On Homegoing

The house where my dad grew up, with its famously spooky attic.

We left the midwest for Seattle 15 years ago. But if I'd moved back to my Rust Belt hometown of Fort Wayne, Indiana, after college I’d probably have lived in a foursquare near downtown, where old houses rent for very little and sell as fixer-uppers for next to nothing. 

During an unexpected trip to Fort Wayne for my grandmother's funeral last month, I visited places from my family’s past: the hospital where I was born, along with my dad and grandfather. The apartment building where the kids’ great-great grandmother Minnie lived. The house where my dad grew up with its famously spooky attic. Hyde Brothers Books, Smokey’s Records, and the Army Surplus on Wells Street. 

I hadn’t been back in these particular neighborhoods for more than a day when a sense of claustrophobia set in. The feeling in my body was a stark contrast to the landscape around Fort Wayne — field on field. Driving to see friends an hour south of town, I brightened.

You can see for miles on the highway. The landscape itself was familiar, and in its own way both comforting and unsettling: cut down corn on winter acres that stretch out on all sides, superconductor telephone poles radiating perilously close to farmhouses. We were expansive but landlocked. The air was cold and clean, with threads of electricity. 

For some of us, home is an embodiment of both nostalgia and grief. The choices we could have made. Our roots and heritage. What we leave behind with the leaving. The feeling that even though we’re long gone, we can't quite shake free.

The holidays are a concentration of all kinds of dynamics around home — or its lacking. “I’ll be home for Christmas. You can plan on me” sounds absurd in the middle of our nation’s housing crisis. 

The apartment building where my great grandmother Minnie lived.

Mary and Joseph were refugees, and Jesus was born in a humble place. But the family was also returning for the census to Joseph’s ancestral home. They were, in a sense, also strangers in a homeland.

I wonder if Joseph experienced a sense of disorientation on the night Jesus was born. “Here is a familiar place where I was known.” Or maybe, “Here is an unexpected place where my young wife is having a child that is both mine and not mine.” Joseph belonged and was a wanderer, he was at home and astray. He was somebody’s son and about to become a parent. Everything was ahead of Mary and Joseph, and their life with Jesus began in a known place, with whatever complexities and gifts were there for the taking.  

The Gospel message speaks less to nostalgia and more to a homegoing: We’re told God is preparing a place for us. It’s forward-thinking, the Biblical idea of our forever home. It’s not an image of wooden houses that break down over decades and grow back wild. Here, nostalgia becomes a longing for the place we know we’re going, but haven’t seen yet.

The Christmas story is only the beginning of the healing and suffering that would fall on Jesus. Fast forward 2,000 years and we’re here, sitting in our own waiting, with our own suffering and healing ahead.