A Path Home?
"I will set out and go back to my father and say to him: Father, I have sinned against heaven and against you"
Much literature I read with my students deals with characters who are lost and struggling to return home. The Odyssey from the Greeks, Gulliver's Travels by Jonathan Swift, and The Old Man and the Sea by Hemingway are all thematically wrapped around the need for the protagonist to return home.
When I teach students the difference between the words denotation and connotation, I usually refer to the word "home" as an example because of its connotative value. Everyone has strong emotions wrapped around the word.
Robert Frost wrote in his poem, "Home Burial," "Home is the place where, when you have to go there, They have to take you in." Christian Morgenstern added, "Home is not where you live but where they understand you." Finally, Emily Dickinson believed, "Where thou art-that-is Home."
Home is a powerful influence on people's lives. When I talk to my students, they often tell me about their home life and how they intend to create their own homes once they are on their own.
They watch their parents constantly. The adults would be surprised to hear how observant their children are.
My students hope and dream about making homes for themselves. Their lives will reflect their own passions and interests.
The Prodigal Son tried to leave home too soon so had to return in humiliation to his father's house. My students may also fail and have to return to their parents' homes.
However, I hope they soar. The Bible doesn't tell the rest of the Prodigal Son's story. Perhaps he lived near his father the rest of his life and patched up his relationship with his elder brother.
Or, maybe he tried again, older and wiser, to make a life of his own elsewhere. It's not easy to leave the sanctuary of home and all a person is familiar with. No wonder his head was so easily turned by those who took advantage of him in his youth.
When he hit rock bottom in life, he sought HOME: the place that had once sheltered him, protected him, loved him, understood him and where now, when he arrived, he hoped they would take him in.
It took Odysseus ten years after the Trojan war to arrive home. Gulliver seven. The Old Man was away from home four days during his ordeal with the marlin.
Sometimes the trip home is impossible. Science fiction literature, for example, is filled with characters who never return home, and as a result, readers are left in a state of sorrow and anxiety for their plight.
Anne Bradstreet, the Puritan poet, used the metaphor of home to connect to her Heavenly home in her poem, "Here followes some verses upon the burning of our house, July 10th, 1666."
After Bradstreet described the terror she felt upon hearing the words, "fire" called out in the middle of the night, she discussed walking through the ruins of her home the next day. She remembered where all her possessions had been placed. Then she rebuked herself and reminded herself where her real "home" is.
What follows are the last three stanzas of her poem.
Then streight I gin my heart to chide,
And didst thy wealth on earth abide?
Didst fix thy hope on mouldring dust,
The arm of flesh didst make thy trust?
Raise up thy thoughts above the skye
That dunghill mists away may flie.
Thou hast an house on high erect
Fram'd by that mighty Architect,
With glory richly furnished,
Stands permanent tho' this bee fled.
It's purchased, and paid for too
By him who hath enough to doe.
A Prise so vast as is unknown,
Yet, by his Gift, is made thine own.
Ther's wealth enough, I need no more;
Farewell my Pelf, farewell my Store.
The world no longer let me Love,
My hope and Treasure lyes Above.
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Lord, Help me remember you have prepared a Home for me and my hope and treasure lie with you
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