Going Home

One of my favorite passages in all of human literature is found in George MacDonald’s Seaboard Parish. It says for me what I have often thought about when I think about home.

In the passage below, Harry Walton, the main character in the book, is reflecting about home as he, his wife, and his daughter were traveling back home from London:

Going home. I lay back in the carriage and thought how this November fog was like the valley of the shadow of death we had to pass through on the way home. A shadow like this would fall upon me, and the world would grow dark and life grow weary-but I should know that it was the last of the way home.

As the thought of water is to the thirsty soul, such is the thought of home to the wanderer in a strange country. And my own soul had always felt the discomfort of strangeness in the very midst of its greatest blessedness. In the closest of contact of one human soul with another, when all the atmosphere of thought was rosy with love, again and yet again on the far horizon, the dim, lurid flame of unrest would shoot for a moment through the enchanted air, and the soul would know that she was not yet home. But did I know where or what that home was?

I lifted my eyes, and saw those of my wife and Connie fixed on mine, as if they were reproaching me for saying in my soul that I could not quite be at home with them. Then I said in my heart, “Come home with me, Beloved; there is but one home for us all. When we find that home we shall be gardens of delight to each other, little chambers of rest, galleries of pictures, wells of water.”

Again, what was this home? God Himself. His thoughts, His will, His love, His judgments, are man’s home. To think His thoughts, to choose His will, to love His loves, to judge His judgments, and thus to know that He is in us-this is to be at home. It is the father, the mother, that make for the child his home. Indeed, I doubt if the home idea is complete to the parents of a family themselves when they remember that their fathers and mothers have vanished.