Homing
[“Lord of all kindliness, Lord of all grace, / Your strong hands were skilled at the plane and the lathe, / Be there at our homing, and give us, we pray, / Your love in our hearts, Lord, at the eve of the day” (text of Jan Struther’s hymn “Lord of All Hopefulness,” EA).]
O Lover,
As we sang Struther’s hymn Sunday last amid the overflow crowd at the Basilica of Your Sacred Heart at Notre Dame I was skewered by the word “homing.” In the intervening days I have been reminded of how frequently I have been nudged by varied forms of this motif. A sampler: the “all in All” theme in Paul’s writing (I Cor 15:22-28); language employed in the second part of the “circle of being” of medieval Christian mysticism (e.g., redítus, restorátio, centripetal, convergence); the throne room at the center of Teresa de Jesús’s The Interior Castle; Dvorak’s “Going Home” segment in the Largo of Symphony #9; the Christic Omega Point of Pierre Teilhard de Chardin; Thomas Merton on the movement from the false/egoic self to the true self; the resolution of dissonance into consonance in music of the Occident. Something important is going on here.
In varied ways each of the above examples connotes movement, directionality, and meaning toward wholeness, completion, a state of rest. The impetus of that movement would appear to include both the human party and a larger drawing agent, whether from within or without. Furthermore, “homing” hints of a predilection, a dedicated preference, perhaps even essentiality, of arrival at home. That inclination can loom large, whether in surrender, opposition, or obfuscating distraction.
But—and now I employ language more nearly depicting You, O Lover—“homing” is a multivalent image, one for me also deconstructive. For example, much of our hymnody, liturgical gestures, and god-talk employs terms like “heaven” as literally spatial despite the burgeoning of cosmology and Christian teaching that “space” too is (but) creature. Relatedly, much talk of “heaven” is laced with the egoic, albeit usually deferred to a realm “after” physical death, in addition to ignoring the teaching that temporality too is (but) creature. Well You know, O Lover, that for me the image of “heaven” is beyond salvage even as I am drawn by that of “homing.” Furthermore, I also find the image of Your “personhood” to be largely an extrapolation of myself, and thus an inadequate part of language for the goal of what I experience as coming home.
So what remains of this “homing” matter given all of the above deconstruction? Granted, I find myself stripped down, denuded, and that is often uncomfortable. However, in the Christ, and elsewhere, You have Self-disclosed that You are Love Itself and that You love me, a seismic opening to which I have sought to reciprocate. While failing to grasp You with sense or language, image or imagination, I nevertheless have come to love You albeit fragmentarily (a la I P 1:8) and experience You as drawing me into Your Divine Life. Furthermore, given the unconditionality of Your agapaic Self-disclosure, I am seeking to open myself to the universality of Your restoration (apokatástasis [Acts 3:21]). While I have experienced many depictions of the consummation of all things as inert, fossilized, or otherwise inadequate, I nevertheless find myself oxymoronically being homed into You who are beyond all names, images, and objectifications. Sometimes scary, I have experienced the awareness of homing as a moment of headiness of heart, of sheer suspension in the embrace of You whom Eckhart dubbed “No-thing.”
So what is the Télos of my being borne home? Toward whom am I homing? It is You alone (Tu sólus), O Lover. Regarding all else—creatures all—I am, hopefully, humbly and reverentially agnostic.
