At Christmas everyone is a little homesick. If this be sentimentalism let the most be made of it. Homesick in the most literal connotation of the word, filled with a strange yearning for that one place in all the world that is really home for us.
It is not an easy thing to define the meaning of home. Certainly it is more than a local habitation and a name; more than a post office address; more, even, than the dwelling place of those we love here below. In its fullest and truest sense it can only be the place where man is at peace with God and with his brethren.
If we were dealing with man in the abstract, we might be tempted to say that home is nothing more than a state of mind, and thus is capable of realization anywhere in the world. There is, doubtless, a measure of validity in this notion, but it is actually truer of angels than of men. The angels are at home simply because they live in the eternal and unchanging presence of God. But man, limited and defined as he is, cries out for a place where he may localize and identify the peace for which he longs, and lacking which he homeless and a stranger in an alien land. For every normal human being there is one spot in all the world where he feels, somehow, that peace may come to him and dwell in his soul. It is the spot where he has asked something of its wonder and mystery in his life. Always, to his dying day, he looks upon it as his home.
Our world is suffering from a tragic nostalgia. It has not only lost its home, but it is in danger of forgetting what constitutes the essential elements of home. It thinks a great deal of places, of settlement and re-settlement, of slum-clearance and building costs, but very little of that which transforms a rooftree into the soaring arch of a sanctuary of peace. We have been so busy destroying and reconstructing the habitations of men that we have come to dally with the horrible idea that man might just as well be rendered a sort of permanent transient, homeless in his borrowed house.
There are many ways in which this distasteful proposition might be footnoted, from our uneasy resignation to some form of co-existence to the absurdity of an internationalism that would uproot all men as pawns at the disposal of a Wellsian Board of Advisers. The point is that in considering ways in which man might be rehabilitated and reassured we are prone to ignore the fact that peace is not merely a cessation of armed conflict or of embattled truce, nor a method of controlling atomic energy or hydrogen power, but a habit of mind shared by men of good will, men who live at home.
Peace comes when the men who are doing the fighting go back to their homes to stay. Obviously, what is meant is nothing quite so simple as soldiers’ stacking their arms and marching off to collect their pensions. The return of the men in the field to their real home is a long and tortuous journey, though it may be reasonably surmised that the odyssey of those who sent them on their mission in the first place is even longer and more painful. They will have to seek peace, searching through the ruins not only of farms and villages and cities, but through the ruins of lives torn from any true context of the value of living. For nearly ten years we have all been searching for this peace, wandering about like men in the mist. Sometimes we have stumbled across what looked like a familiar threshold, only to find the rooms vacant and the windows smashed. If it was ever home the curse is on it now.
There are men at work industriously drawing up the blueprints for the new homes of men. The designs, those we have seen at any rate, are streamlined, excessively clever. The only trouble with them is that they are not fit for human habitation. Man is not at home in an economic world, fashioned for that entirely mythical figure, the economic man. He is not at home in a world where a cosmic policeman is forever pacing his beat outside his door. He is not at home in a world where his neighbors are regarded, almost by definition, as objects of suspicion and distrust, fodder for the next investigating committee. Above all, he is not at home in a world where God is ignored by a rule-of-thumb secularism that would build a wall shutting off religion from human affairs.
For the Christian, the way home was marked out long centuries ago for generations of his forebears who had also lost their way. It is the way that invites all men to come home, back to the warm hearth and the dignity of simple things. It is the road that leads to the Cave of Bethlehem. In our universal experience, Bethlehem is home, even in the significance of its name, the House of Bread. Nor is this a mere figure of speech; it is indeed a symbol, but one whose terms correspond to a physical reality. The Cave was the birthplace of Jesus Christ, the Son of God. It was His home. It was the one spot on earth where love of God and love of man were realized absolutely and intimately.
Only to the extent that our own familiar places have borne spiritual resemblance to Bethlehem have they been worthy to be called home. And we cannot now find our way back to our own homes, wherever they may be, without pausing and praying at the Cave to see what it is we are looking for. There, God’s plan is unfolded before our eyes in all its gracious beauty. He is a wiser architect than those who would balance crystal balls on steeples for precarious modern living. The world, in the light reflected from the halo of the Babe, is seen not as a dark forest of sinister shapes and threatening shadows, but a place of light where men may dwell together in holiness and peace.
There are many, countless millions of them actually, who are groping in the mist to find the road to Bethlehem this Christmastide. There are Christians who have forgotten the meaning of the name they bear. There are modern pagans who have caught vague intimations of their own distress and who blindly stumble along, rarely helped, alas, by those who seem to know the way but prefer to stalk it in meditative solitude. They are of all nations, Americans, British, French, weary of their illusions, heartsick of their materialism and their secularism and their existentialism, seeking something more than the sour husks of the philosophies they have been fed upon.
There are Russians among them, even members of the Party, grimly sobered by the realization that the house they have built at such toil and cost is an empty shell, a charnel-house where the spirit of man is slowly corrupting. There are Germans, remembering their picture-postcard Bavarian villages in the shadow of the baroque churches, wondering why it is that a nightmare swept all that away. And there are the long, hungry hordes of the dispossessed, Koreans, Chinese, Vietnamese, whose utter homelessness under the naked sky is the cruelest mockery of what we mean by home. It is so easy to write this; it is so terrifying to come even to the verge of its realization.
The road home is as long or as short as man himself will make it. It can be traveled in a single Christmas night; it can consume all the tedious years of life. For us who travel through the fog and darkness of our present uncertainties, however, there is at least one glimmer of light for our feet. We have begun to sense, however dimly, that there is no other road that does lead home, not even the royal road of science. It is, we note, this very road of science, arbitrarily separated from the way of the Cross, which has led modern man farthest away from peace and home. It has led us into sadistic orgies of self-destruction. It has supplied us with the implements to annihilate our familiar world. It has left us desperate in the desert of loneliness, for it has introduced us to death. It dawns on us at last that science without love is death. Our way, then, is somewhat simpler than it might have been in the years when we still cherished our stubborn illusions. But there remains for us to encounter the humility of the Cave, the sacrifice of our pride which is implicit in our admission that we have not been able to build the house of man with our own hands. We have yet to bow our heads to the inscription over the gate, that it is only in the will of God that our peace is found. Then we can enter in. But the joy of those who come home to Bethlehem is beyond all comparison with the pain and sorrow and humiliation of the journey. It is the joy of the prodigal finding welcome in the outstretched arms of the Infant Savior; it is the joy of the motherless finding infinite tenderness in Mary’s eyes; the joy of the wanderers over the face of the earth who find assurance in the strength of Joseph’s staff. It is the exultation of those who had lost the music of the spheres and who hear it again in the celestial chorus of the angels singing their Gloria. It is the happiness of those who had forgotten the dignity of simple things, finding it once more in the intimacy of straw and the breath of dumb beasts. It is the peace of the homeless who have found their abiding home in a Cave at the world’s end.
