Dear friends,
However good the holiday is … however good the time away … it is always lovely to unlock your front door and go into your home after a vacation. You are welcomed by the musty smell of the closed and waiting home … the silence of familiarity … the thankful feeling of having arrived at long last. You can throw yourself onto the couch and let out a big sigh as you think, “It’s lovely to be back home!”
We all feel most comfortable in our homes. There is a natural ease, a sense of belonging, a distinct sense of freedom that being in our home brings. We live there with an awareness of acceptance which is different from being in other places where we know instinctively we don’t belong. However good the holiday is … however good the time away … it is always lovely to unlock your front door and go into your home after a vacation. You are welcomed by the musty smell of the closed and waiting home … the silence of familiarity … the thankful feeling of having arrived at long last. You can throw yourself onto the couch and let out a big sigh as you think, “It’s lovely to be back home!”
We all feel most comfortable in our homes. There is a natural ease, a sense of belonging, a distinct sense of freedom that being in our home brings. We live there with an awareness of acceptance which is different from being in other places where we know instinctively we don’t belong.
And what we experience in our physical life we also know in our spirituality. This life, this earth is not our permanent home. It is a place where we can experience great joy … but also the petty tendencies and desires of mind and body. It is a place of wonders and adventure … but also one of challenge and difficulty. And we humans, from an early age, instinctively want to look beyond, to delve deeper and to search. We know deep within there is something more, something missing. St Augustine of Hippo says, “You have made us for yourself, O Lord, and our heart is restless until it rests in you.”
Yes, God is our home. God is our eternal home both now and in the future. It is only in and through a relationship with God that we can find that space where we can kick off our shoes, drop all pretensions and wallow in the feeling and freedom of being unconditionally loved and completely accepted for who we are. We are made for God and we come from God. And we will return to God.
So wherever we have travelled this summer, whatever sights we may have seen, it is good to be back in our earthly homes and in Holy Trinity with each other as the year journeys on. We are very blessed to have this community and it is good to know we don’t walk alone.
This month Jan Bundy begins her introduction to meditation course – a way of praying silently which allows us to experience in the present a little more of the heavenly home which awaits us in the future. Do come along if you’re interested – I’m sure it will be a good and worthwhile experience.
At the beginning of September fourteen of us from the congregation will also go on retreat together – a new venture – where this theme of homecoming will be picked up once again. For those of you who expressed a wish to join us I am sorry that all available places were taken long ago – but I hope that this retreat will become an annual event and thereby give others an opportunity to come along.
Please pray for us.
with love, Liz
