by Brian J. Walsh and Steven Bouma-Prediger

Home . . . hard to know what it is if you’ve never had one.” So sings U2 in their song “Walk On.” What does it mean to “go home” if you’ve never actually had a home? And how, in the face of pervasive homelessness, can Bono (U2’s lead singer and lyricist) sing the next line of his song, “Home . . . I can’t say what it is, but I know I’m going / Home”?
Elie Wiesel has described our time as the age of the expatriate, the refugee, and the stateless exile. “Never before,” he writes, “have so many human beings fled from so many homes.” Homelessness is epidemic in North America. The fleeing of homes that Wiesel refers to on a global level is mirrored in our cities, neighborhoods, and rural communities. Simply stated, more people are on the street today than ever before in Canadian or American history.
While many of us gather around the family table at Thanksgiving, we know that thousands upon thousands of our fellow citizens will either have no Thanksgiving dinner because they have no home in which to celebrate, or they will be recipients of the charity of good folks like us in the soup kitchens, shelters, and food banks of our communities. They can be forgiven if they are not overflowing with thankfulness this year.

A Culture of Homelessness
But the economically disenfranchised are not the only homeless people these days. In fact, the homelessness epidemic reaches beyond the unsheltered poor and into the hearts of the middle and upper-middle class, comfortably sheltered in suburban homes and downtown condos. We live in a culture of homelessness.

Consider the protagonist in Walter Kirn’s recent novel Up in the Air (Anchor Books, 2002). Ryan M. Bingham describes himself as an inhabitant of “Airworld.” Convinced that home ownership is a self-defeating attempt to find shelter in the ruins of America, he lives in that realm of contemporary business life that consists of airplanes, airports, and airport hotels. Ryan is a postmodern nomad who has no sense of roots in any particular place, nor any deep attachment to his family. Indeed, he has an almost allergic reaction to any notion of settling down.

To settle. To be at home. Home sweet home. Such ideas seem increasingly hollow and oppressive to a generation raised in the suburbs on television, video games, and a life dominated by institutionally organized activities from school to church to the sports field. They may have had shelter, but did they have a home?

The warm and sentimental ideal of home as a site of safety, generosity, clarity, and love is little more than a “sweet fantasia,” in the words of Bruce Cockburn’s song “Candy Man’s Gone.” A mere glance at the street or the homeless shelters, indeed a mere glance into the heart of family violence and alienation in our society, and we discover that home often degenerates into a dangerous and precarious site of deception, anxiety, violence, disrespect, confusion, and alienation. It is no wonder that for so many people “going home for the holidays” often conjures up feelings of dread rather than joy.

And yet . . . the longing won’t go away. Even without clear ideas or life-giving memories of home, the human heart still longs for home. Homeless street kids still refer to the places from which they have run as their home. They still have a longing to either return home or to make a home for themselves. Even jet-setting nomads, in the end, need to go home.

Called to Homecoming
Home is a matter of vision and hope. While the apostle Peter describes the early Christian community as “aliens and exiles” (1 Pet. 2:11, NRSV), the author of the book of Hebrews describes people of faith as longing for “a better country,” a “homeland” (Heb. 11:14, 16, NRSV). It is clear from the whole biblical witness that exilic life, life as aliens not at home in the world, is a broken way to live. We are called, rather, to homecoming. From the garden to the promised land to the promise of the new Jerusalem in the restored creation (Rev. 21:1-4) the message is the same—we are created to be at home with each other, with all of creation, and with God.

This vision of home is profoundly more radical than either the nomadism of our global consumer society or the bland self-enclosed sameness of the nuclear family cloistered in their own rooms with their own televisions and computers, gathering on occasion to consume a meal of packaged food from the freezer section of the local grocery store. You see, neither can meet the deep longings we have for home. Ultimately only the kingdom of God can be the site of our homecoming. But we are called to be a kingdom people, a community of homemakers anticipating and enacting in our own lives that homecoming vision.

Seven Characteristics of Home
What might this kingdom homecoming vision look like? Let us suggest seven characteristics of home.

• First, in an individualistic culture addicted to mobility, home is a place of permanence. To be at home somewhere is more than simply having a place to stay—you can do that in hotels. No, home carries with it a certain degree of permanence, a sense of staying put, of commitment to a particular place, community, and neighborhood.

• Second, home is not merely a house. While having a sense of secure shelter is indispensable for us to be “homemakers,” it is not just the house that makes a place into a home. Rather, a place becomes home when it is suffused with memories of important transitions, events, and experiences. Indeed, forgetfulness is the temptation of homelessness. Elie Wiesel puts it this way: “The one who forgets to come back has forgotten the home he or she came from and where he or she is going. Ultimately, one might say that the opposite of home is not distance but forgetfulness. One who forgets, forgets everything, including the roads leading homeward.” And, of course, where the memories are painful, where those memories are not life giving but broken, then the path home is seriously blocked.

• Third, home is a place of rest. Beyond the restless insatiability of our culture, home can be a place of “enough,” of satisfied rest and contentment. When our homes become little more than domestic sites of consumerism—as we sit in front of our televisions, in rooms furnished according to the latest styles, wearing designer jeans and eating mass-produced foods—then they are only a facade of home. Home is where you don’t have to prove anything anymore—not to your family, your neighbors, or yourself. Home is where you can rest and say, “This is enough.” And there are few words more subversive in a consumerist society than “enough.”

• Fourth, homes are not self-enclosed fortresses. Home is not a place where we go to keep the world out. Instead homes are rooted in and find their fulfillment in hospitality. But hospitality is not so much a matter of entertainment—that could simply perpetuate the consumerist model. Rather, it is an opening of the home to others. Hospitality offers the security and rest of home not just to friends and family but also to those who have little security and need a place to rest. In welcoming others into our home, we share with them our home-making memories, and they then have the opportunity to shape those memories. The memories of home then become populated with a host of witnesses to the blessings of hospitable living.

• Fifth, homes are formed through loving care and cultivation. Home does not come ready-made. And simply repeating the homemaking practices of a former generation is insufficient in making a home for oneself in a different context, at a different time, and with a different cast of people. Further, such cultivation of our relationships and our dwellings into home requires attentiveness to the place where the home is located. What kind of soil do you have and what kind of plants flourish there? Who are the neighbors, and how can we enhance a sense of community? What are the needs and gifts of various family members, and how do we encourage their development and service? How will we deal with the challenges to homemaking at this particular time and place? Will we have a television? How will we structure family meals?

• Sixth, in a culture in which people find themselves either narrowly focused on their upwardly mobile careers or lost in a morass of homeless disorientation, home is a profound point of orientation. Indeed, when a healthy sense of home has not been fostered, we invariably experience disorientation. If our home was a place of violence, isolation, self-enclosure, constant movement, and little real investment in each other, then those broken memories will often render us deeply homeless and disoriented. We will have difficulty navigating our way creatively through the world because we will have no real point of departure, no homeport to return to. No wonder so many of us feel lost at sea.

• Finally, home is where we belong. Theologian Jürgen Moltmann puts it well: “I am ‘at home’ where people know me, and where I find recognition without having to struggle for it.” To be at home is to know that here, in this place and with these people, we belong. We will always belong here, even if we mess up. In Frederick Buechner’s words, home “is a place where you feel you belong, and which in some sense belongs to you.”

A Gift, Not an Accomplishment
In “Walk On” Bono sings, “You’re packing a suitcase for a place none of us has been / A place that has to be believed to be seen.” In terms of our ultimate homecoming—life in the restored creation—this is true. “Faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen” (Heb. 11:1, NRSV). And it is faith that looks forward to “a city that has foundations, whose architect and builder is God,” a “homeland” (Heb. 11:10, 14, NRSV). But we can get glimpses of this homeland by how we form our lives together, by the homes we make.

When we shape our lives into homes of security and hospitality, rest and care, orientation and belonging, then we begin to foster deep and abiding memories of home that can engender a dynamic vision of our homecoming in Christ. All of this is a radical gift. Yes, we are called to be homemakers, but when our dwellings, families, and communities actually take on the shape of home, it all seems like a gift, not an accomplishment. And, of course, the only appropriate response to a gift is gratitude. Happy Thanksgiving. Welcome home.