This is Life!: Revolutions Around the Cruciform Axis

What Home Does to You

The trip home to see our families has had a profound impact on me, or so it seems as the days following our return to Chicago have unfolded. Perhaps it's the time of transition already underway with a new year, a new semester, Anna's soon-to-be-realized embrace of her God-given vocation. Or all of it together.

I just find myself interested in and focused on different things.

My following of the Anglican schism has effectively postponed the reality of my having left ECUSA long ago. And, frankly, has been a waste of time.

I'm not even interested in current events like I normally am. The presidential politics and upcoming primaries are something I'm usually a junkie about. Yawn. While I usually enjoy faithful Christian reflection on and critique of present-day culture, now I'm just tired of the distraction. Blah.

I could go on.

Being home these past couple of weeks got me in touch with the bedrock realities that sustain life and faith: parents, siblings, extended family, day-in/day-out earning a living, some prayer, some faithful living, new babies to keep the particular embodiment of all our lives going. I miss my family terribly. Does it really matter, my getting my PhD? Not when you compare it to holding on to my nephew, Jacob, or cuddling my niece, Reagan, or teasing my other nieces, Cassidy and Baileigh. Does it really matter that some self-proclaimed Anglican "inclusivist" expertly uses doublespeak to exclude those hated traditionalists? Not when a new mommy and daddy each and every night hold and caress their infant daughter while praying the Lord's Prayer. Not when this daughter will grow up in the Faith once for all delivered to the saints, and will know the smarmy church politico for what he is.

All my current life activities and interests could go hang, so long as there were family there to sit and sip a soda with and catch up on the gossip. So long as there were toddlers and infants exploding with new life and energy. So long as a young family could look out across windswept Kansas plains, or up at a clear Oklahoma sky, and rejoice in the God who had made these things and bridged the gap between us and him with flesh and bone and blood.

Sometimes the contemplation of these things is so sweet it leaves an ineffable disturbance in the soul, a joyful sorrow, a graceful melancholy. For the blessedness that you can taste in the slobbery kisses of your infant daughter is only a foretaste. . . just a foretaste, and not yet the full reality.

No wonder creation groans and waits. And so do I. So do I.