Hope and Home
Cardinal Timothy Radcliffe (known to many in Oxford) tells a wonderful story about what it means to hope for ‘home’:
“A Dominican, a Benedictine and a bishop, were on a boat sailing to across the Pacific. And the boat sunk and they all ended up on a small desert island. After a bit an angel appeared and offered each of them a wish. And so the Dominican thought hard and said to the angel, 'I would like to go home to my brothers in Blackfriars.' 'Wush', and he was gone, like a text message on an Iphone. And then the Benedictine said, 'That Dominican was absolutely right as they always are. I want to go back home to Worth Abbey.' 'Wush' and he was gone. And then the bishop said: 'I am awfully lonely now that they have gone. Could you please send the Dominican and the Benedictine back please?' Wush, wush!”
It is often said that ‘home is where the heart is’ and, as we continue to pray for so many who are displaced by war and famine; longing for familiarity and the safety they once knew, their stories can be a sobering prompt for us all to reflect upon how we can be home to one another in times of desperation and need. The idea of home, can be a complex yet deeply powerful symbol of hope. For those who have enjoyed good relationships at home, it is the very real idea of all that brings comfort, certainty, and mediates love. For others, who may have more difficult memories, home can become an ideal of what is striven for and courageously built for themselves, in spite of previous challenges.
As the people in Timothy Radcliffe’s story knew well, home can be less about the place you find yourself, or even the place you long to be. Home then becomes about the relationships you choose to build to sustain you, the community you craft and contribute to, the unlikely friends you are gifted to uphold you when certainty and comfort are displaced.
Hope is a gift, but it is a spiritual practice too. It is most-potent, and most-evident, in the lives of those who choose to daily build an earthly foretaste of the heavenly home we will, one day, all share in God’s Kingdom.