In recent weeks I finished a beautiful book entitled “Home” by the American author Marilynne Robinson. It is a story of family and relationship and the narrative of homecoming. It is about forgiveness and the times when our fallible humanity finds the parameters of the promise of boundless grace. It is about the burdens we never fully learn to set down, choosing to carry them with us despite the back pain and heartache they continue to cause us. 

I have been consumed in reflection and deep thought ever since I set the book down, considering what exactly I understand home to be. Some of these thoughts I wrote down to try and clarify it in my mind. Although I am far from a clear picture, it has certainly been an exercise in self awareness and gratitude. Below is a little section from my notes on the matter.

“Home is more than a geography or a landscape. It is more than the street where you grew up or even the house where your parents live. Home is a sacred space, a hallowed dimension of our hearts marked by the laying down of arms and the weathered shoes abandoned at the doorstep. Its gates are carved from purest honesty and gilded with burnished vulnerability. As we step through, our brokenness is not ignored or forgotten but known and held as part of the joy of knowing and holding one another. Home is the sound that filters through our minds like the morning light filters through closed eyelids, waking us from the doldrums of our day-to-day survival and calling us back into glory, into the remembering of ourselves, into the full recognition of one another and the freedom of living in that fullness. It is the voice of God that calls out of the mystery, "Return to your fortress you prisoners of hope." (Zechariah 9:12) We are all slaves to so many things in this life. I pray that hope is a chain that binds your heart each and every day, holding you fast to your fortress home, your place of strength.

The art of homecoming too is so much more than we might imagine. More than a simple arrival, more, even, than the presenting of ourselves and all that we have become to the people who used to know us. It is the culmination of our longest and most arduous journey. It is the dirt on our soles, the scuffs on our boots, the tears in our clothes, the tears in our eyes and all the marks the road has made upon us. It is the crescendo to our symphony, the heartrending climax to our story, the end of all our departures and the little deaths we experience at every leave-taking. It is all the places we've been, people we've loved and persons we used to be. It is the truest and most genuine cry of our heart. That at the end of all the confusion and uncertainty of earthly life, we might arrive at the doorstep and be understood and welcomed in.”

The river that flows from there

Has grown so vast and full and swift

And here

After the rush of its rapid beginning

Before the gentle ebb of it's oceanic end

It has laid its body and speed and depth down between us.

The meandering curves crafting borders between our bodies

Shushing silence into our stories

Making separate shores from our same earth.

We have stood at those boundaries

Walked along the waters edge

In search of safe passage.

We have dipped our toes

Put messages in paper boats

Gently pushed them out in hope

And watched them all sail helplessly downstream

Spiralling out of sight, off the edge of the world.

Even the faithful have turned their backs

"It is hopeless" they mutter "leave them be"

I must confess

It is difficult to admit defeat

But it is easier to sink a paper fleet

To bare our shins and wet our feet

Than to break our backs

Building bridges 

Where the two of us could meet.

A BenjiSemps Original. 

For Claire.

This is a poem I wrote about one of my habits that I exhibit regularly. That is the art of monologuing while no one else is present, in laymans terms, talking to myself. Zafon refers to this performance as 'the inebriated man's prerogative'.