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Real Live Preacher has a new post that resonates with me, titled Open Communion. It can be read on his site. One of his best posts in some time, I even took a few minutes to read the comments and added one of my own. A young lady from Tennessee (now in Chicago) commented also and I was intrigued by what she said, so I checked out her blog. As the saying goes, these folks “done gone from preachin’ to meddlin’.”

In The Death of the Hired Man, Robert Frost, from Warren’s point of view wrote:
“Home is the place where, when you have to go there,
They have to take you in.”
And Mary’s reply was:
“I should have called it
Something you somehow haven’t to deserve.”
I may have the characters reversed; but if you’ve ever read the poem, I know you remember the passage.

Am not sure why RLP and Pledge’s blogs moved me, but they did. Probably was a sort of homesickness and feelings of lost community within my family that I felt the most. Our children are on their own, 8 & 14 hours away by car respectively. Am not close to my or the wife’s remaining sibling(s) and their kids. All the parents have been gone for several years now. That means it’s my turn at end of the line; and truthfully, it’s lonely being the last stop.

I’ve come to realize why my grandfather grieved his wife so when she died. In the same position as I, she was the last “binding” to his home. He had his daughter and her husband (my parents) as well as my wife and I, and my sister. But that really wasn’t enough. In the same house he’d lived in for the preceeding 10-12 years, a block away from his daughter, in the same city where he’d lived for a good third of his life and surrounded by extended family, it appears to me that he had utterly lost what he considered his true sense of home.

Could I be granted one wish, it must would be that: “I could again be in community with all those loved ones, now gone, who had meant so much for so long.” and spend a few more precious hours comfortable in the knowledge of who I am and not just who I’ve become. I suppose that’s why my faith is so important. Christ loves me “just because”, and not for that I am anyone extraordinary.

“Thanks be to God!”