Easter Home

It's Holy Week, days when we're ordinarily thinking of Good Friday and Easter and all their attendant implications. Usually it's a pretty busy time of year, physically as well as spiritually, but Holy Week this time has been quite different around our house. For one thing, I've been pretty well focused on the recuperation process after last week's carotid artery repair, and while everything's gone well according to the doc's reports, it's still been a pain in the, well, the neck. I'll spare the details, but trust me: I haven't had many wonderfully spiritual insights this week.

I have, however, had a wonderful time during a brief visit with brother John and Caroline, his wife. They stopped here for an overnight on their way home after a month in Florida, and we made the most out of our short visit. (We were scheduled to visit J. and C. while we were down in Florida for some baseball, but that trip got short-circuited and we haven't been able to see each other for a while.)

In the course of this visit John and I got to talking about our folks and South Charleston and home in general, and I realized somewhere in the course of this conversation that the whole construct of "home" means such different things to people. For some, the idea of home conjures up first of all an image of a place. In Ann's life, for instance, it would be "The Farm", that place out beyond St. Elmo, Georgia, down Chattanooga Valley Road, where she spent some of her earliest and fondest years, that place where she and I first got to know one another and fell in love, and now, generations later, we still have pictures of that place hanging on the wall of our subdivision home. There were people in that place, of course, wonderful and important people, yet we were always locked in the embrace of that place.

Others, and here John and I would fit, have felt "home" filled our minds eye first of all with people. In our case they were primarily our parents, but they could have been any others, such as some of those "Most Infuential" that I blogged about earlier. The places have, of course, been terribly important to our lives, and we'll always remember our homes in Reading and New York and South Charleston, but when "home" comes to my mind I think first off of mother and dad. Where they were was where home was.

My mind wandered from there back to Holy Week and Easter, and I realized something: Easter is my spiritual "home", the event from which everything else flows. Easter is my tap root. I don't spend a lot of time thinking about the mechanics and details of Easter, about whether or not the resurrection of Jesus happened exactly when or where or how we're told it happened. But I've bet my life that it happened.

I enjoy Christmas and all the gloriously fuzzy stuff about angels and mangers and struck-dumb shepherds, and I treasure the many long held affections with unforgetable people and well-loved places met along the way, but they can't hold a candle to Easter. If Christmas should vanish and all the memories fade, if everything around me should crumble into dust, the New Creation of Easter would still be the prime reality in my life, the starting point of all that is true and holy. That nutshell-phrase in the Eucharist says it all: "Christ has died. Christ has risen. Christ will come again." Easter is the source of my spiritual home.