M. Craig Barnes - Searching for Home: Spirituality for Restless Souls

2003 by M. Craig Barnes

Published by Brazos Press
a division of Baker Publishing Group
P.O. Box 6287, Grand Rapids, MI 49516-6287
www.brazospress.com

Ebook edition created 2012

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any meansfor example, electronic, photocopy, recordingwithout the prior written permission of the publisher. The only exception is brief quotations in printed reviews.

ISBN 978-1-58558-517-5

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is on file at the Library of Congress, Washington, DC.

One of Us, by Eric Bazilian 1995, 1996 Human Boy Music. All rights reserved. Used by permission of Warner Bros. Publications U.S. Inc., Miami, Florida 33014.

Scripture is taken from the New Revised Standard Version of the Bible, copyright 1989 by the Division of Christian Education of the National Council of the Churches of Christ in the USA. Used by permission.

For my brother Gary,

who was with me on the road

Contents

Midway along the journey of our life

I woke to find myself in a dark wood,

for I had wandered off from the straight path.

How hard it is to tell what it was like,

this wood of wilderness, savage and stubborn

(the thought of it brings back all of my old fears),

a bitter place! Death could scarce be bitterer.

But if I would show the good that came of it

I must talk about things other than the good.

How I entered there I cannot truly say,

I had become so sleepy at the moment

when I first strayed, leaving the path of truth...

Dante, The Inferno, I. 112, p. 76

Homeless

Lost in the Search for a Good Place

T he sun was shining hard on my fathers coffin as it lay perched above the hole in the ground where he would finally stay put.

We were standing in one of those stark cemeteries that dont have any trees. The grave markers were tarnished little plaques that lie low on their backs just below the grass line, so it wouldnt be hard for the guys who mow the brown lawn. Dad had spent most of his life in the shadows, so I knew he would hate this place and be eager to join those hiding under the ground, protected from the revealing light.

He spent the first part of his life trying to be at home in the respectable places. Not only was he the head of our home, but he was also the head of our home church, serving as the pastor. But failing at all of that, he left when I was a teenager. For almost thirty years I never knew where he was as he abandoned all who loved him. He abandoned every notion of home to roam about as a tourist through life. He died alone on Thanksgiving, 2000. At the time he was living in a raggedy Airstream camping trailer parked at the Mobile Home Village somewhere in the middle of Florida. We buried him a few miles down the road.

If it were up to him, and for the first time it wasnt, he wouldnt have shown up for this funeral. But there he was. So dead, and yet finally so present. It was one last pathetic irony in the life of a father known mostly through absence.

People driving by the cemetery on the other side of the rusted chain-link fence slowed down to take a look at the bereaved: my older brother from Dallas, my aunt from somewhere in Virginia, my wife and me who lived in Maryland, and a handful of people from the trailer park. It occurred to me that no one belonged hereleast of all my father.

I was never sure about where home was for my dad, but I knew this wasnt it. Burying him a few miles down the road may have been the perfect symbol for his meandering life, but it was still a lonely one. We imagine that our loved ones will one day be placed under a large oak tree on a grassy knoll not far from the family homestead. That way even their graves will tether us to the home where our souls are always nurtured and our identities renewed. But my father is now resting near the highway somewhere in the middle of nowhere.

Standing beside that barren grave, watching the dry wind toy with a piece of litter along the road, I wondered if this was the identity to which I was tethered. I had never thought about home much before that afternoon, but since then it has been my great passion. What is home? Where is mine? And how do we conduct lives that amount to something more than getting a few miles on down the road to nowhere special?

M EMORIES OF H OPE

Shortly after Dad rolled into town, a few months earlier, he met the minister performing the graveside ceremony. He was the one who called to tell me my father was dead. But he didnt know Dad any better than anyone else who had brushed his life, so he just said all of the appropriate and forgettable things that ministers say at a time like this. When he got done, he smiled tenderly and went down the line shaking hands with those of us sitting on the green plastic folding chairs. Then he took his place beside the colorless man in the dark suit who ran the local funeral parlor out of the first floor of his house.

Although we hadnt planned on it, my brother and I accepted the ministers invitation to Say a few words. I think I said something sentimental about looking forward to meeting my Dad on the other side where we could finally settle down together. I really dont remember. What is vivid in my mind are the gentle tears that made my brother pause in his comments. He started out so well, just like Dad would have done, holding an open Bible as he spoke. But in the middle of one of his respectful sentences, the tears interrupted. So he just stood there, the eldest son beside his prodigal fathers casket, unable to keep saying a few words about the father whose presence had also been interrupted. It was the only thing about the funeral that made sense.

After the service was over, we milled around a bit until the harsh sun finally won and we shuffled off to the rental car. Driving away, from the rearview mirror I watched the grave diggers crank the casket down into the earth.

The woman who managed the trailer park had asked us to stop by on our way back to the airport in order to see if there was anything we wanted from our fathers small trailer. I was horrified at the thought and said, No thank you, we really need to be going. So she asked my dutiful brother who said, Sure, which meant Id get to enter Dads little hell on wheels after all. It was the kind of trailer you have to stoop down to enter, like when youre walking into a small airplane. I wondered what it would be like to live in a place where you can never stand tall. Dads few possessions were neatly organized, placed into little compartments hidden under the sofa, above the bed, and along the walls. Each compartment had a little latch that would keep things safely inside for when he had to hit the road again. The metaphors were overwhelming. Quickly, I opened every cabinet searching for the place where we had traveled with Dad through all his wanderings. Then I found it. In an old, three-ring, leather notebook.

I remembered the notebook from my childhood. Dad had used it to work on his sermons back in the days when he was a Baptist preacher. For eight years he led that small church on Long Island that our family literally built, brick by brick. Since it was the place where my brother and I had spent our formative years, it was very much our home. Though I doubt it was ever his.

As a child, sitting beside him in the car on the way home from a worship service, I would pick up the notebook from the seat and gently leaf through the sermon notes that had just come from the pulpit. I thought I was holding the Ten Commandments. Funny how he had walked away from everything and everyone in his old life except that notebook.