a very real sense, the story and identity that is mine is only a real Story and a real Identity, and a real Home to the extent that it is a story that is weaved into the eternal story that is God's. The continuity that I hope for in a world of change, distance, and discontinuity is found in the story being told by the storyteller that is the God of Israel.
Amen.
If none of the above makes any sense or sounds like craziness, just imagine what it would have sounded like and how long it would have been had I gone home for two weeks instead of one ; )
Footnotes:
1. This quote is taken from Brad Kallenberg, Ethics as Grammar: Changing the Postmodern Subject, Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2001, 14, who got the quote from D.Z. Philips, "The World and 'I'," Philosophical Investigations 18, no. 3 (1995): 237.
2. Kallenberg, 14.
3. It is interesting to note that Jesus in arguing with the Sadducees—a sect of Judaism at the time of Christ that did not believe in an afterlife or resurrection of the dead—focuses on a common Jewish "storied" way of describing God (i.e. calling him "The God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob") to make an argument for resurrection. In Mark 12.26-27, Jesus says to the Sadducees, "And as for the dead being raised, have you not read in the book Moses, in the story about the bush, how God said to him, 'I am the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob'? He is the God not of the dead, but of the living; you are quite wrong." While this rabbinic way of arguing may seem odd or weak to contemporary readers in its placing so much meaning of the tense of a verb, it is interesting to see the way that Jesus looks at the story of Moses and recognizes as significant the fact that God does not describe himself saying, "I was the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob," as though these patriarchs were something once and now nothing. Jesus sees in the statement of God, "I am the God of Abraham," a present tense phrase that suggests that these figures continue on or will continue on even though his audience surely knows that such characters died long ago. Here God is the continuity that ties Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob together and it is this God that will keep their stories going, because there stories are really only possible and meaningful because they ultimately reside and are taken up into God's grand overarching story.
