Taking Easter Home

“Behold, he goeth before you into Galilee; there shall ye see him.”  St. Matthew 28:7

One of the special things about settling in the DC area for Allison and me is spending time in the city where we fell in love.  Back in the summer of 2003, I had just finished my studies at seminary and was getting ready to begin as a teacher at a boarding school near Hagerstown.  Allison was a public policy student completing her mandatory student internship at a organization on Capitol Hill.  I’d meet her after work in the grand hall of Union Station and we’d head off to one of those free concerts at the Kennedy Center or we’d sit and talk in one of those pleasant little parks near the Capitol, or share a meal in that most exotic and romantic locale, the food court in the basement of the train station.

Sometimes, when we’ve got the kids in the backseat and we’re headed off to a museum on the Mall or to see a friend who lives across town, we’ll drive by one of these places and tell them a little about what it meant to us then.   So much that has happened since then that we never expected, but many of the good things we do enjoy now were planted there.  Going back to those places, we fall in love again, or at least we understand something valuable about the love we share now, something we can only discover there, where it all began.

Home for the Holidays

“See your children gathered from west and east at the word of the Holy One, rejoicing that God has remembered them.” Baruch 5:5

In our family, sometimes we call my mother the sheepdog.  She likes nothing better than to herd all her charges into one place.  My mother has always loved big family gatherings: the heaping table, decorations all in their places, music playing in the background, children shouting and dogs barking underfoot.   When we all get together there are fourteen now, the majority of us under seven.  It can make for quite a racket in a house built for smaller crowds.  Sometimes one of my brothers or I will suggest that it would be simpler to host us in batches.  It really is easier to talk at a smaller table.  There’s no need for quite so many dishes.  But she’ll have nothing of it.  Since my father died ten years ago, my mother spends most of her time alone.  For a woman who gave so much of her life to the things that make for a happy family, that’s sometimes very difficult.  When we are all together, I think that for her, it’s a bit like putting life back together again, recovering something of what was lost and can never quite be again.

Of course, this is the season for big family gatherings, when we endure hair-raising traffic and the nightmare of airport security to head back to our home places, to sit around the family table, among old, familiar things. 

I met a man who lives in Tennessee

He was headin’ for, Pennsylvania, and some home made pumpkin pie

From Pennsylvania, folks are travelin’ down to Dixie’s sunny shore.

From Atlantic to Pacific, gee, the traffic is terrific,

For there’s no place like home for the holidays.[1]

For Meditation: The Home and the Way

From a sermon of St. Augustine, quoted in Hughson's With Christ in God:

"He is the home, whither we go, He is the Way whereby we go: go we by Him to Him, and we shall not go astray" (293-294).