Ride on Home, Jesus
Palm Sunday Week, 2006.
I have been thinking this week, in my parents’ house on Center Drive in Mt. Pleasant, Michigan, about the nature of “home.” For this week I have come home to a place that is not home. It is true that my parents are here, and the furnishings of the house they have lived in for twenty-five years are familiar; they include some I grew up with. This town they have lived in now for almost 40 years is also familiar. Moreover, the people here (a few anyway) know me; they recognize me; they are not only kind to me for my parents’ sake, they even think I belong here somehow. But I do not. I have never lived here; this is not home.
I’m not even sure this is home for my parents, though they have lived here for . . . 37 years. I think they still think of northern New York State, where they grew up, where they met, where their parents are buried, as home. But I may be projecting. And at the same time, I’m wondering, “Is there home?”
In Saul Bellow’s The Dean’s December, Dean Albert Corde does come home, if we mean by “home” the place he grew up in, where his parents are buried. Dean Corde comes home to Chicago, but it is not the Chicago he grew up in. Of course, it isn’t. He’s not surprised; he’s an intelligent man; he’s read Thomas Wolfe. The dean knows that he can’t return to the Chicago of his childhood. Nor can he find the Chicago he hopes for. Chicago cannot go in the direction he would have it: it is too big, too complicated, and too hellbent in its own direction and on its own destruction.
This December, the dean is looking at Chicago from afar. His wife Minna (the astronomer) has taken him to her home, Bucharest, to attend with her the illness, the death, and the funeral of her mother. In the cold, gray still-communist Rumanian capital, they stay in the cold, gray flat that Minna grew up in. They sleep in her little bedroom—which is little changed.
The city itself has not changed at all. But Minna is so lost in it that she hardly survives her visit. She wouldn’t have survived without her mother’s friends. Even with them, she cannot come home, and this is true even though she has carefully kept the road home clear. For example, she has never given up and declares she will never give up her Rumanian citizenship for U.S. citizenship as her childhood friend Vlada has.
On the other hand, neither Vlada nor Minna were ever truly Rumanian, though both lived their entire young lives in Bucharest (speaking Rumanian). Vlada’s family was Serbian. Minna’s family is Macedonian.
I grew up in southwest Virginia, and I still think of that at least as where I’m from, though my family is, as I’ve said, from northern New York State. Still, when people ask me where home is, that’s what I say, “I grew up in southwest Virginia.” And in many ways I’m at home there still, as if I could breathe best at 2500 feet among oaks and dogwoods and people who use the word “tar” to refer not only to the surface of a road but to a wheel on an automobile. On the other hand, I have no one there, in the town I grew up in. We’ve all grown up and gone away. And we’ve all read Thomas Wolfe.
Jesus hadn’t though, unless sometime in his pre-existence (and Wolfe’s). So, this week he starts home. That’s what I’m thinking anyway, this Palm Sunday week. He was born in Bethlehem, true. There was a time in Egypt. The boyhood in Galilee. Still, Jerusalem is home. That’s where his father’s house is (Luke 2:49; Mark 11:17). So on Palm Sunday, he is coming home.
Except he can’t.
I have been thinking this week, in my parents’ house on Center Drive in Mt. Pleasant, Michigan, about the nature of “home.” For this week I have come home to a place that is not home. It is true that my parents are here, and the furnishings of the house they have lived in for twenty-five years are familiar; they include some I grew up with. This town they have lived in now for almost 40 years is also familiar. Moreover, the people here (a few anyway) know me; they recognize me; they are not only kind to me for my parents’ sake, they even think I belong here somehow. But I do not. I have never lived here; this is not home.
I’m not even sure this is home for my parents, though they have lived here for . . . 37 years. I think they still think of northern New York State, where they grew up, where they met, where their parents are buried, as home. But I may be projecting. And at the same time, I’m wondering, “Is there home?”
In Saul Bellow’s The Dean’s December, Dean Albert Corde does come home, if we mean by “home” the place he grew up in, where his parents are buried. Dean Corde comes home to Chicago, but it is not the Chicago he grew up in. Of course, it isn’t. He’s not surprised; he’s an intelligent man; he’s read Thomas Wolfe. The dean knows that he can’t return to the Chicago of his childhood. Nor can he find the Chicago he hopes for. Chicago cannot go in the direction he would have it: it is too big, too complicated, and too hellbent in its own direction and on its own destruction.
This December, the dean is looking at Chicago from afar. His wife Minna (the astronomer) has taken him to her home, Bucharest, to attend with her the illness, the death, and the funeral of her mother. In the cold, gray still-communist Rumanian capital, they stay in the cold, gray flat that Minna grew up in. They sleep in her little bedroom—which is little changed.
The city itself has not changed at all. But Minna is so lost in it that she hardly survives her visit. She wouldn’t have survived without her mother’s friends. Even with them, she cannot come home, and this is true even though she has carefully kept the road home clear. For example, she has never given up and declares she will never give up her Rumanian citizenship for U.S. citizenship as her childhood friend Vlada has.
On the other hand, neither Vlada nor Minna were ever truly Rumanian, though both lived their entire young lives in Bucharest (speaking Rumanian). Vlada’s family was Serbian. Minna’s family is Macedonian.
I grew up in southwest Virginia, and I still think of that at least as where I’m from, though my family is, as I’ve said, from northern New York State. Still, when people ask me where home is, that’s what I say, “I grew up in southwest Virginia.” And in many ways I’m at home there still, as if I could breathe best at 2500 feet among oaks and dogwoods and people who use the word “tar” to refer not only to the surface of a road but to a wheel on an automobile. On the other hand, I have no one there, in the town I grew up in. We’ve all grown up and gone away. And we’ve all read Thomas Wolfe.
Jesus hadn’t though, unless sometime in his pre-existence (and Wolfe’s). So, this week he starts home. That’s what I’m thinking anyway, this Palm Sunday week. He was born in Bethlehem, true. There was a time in Egypt. The boyhood in Galilee. Still, Jerusalem is home. That’s where his father’s house is (Luke 2:49; Mark 11:17). So on Palm Sunday, he is coming home.
Except he can’t.
Rick
posted by Rick at 11:04 AM
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