Advent and Home
“It’s a Carolina Christmas”
Home. It is more than a place. “Home” is not really where you are from. “Home” might not be where you are going. But home is a deeply embedded human experience.
As a pastor and a military man, I always thought of home as where we were at any given time. I learned that from my Aunt Eva. But when we moved to Kansas many years ago, I felt I had found my first-ever home. Then, we accepted another call. But I never got over Kansas. It was a metaphor for new life to me. Aunt Eva had been with us in Kansas (before seminary and after, when we returned to Kansas to plant a church and school). She used to tell me that Olathe, Kansas was the most wonderful place she had ever been. She would pass from this life into the next in Kansas. Later, much later, I acted on that truth I had been taught by my pastor, the Reverend Robert E. Baxter; that home is where the Lord has assigned you at any given time in your life. Embrace it as your own. You will never be forlorn or nostalgic when you remember that we are on a journey and home is the place where God is. Connect the longing with the Creator of the longing and you have it. But that has been difficult for me.
Many people have been disappointed who supposed that home is where they were born (for many of us that given place has little to do with our lives, particularly those in the military, or ministry), or where they grew up, or, perhaps, where our ancestors were from. As Walker Percy reminds us, it is important to listen to the longing. But we must be careful lest we are lured to believe that home is a memory of a place. That is close, but despairingly short of where the longing is leading. The Asheville writer, Thomas Wolfe (1900-1938) penned “You Can’t Go Home Again” (released posthumously in 1940). The title became a phrase that is arguably more famous than the author. And that is because he captured one of the fireflies of human experience. Of his protagonist, George Webber, Wolfe wrote,
For he had learned tonight that love was not enough. There had to be a higher devotion than all the devotions of this fond imprisonment. There had to be a larger world than this glittering fragment of a world with all its wealth and privilege. Throughout his whole youth and early manhood, this very world of beauty, ease, and luxury, of power, glory, and security, had seemed the ultimate end of human ambition, the furthermost limit to which the aspirations of any man could reach.
Thus, the main character’s search for meaning, for contentment, is not experienced in place.
And he knew now, as he had never known before, the priceless measure of his loss. . . He saw now that you can't go home again—not ever. There was no road back.
Thomas Wolfe’s novel is an existentialist inquiry into the mystery of the longing for home. Should one read Thomas Wolf's classic as if reading Agatha Christie or John Grisham there will be an inevitable disillusionment. Thomas Wolf writes much like other Southern authors such as Flannery O'Connor, William Faulkner, and Walker Percy. It is more like reading Kierkegaard. Not that the author is preachy. Quite the contrary. The author is using Time and Place, Character and Events, to work out his feelings about himself and the world. If you can read it and observe the author’s struggle on the pages of his novel you will enjoy it and, indeed, treasure the lessons (or sometimes appreciate the unanswered questions). In the case of Thomas Wolfe and You Can't Go Home Again the questions and answers are not always obvious. Yet, in my experience, the reader comes away sensing the author is on to something. “Things are changing. I want to go back to the way things were. But that is impossible. Things change. People change. Time is like a river that cuts a path according to its apparent powers.” When Thomas Wolfe wrote You Can't Go Home Again, America was moving through the Depression and facing the icy winds of yet another European war. Many longed for the America they had known before. Sound familiar? Wolfe seemed to be saying that the longing is real, but the object is not. The longing for home transcends earthly places. Home is beyond time and space. Yet, how do we express the infinite except with our only experience of the finite? And that is what William Butler Yeats (1865-1939) was writing about in his poem “Innisfree:”
I will arise and go now, and go to Innisfree,
And a small cabin build there, of clay and wattles made:
Nine bean-rows will I have there, a hive for the honey-bee;
And live alone in the bee-loud glade.
And I shall have some peace there, for peace comes dropping slow,
Dropping from the veils of the morning to where the cricket sings;
There midnight's all a glimmer, and noon a purple glow,
And evening full of the linnet's wings.
I will arise and go now, for always night and day
I hear lake water lapping with low sounds by the shore;
While I stand on the roadway, or on the pavements grey,
I hear it in the deep heart's core.
Did you read that last line? “The deep heart’s core.” That is it. Call it Innisfree. Call it Carolina. But what we are saying is that there is a home for us. And we are made for that place. Thus, John’s Gospel:
John 14:1–6 (ESV): 14 “Let not your hearts be troubled. Believe in God; believe also in me. 2 In my Father’s house are many rooms. If it were not so, would I have told you that I go to prepare a place for you? 3 And if I go and prepare a place for you, I will come again and will take you to myself, that where I am you may be also. 4 And you know the way to where I am going.” 5 Thomas said to him, “Lord, we do not know where you are going. How can we know the way?” 6 Jesus said to him, “I am the way, and the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me.
In Advent, we are allowed to think out loud about this visceral pining for home. For in the coming of our Lord Jesus, we have the Answer to the internal longing, the existential ache. And we learn: He is our home.
I composed “Carolina Christmas” (below) as an expression of this Gospel reality. I pray it brings peace and maybe even a prayer for the Home where you can go.
References
A Study Guide for William Butler Yeats's "The Lake Isle of Innisfree". United States: Gale, Cengage Learning, 2016.
Wolfe, Thomas. You Can't Go Home Again. New York: Harper, 1940.
It's a Carolina Christmas
Words and Music ©️ 2005-2023 Michael Anthony Milton (Bethesda Music, BMI, CCLI).
It's a Carolina Christmas
From her mountains to the Sea
From Cherokee to Wilmington
And the Piedmont in between
I have been traveling way too much
My work has forced me to roam
But what I need today is to
Find my way
To my Carolina Home
Recently I′ve been to California
And to the San Francisco bay
It's a beautiful sight
But it's another flight
And another motel stay
Yes I′ve seen the lights of Broadway
I′ve felt breezes on Key Largo
But of all the places where I have been
There's only one place I want to go
It′s a Carolina Christmas
From her mountains to the Sea
From Cherokee to Wilmington
And the Piedmont in between
I have been traveling way to much
My work has forced me to roam
But what I need today is to
Find my way
To my Carolina Home
Carolina Christmas
Means so much to me
Not because of the natural beauty
But because of my family
It's a Carolina Christmas
From her mountains to the Sea
From Boone to Elizabeth City
And Charlotte in between
My calling has taken my far and wide
And I do not mean to moan
But there′s a time to give
And a time to rest
And a time to come on home
It's a Carolina Christmas
It′s a Carolina Christmas
It's a Carolina Christmas
And it's time to come on home.
Beautiful. L. Frank Baum was right, "There is no place like home."