If you live in the South, it is important to be able to answer certain questions. “Where are you from?” is the most important followed closely by, “Who are your people?” Both are really questions about home. Some also want to know, “Are you saved?” Southerners, bless their hearts, have a need to ground themselves in place, history, family, and religion. It is both a blessing and a curse.

When asked, this Southerner says, “Murfreesboro, Tennessee.” Technically I was born in Cookeville and raised in Murfreesboro but that’s my story and I’m sticking to it. My people are from Franklin, although again technically mother was born on a farm in Wilson County.

Yet, as of this weekend I’ve lived twenty-five years in the Washington region, longer than in any other community. Is this now home?

The quick response to my own question was an emphatic “no.” But it only took a moment of reflection before I realized that the answer is more complex.

A birthplace or long-time residence usually comes front-of-mind when thinking of home. But what happens when we move, perhaps due to age or health reasons? Are we homeless? Thomas Moore describes home as “an emotional state, a place in the imagination where feelings of security, belonging, placement, family protection, memory, and personal history abide.”

I’m not ready to move entirely to an emotional state, but I clearly need to think more deeply about home.

---

As a young couple with a growing family, Mom and Dad lived in five different houses in Cookeville. In 1966 we moved to Murfreesboro and in 1969 my parents bought 407 E. Main Street when my grandmother came to live with us. They were in this house for two decades.

My brothers and sisters were all Cookeville-born/Murfreesboro-raised, but our lives took very different paths. To start this exploration, I asked them what comes to mind when they think of home.

Steve, an arts administrator in Florida, said simply,

Home is where my wife is.

Debbie, now retired from local government, responded with Murfreesboro — “as I’ve lived here for 56 years” — then added,

Home is a place for family to feel secure. A place to carry on traditions and to pass along family memories to my children and grandchildren. Home is not just a house or city but it’s the people who share it with you.

Home for Joe, the artist blacksmith, is the log house on Cripple Creek, where he and his wife Kerry, who passed away six years ago, lived. Full of memories, joy, tears, heartache, and at times loneliness, this home now “yearns for new purpose as my friends come and share it with me when we seek a deeper relationship with God.”

My home has a new life and I pray it will harbor many more times of joy, laughter, and encouragement, but this home is only temporary till God calls me “Home”.

Carol, the librarian and retired Baptist missionary, has blogged about home. She was raised on East Main and loves that place, but in recent years her view has changed. Each of the more than six countries where she has lived carries a sense of home with accompanying memories. But her “true home is not in this world.”

I’ve become a stranger in a strange land, not only because I’ve moved in and out of countries and cultures, but because any home I have here on this earth is a temporary residence. Just as that house on East Main gave me a taste of “rest,” Christ’s promise of a heavenly home is where I know true rest will be, and that’s home to me. 

---

Tied as it is to memory and identity, home is intertwined with the cycle of life. It transcends place and time, inviting different interpretations.

Madeleine L’Engle once wrote that she was still every age she had ever been. Similarly, I am home in places and with people past, present, and future where I feel understood and loved, even with all my faults and foibles.

Home includes 407 E. Main, with its memories across multiple generations: sounds, smells, laughter, crying, loss, discoveries, birth, death. Each Thanksgiving also brings us home to Staunton, where Candice and I began our married life and our family became one. The welcoming embrace of place and friends mixes memories with present joys and sorrows.

In March we’ll celebrate our anniversary, and part of my soul will be at home as we return to the evocative landscape at Mohonk Mountain House. I look at the photographs on the wall here in Silver Spring and realize that these are the choices I’ve made and the people I’ve loved. Yes, this is home as well.

Death is part of any real discussion of home, yet no one really knows what that future will be. The old blues song — Everybody wants to go to heaven, but nobody wants to die — speaks to our fears. To those who count on meeting mom and dad, C.S. Lewis reminds us that there is nothing biblical about the comforting images of “family reunions on the further shore.” L’Engle says we must recognize that we simply do not know. “It is not in the realm of proof. It is in the realm of love.”

For me, death is not the end but just another passage in an ongoing journey. I look forward to being welcomed — warts, imperfections, and all — into a home intertwined in some unknowable way with familiar, sacred, yet perfectly ordinary places. That future home may be here now; in a reality I can’t yet see.

The places we call home are remarkable, challenging, and full of contradiction. Home is where we love, acting out our connections with others. Home is where we set down deep roots. Home stretches across time as a journey. Yes, home is a paradox, but all truth is paradox.

Considering the complexity of all its dimensions, home is in the realm of love. Which seems just right to me.

More to come…

DJB

Image: Family photo wall.