Yesterday I biked to Suamico United Methodist Church. They have a porch across the full width of the old building and a flower garden beyond, as well as more flowers to the sides. I sat on the porch steps. The breeze was flowing over me. In front of me there were bumblebees buzzing around the flowers. And I thought, this feels like home.
Some part of home, I mean. I didn't feel like living there in the church sanctuary, sleeping in the pews and perhaps cooking breakfast in the usher's room. Those activities are parts of the idea of home, but not the part I was experiencing on the porch steps.
Home seems like a unitary concept; I was surprised to notice that parts of the sense of home are separable from each other. That throws a little different light on the desire we often have to go back home in one sense of another.
"You can't go home again," the saying goes; but you can have a sense of home in the things you do, the places you stop, and the relationships you build. It isn't home in the fullness of the ideal, but it is home in part.
"You can't go home again," and I think perhaps we never could. That sense of home is not a specific memory but a conglomeration of the many parts of home we have experienced in our lives. When I think most clearly about growing up at home, it was never a fullness of my ideal of a perfect home. My memories of home are admixtures of everything I wanted with other things I didn't want and desires that were unfulfilled. My first memory of chocolate chip ice cream when I was 3 years old -- my brother and sister still alive, the familiar kitchen table, a warm summer evening, all these parts of that sense of home -- this memory begins with me intending to run away. Why? I don't remember why I was going to run away from home. What I know is that this memory of being at home begins with my desire not to be at home.
Real life, actual reality, was always a lot muddier than is that concept of home we hold onto as our ideal. And so it should be. The ideal is abstracted out of our reality. It leaves aside those aspects of life which were not ideal, those parts we would rather not emulate and reiterate, to the extent that we have a choice. Abstraction is a peculiarly human ability by which we separate some parts of reality from all the dross of daily living. From those abstracted pieces we assemble a comprehensive idea, an ideal, of what we would like life to become. An ideal is not a statement of what is but a goal for what might be.
The successful player of the actual reality game is one who notices when real life is touching the ideal. For a few moments in Suamico, life on the porch touched some points of the ideal of life at home. And I noticed.