Home

Home is where the heart is or so they say.  Or possibly in contrast, home is where you hang your hat.  Looking at other cultural uses of the word home, it is the place to which we always return or at least try to.  Your home screen is the first thing you see when you start to navigate the internet, home base is both the point of origin and the goal in baseball, the home button on an iPhone returns you to a place that exists for the purpose of choosing a new app to open.  Home is often presented as both our beginning and our end.  From a Christian context, home is a place we have never seen and yet our souls long for it.  However you view it, home is a pretty important concept both personally and historically.  I've had a lot of really good and rich discussions about "home" with my siblings and others and that is partly because it is a topic which never really looses its relevance.

I am writing on this topic because I have recently had the importance of it driven "home" (I didn't mean to do that originally but I'm leaving it because it makes my point) emotionally with the holidays fast approaching.  For a student the holidays are more than a vacation, they are a point of transition.  And when we find ourselves in transition, big questions of identity and personal values just seem a little bigger.

Looking back on my childhood I don't know that I ever had a strong sense of "home"ness.  Sure, I lived in the same house for 20 years, had a very stable family, had my life routines.... all the markings of "home" as we traditionally think of them.  But when I left I never felt a draw to return.  I never felt out of place.  I never thought "I just want to go home".  Why?  Who knows.  Maybe it was because I felt relatively isolated as a child?  Maybe it was because all of my extended family lived elsewhere and I was terrible at forming relationships with other people?  Maybe I just never thought about it?  I don't have that answer pinned down well enough to make any kind of statement about it.  What I do know is the first inkling of home I ever felt.  It was at Elmore State Park in 2006.

Most of you will be familiar with the gross history of my life surrounding my move to Elmore since I love to talk about that story.  But for those of you who don't a brief background:  In 2004 I went to college at Rowan University to study engineering.  I very quickly fell apart at the seams.  I was depressed and failing out.  Then I decided to change course and pursue archaeology which I still sometimes wish I had kept going with.  But, my college didn't offer anthropology as a major and my grades were not good enough to transfer to the only school I immediately cared about which was Notre Dame (I went to their archaeology field school summer 2005 and fell in love with the school).  So I didn't know what to do and with me that often means I did nothing.  My sisters encouraged me to apply to AmeriCorps very forcibly and so I [they] did.  Through a long but interesting sequence of events, that lead me to Elmore State Park in May 2006.

That summer was the most significant point of my entire life to date.  I found God, I discovered nature, I fell in love, I lost 40 lbs in 3 months, I learned my love for biking, and that summer set my path for next, oh depending on how you count and what you consider to qualify it would either be 4 years or you are still counting.  All the things going on are too complicated to parse out my sister Sarah refers to that summer as the moment I "woke up".  I think that was the first time that I discovered I actually like people.  Before that I was a half-hearted misanthrope.  The reason I wasn't more forceful in my dislike for humanity was that most of them just weren't worth my time.  I never let anyone get too close and I saw no reason to change.  I know that my peers in high-school would never have described me a likeable even though that may be the most common positive feedback I get these days.  In short (too late I guess but oh well) all my paradigms shifted.

On breaks I would miss the park, when I biked to Stowe on Mondays I looked forward to returning, when my time at the park ended my only real consolation was that I still got to spend time with some of the same people I had been working with.  And even though I didn't feel as strongly about the second half of my time in Vermont when our crew was being housed at Goddard college, I genuinely missed VT when it was time to leave the state and go back to NJ.  From there I lived in Cincinnati, Chicago, the woods of NJ, the desert of California and other places.  In each place there were things I loved and things I hated but when it was time to leave I maybe felt a pang of nostalgia but never that same sense of loss I felt when I left VT.  So, I resolved to return.  And I did that in 2009.  Second time around was different and not always for the better.  It took me a while to really find my stride.

Flash forward another couple years to the present.  I find myself in really different circumstances.  I live in Rutland which was never my first choice, I am back in school, I am an Army reservist (for the moment), my sister lives one block down the street WITH HER HUSBAND, and I have an increasingly intricate web of social connections.  My church, Middletown Springs Community Church, has become family to me in less than a year.  Life moves fast sometimes.  And all of that long story finally comes down to this.  I realized yesterday that I am probably going to have to be away or unavailable to my life in VT for the next 3 weeks.  And that was actually painful to contemplate.  Yes I will be going to see my family in the Philadelphia area who I do not see often enough and who I dearly love.  But for the first time ever I think I am actually getting home sick and that at just the thought of leaving.  Missing 3 weeks of church? Missing community groups and Yellow Deli Club and all the other little things that constitute my life these days?  Not being with my friends and church family for my birthday?  I've never had such a strong attachment to a group of people and a place before.  Sure, when life happens I would maybe have an "aww shucks" type reaction but I am a pragmatist about such things.  If I can't change events then what is the point of worrying?  I'll just have an awesome adventure elsewhere and I can tell the story when I get back.  And I've never cared much about where I was for my birthday.

So I think that this must be what home is.  Home is the place where you feel you belong.  Home is the place you'd always choose when given two awesome alternatives.  If it doesn't hurt a little to leave then you probably don't care too much about the place.  During my traveling days I never knew what to tell people when they asked where I'm from.  I would usually say New Jersey for simplicity and the rich opportunities for teasing banter but I haven't felt an allegiance to that state for years.  At the same time I can't really say I'm from Vermont but that is the answer that I always want to give and usually will unless I'm talking with someone who I know will probe deeper.  And it isn't really a question anymore.  I feel like I've lived here all my life just like I feel like I've known my church family for many years instead of just 1.  It just feels right.  So I think in the future when the topic of Home creeps in to the conversation my answer is going to be "Home is the place (or people) that it hurts to leave".  Thanks for reading if you managed to get through all of that.  Until next time God bless.