On Being Home For Advent
It is the last day of November and the first day of Advent. And it’s 7 degrees outside. The trees are all coated in frost, delicate white frost and its as if it is just for me.
The house is in this strange and wonderful disarray of being half Christmas and half Thanksgiving. There are tubs of Christmas waiting to be unpacked and window sills still full of pumpkins and little scarecrows. “Thankful” still hangs in a banner over the dining room, but the stockings are hung and the Christmas tree shines golden and bright. The table is covered in a red and green table cloth that has seen dozens of Christmases but the Thanksgiving center piece still sits in the middle of it, all beige and filled with leaves and candles.
It’s strange yet lovely how peaceful and at home I am in the middle of the chaos. I never want to go back. It’s as if home was never so good and sweet as it is now. I am a part of family again and I am far removed from trouble.
Dad’s old car looks so comforting outside the window, covered in frost, and the sounds of the furnace warm my soul. It’s as if trouble doesn’t exist here, though I know we’ve had our fair share.
It’s cold, bitterly cold, but home is warm and safe.
I am eating the last of the white pumpkin pie and drinking coffee at the kitchen table while the others are away at church. My big brother and I will join them later for lunch at our favorite restaurant.
I am so glad to be here in my old chair where I belong, looking out at the beautiful snow, the almost white sky, enjoying the quiet of home in the countryside.
I feel as if I’ve come home from long travels away. And it is G.K. Chesterton who said,
“I cannot see any Battersea; I cannot see any London or any England. I cannot see that door. I cannot see that chair: because a cloud of sleep and custom has come across my eyes. The only way to get back to them is to go somewhere else; and that is the real object of travel and the real pleasure of holidays. Do you suppose that I go to France in order to see France? Do you supposed that I go to Germany in order to see Germany? I shall enjoy them both; but it is not them that I am seeking. I am seeking Battersea. The whole object of travel is not to set foot on foreign land; it is at last to set foot on one’s own country as a foreign land.”
And it is Ryan Whitaker Smith that says,
“The purpose of our journey is not so much to dwell in “the place from which Christmas came,” but to allow that place to dwell in us, to return to our own country with christened eyes, to look upon our everyday surroundings with a baptized imagination.”
Perhaps that is what Advent is? Of course it is the waiting and the yearning for Emmanuel, but it is also the coming home.
I have come to understand that the wanderers and wayfarers journey and travel far not so much for the sake of journeying and traveling, but to find a reason to come home again. To remember why they loved home in the first place, to be reminded of where home really is.