Destination Home

in which I wax poetic about New Jersey and the joys of having a place

I’ve been in Ocean City, NJ, for a few days working on a proposal for a new book I’ve been thinking about.  It’s break at the college, and Jill was really supportive of me getting away to do some research and planning.  I was planning a retreat near my home when I discovered that, because it’s the off season, I was actually able to book a place down here pretty inexpensively.  And the weather has cooperated—it’s been gorgeous.  Even though I’ve mostly been in my tiny apartment, I have been able to go for a run every day and sit on the beach a bit too.

I always get a little caught up in my feelings when I come back to New Jersey, or the Delaware Valley in general.  I grew up here, but since my parents moved a couple of years back I have no family left in the area, no real “reason” to come back, and yet I find myself coming to Phillies games or doing trips like this every so often.  Every time I come, I find myself in touch with a person that I used to be and, in some ways, I still am.  I don’t want to lose this part of me.

There’s an unaccountable sense of being home.  No doubt you feel it when you are wherever home is for you.  There’s the way the land just goes on forever, uninterrupted by a single hill—I can run or bike for miles in New Jersey and the only hills are overpasses and bridges.  There’s the sound of the old people at church, all with the “Fluffya” (Philadelphia) accent, pronouncing their Philly “O” vowel sounds the way I always imagined pronouncing them when I got old. There are foods that this place does right that other places just do objectively wrong—white cream donuts chief among them.

And there’s all these cultural reference points that my children don’t know.  When I was running the other night, Ocean City High was playing football.  I remember being in the band and playing field shows at football games; no one does that near us in Houghton, and it hit me that I was raising my kids without a really important part of my life growing up.  The same feeling creeps up at prom time.  I didn’t even like prom.  I didn’t want to go to prom. I went once because I was dating a girl who wanted to go. And yet, when I see pictures from Woodstown’s prom every year, I feel sad that my kids don’t experience that same thing.  (Yes, the schools near Houghton have proms, but they’re not quite the same in terms of formality.)

Sometimes, I think about my friends who have stayed in the area.  I think if I had stayed, I’d wonder about my choice—did I miss something by not leaving?  I hope they know that I wonder the same thing sometimes—did I miss something by not staying?  Home is an important part of our lives, and there are times I am so envious of those who live in my home, who live in the world I lived in growing up, who live the world as it still intuitively “should” be to me in some ways.

Of course, the truth is that this is mostly a romantic vision.  I am soon packing up and going home.  And my home in Houghton is much more home, in many more significant and tangible ways.  My family is there.  My job is there.  My beloved experiment in Christian community is there.  I can’t stay here, and I certainly can’t stay here alone.  In a much truer sense, my home is with them, and even here at “home,” I’m homesick for them.  I miss Jill.  My home is always with her, and through some really weird times, her presence has been the most faithful home for me. I miss the little ones we are raising. I miss Houghton and the person I’ve found myself to be there.

And it dawns on me that as I am raising my kids, I am giving them a different home.  They’re not from New Jersey, and that’s OK.  They’re western New Yorkers.  When they grow up, they will want to come back to western New York and visit Letchworth and drink cider from the Castile Cider Mill and watch a volleyball game and hear the beautiful midwestern short “A” that is part of the accent they grew up with.  Just like I need to get back to the coastal plains from time to time, they’ll need to get back to the hills and remember who they are in their home.

What is most remarkable, I think, is that all of these feelings of home are warm intimations from God, a reminder that our home is in God alone.  That’s why we our feelings about home are so ambivalent.  We yearn for home, but we also know that we are yearning for an idealized picture that can never be until God sets things right.  The yearning for a place where we belong, where things are as they should be, where we know and are known, the drive to be in those places and with those people—this is part of our general yearning for something more.  So much of the Scripture is addressed to people in these liminal times and spaces: Israel in the wilderness, waiting for a home.  Judah in exile, trying to figure out whether they should adopt local customs or whether they could go home.  Disciples trying to figure out how to build a home for God’s work here while waiting for God to return and call us to a different home.  God doesn’t shame us for feeling homesick or divided; instead, He reminds us even through our yearning that He wants to be our Home.