Homeward

This December, about eight million overseas Filipinos will ache for home. Those of us over here will eat and drink and make merry; we will sing carols and give gifts to one another. It may take some while, but we too after the hangover will ache for home.

The reason for this genetic longing is to be found in who and where and why we are. Once upon a time, we used to live in Paradise. There we knew how precious we were to God who fashioned us out of the earth. We had the power to give words to many things, but we had no word to name loneliness. We worked the fields of Eden, and ate of our harvest, and God walked the afternoons with us until the stars came out at night.

One day, a talking snake came to tell us about freedom and power. We already know how things went after that. And so you can say that the reason for this longing at Christmastide is because of who we once were and where we are now relative to Paradise. This homelessness, this restive aching for a home we can no longer name, is a consequence of our dislocation from Paradise.

The reason too for the Child in a manger is because of who we truly are and where we are meant to be. The mystery of the incarnation reveals who God truly is and where God desires us to be.

Once, in a tricycle in faraway Palanan (Isabela), coming from a house blessing, I found myself gazing at the great night sky scattered with stars. At that time, electricity was rationed at night and so the darkness was wide and deep. While we moved through the rice fields, the drone of the two-stroke engine breaking the evening silence, I would look up intermittently to find my bearings from the constellations. It was then that I knew, for all the travels I have made in my life, that I was far from home.

In the first reading from Samuel for today’s Eucharist, David sees the contrast between his own living quarters (“a house of cedar”) and where the ark of God was (“a tent”). He then dreams of building something more permanent to house this holy presence.

At this point, God puts David in his place: through Nathan the prophet, God asks him, so you think you can build Me and put Me in a house? It is I who will build you one, and this house will not be a physical building but a line of descendants (“sprung from your loins”), culminating in an heir whose kingdom shall be firm and who “shall be a son to Me.” In this House of David, as the angel Gabriel assures Mary in the Gospel, the Lord God shall “give [the Child] the throne of David his father, and he will rule over the house of Jacob forever, and of his kingdom there will be no end.”

Strangely beautiful then is the mystery and grace of the Incarnation. It is not a house or a place for Himself that God seeks. It is connection, a living line of relationships which God desires and offers and makes possible. It is Paradise again that He longs for.

To set us on our way, our King comes to us as one like us, born in a place of conflict, to a people who have been walking in darkness for ages, where no compass or constellation has ever been able to give them back their bearings. Our King comes to us, divested of all form and manner of imperial power, to lead us Edenward and bring us home.

We cannot be more lyrical than the poet G K Chesterton in describing the strangeness and beauty of Bethlehem:

To an open house in the evening

Home shall men come,

To an older place than Eden

And a taller town than Rome.

To the end of the way of the wandering star,

To the things that cannot be and that are,

To the place where God was homeless

And all men are at home.

This Christmas then, take heart: if you should find yourselves aching once more, even after all the gifts and merriment, and you realize how far you are from home, let the longing (yours and God’s) grow on you.

It is the longing, not the stars, that will give you back your bearings and bring you home.

(Fr. Jose Ramon T. Villarin SJ is president of Xavier University, Ateneo de Cagayan.)

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