The Longing for Home: Reflections at Midlife

by Frederick Buechner

The first home foreshadows the final home, and the final home hallows and fulfills what was most precious in the first.

it was as if she lived out of some deep center within herself that was beyond the reach of circumstance.

There was a room inside her which was neither dark nor little, and in that room she continued to be—how to put words to it without tarnishing it?—full of wit and eloquence to the end.

Instead it would be more accurate to say that she lost sight of her own predicament by focusing on us, and I believe that the capacity for doing that is another mark of her wholeness.

To be whole, I think, means among other things that you see the world whole.

We are in constant danger of being not actors in the drama of our own lives but reactors. The fragmentary nature of our experience shatters us into fragments. Instead of being whole, most of the time we are in pieces, and we see the world in pieces, full of darkness at one moment and full of light the next.

It is a peace beyond the reach of the tragic and terrible. It is a profound and inward peace that sees with unflinching clarity the tragic and terrible things that are happening and yet is not shattered by them.

His peace comes not from the world but from something whole and holy within himself which sees the world also as whole and holy because deep beneath all the broken and unholy things that are happening in it even as he speaks, Jesus sees what he calls the Kingdom of God.

For all its horrors, the world is not ultimately a horror show because, as Jesus tell us, the world has the Kingdom buried in it like a treasure buried in a field, like leaven working in dough, like a seed germinating in the earth, like whatever it was in the heart of the Prodigal Son that finally brought him home.

before. It is not so much that he is judged by the beauty he sees as that he is brought up short by it. The beauty he sees strips the scales from his eyes and calls him somehow to become beautiful himself. It is a call that rises out of the holiest part of who he is.

The part he has to play, in other words, is not to kill his enemy but to kill everything that is broken and old in himself so that something whole and new can be born. Then as that newness starts coming

“Fathers and teachers, I ponder, ‘What is hell?’ I maintain that hell is the suffering of being unable to love.”

There is treasure buried in the field of every one of our days, even the bleakest or dullest, and it is our business, as we journey, to keep our eyes peeled for it.

It is our business, as we journey, to keep our hearts open to the bright-winged presence of the Holy Ghost within us and the Kingdom of God among us until little by little compassionate love begins to change from a moral exercise, from a matter of gritting our teeth and doing our good deed for the day, into a joyous, spontaneous, self-forgetting response to the most real aspect of all reality, which is that the world is holy because God made it and so is every one of us as well. To live as though that reality does not exist is to be a stranger in a world of strangers. To live out of and toward that reality is little by little to become whole.

God created us in joy and created us for joy, and in the long run not all the darkness there is in the world and in ourselves can separate us finally from that joy, because whatever else it means to say that God created us in his image, I think it means that even when we cannot believe in him, even when we feel most spiritually bankrupt and deserted by him, his mark is deep within us. We have God’s joy in our blood.

Joy, on the other hand, does not come because something is happening or not happening but every once in a while rises up out of simply being alive, of being part of the terror as well as the fathomless richness of the world that God has made. When Jesus was eating his last meal

Could anyone guess by looking at us that joy is at the heart of what goes on in church Sunday after Sunday?

loved as we alone know ourselves to be, the weakest and shabbiest of who we are along with the strongest and gladdest.

we have all, humanly speaking, come from the same place and are heading out into the same blessed mystery that awaits us all.

woe to us too if we forget our own homelessness. To be homeless the way people like you and me are apt to be homeless is to have homes all over the place but not to be really at home in any of them. To be really at home is to be really at peace, and our lives are so intricately interwoven that there can be no real peace for any of us until there is real peace for all of us.

If he were able somehow actually to enter the world of the plays as himself in all his multidimensional richness and fullness, if he were able somehow to thrust himself bodily into their fictive and derivative world, leap down feet foremost into their midst with a terrible ripping and scattering of parchment, how could it do anything less than blow the whole show sky-high?

suffering is not the work of wanton gods at all but a precious and holy suffering which, before it kills him, will confer on him a strength and self-knowledge he would never have attained in any other way, one that will add to the depth and beauty of the whole world he inhabits as well as to his own depth and beauty.

Would he recognize him as the great Author himself, incarnate in the little world of the drama whose author he is?

the way you and I rise out of God’s heart and become forever part of it.

Who knows what affliction he is referring to, but at the same time who does not know well what it means to be afflicted like that? Who of us, looking back at our lives, cannot remember moments of such nearly unbearable sadness?

Oh, that we all of us knew where we might find the One who beyond any world we can imagine wipes every tear from our eyes and death from our hearts and creates all things new.

my guess is that it was not an answer that Job was really after, not some sort of theological explanation of the problem of suffering, which would have left him wiser than he was before but suffering still. I believe instead that what Job was really after was not God’s answer but God’s presence.

that was what Job needed above all else—not an explanation of suffering but the revelation that even in the midst of suffering there is a God who is with us and for us and will never let us go.

add to the world’s pain, and to their own pain, less by any evil they do than by the good they don’t do, the good they could do, maybe even dream of doing but somehow never quite get around to doing very well, for the poor and broken of the world.

we go to find shelter from the storm.