We’re All Looking for Home
Day 18
Buechner begins a new chapter: ‘The Subterranean Grace of God, or Why Stories Matter’.
“Then there’s that wonderful catalogue of the heroes of the faith: by faith Abel offered to God a more acceptable sacrifice than Cain . . . by faith Enoch was taken up so that he should not see death . . . by faith Abraham obeyed when he was called to go out to a place that he was to receive as an inheritance . . . by faith Sarah . . . by faith Isaac . . . and so on. These all died in faith, not having ‘received what was promised,’ but having seen it and greeted it from afar, and having acknowledged that they were strangers in exile on the earth, for people who speak thus make it clear that they are seeking a homeland….
“…And I thought of little Dorothy Gale from Kansas, who was in Oz to find the wizard, hoping he’d find a way of sending her home, and that in a sense we are all looking for home, a place that we glimpsed only from afar, but we have glimpsed it. And I thought also of the church as an outpost of home, as a threshold over which we see a little of what maybe home will be like. And then I thought of all the nasty things I sometimes say about church, and I say them because of my experience where I happen to live in New England where for me at least the churches have just not come through. I’ve gone hungering and I haven’t been fed. But recently I was giving a series of lectures in the southern part of the country with a man named John Huffman, and I listened to what he said with great interest, but maybe more than that, I watched him and listened to him as a human being. And I thought if I were lucky enough to live in a part of the world where I had as my pastor someone as wise and compassionate and committed as I sensed him to be, maybe I would have a different view of what church is all about. I loved what he said about giving all that you know and all you don’t know about yourself to all you know and all you don’t know about God. That’s a wonderful way to say it.”
Frederick Buechner, The Remarkable Ordinary: How to Stop, Look, and Listen to Life, Grand Rapids: Zondervan, pp55-56.
To help you reflect…
In what ways do you notice yourself still seeking “home”?
When have you glimpsed this true, spiritual home?
When (if ever) has church been an outpost of this home for you?
