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Dear Friends in Christ,

Happy New Year! We have celebrated the newborn Christ, and this month we’ll make our way to Epiphany and the season that follows it. In the church, this has traditionally been a time for house blessings, words proclaiming God’s grace over our homes. For the last two years at St. Peter’s, we’ve blessed chalk and taken the chalk to our homes to write a blessing over our doorways. So each year during this season, my thoughts turn toward the notion of home. 

What is home?

My parents sold the home I grew up in a few weeks ago. I was sad about it. I was also very thankful I didn’t have to see it empty. But my feelings kind of surprised me. It has been 18 years since I lived there, and I didn’t recognize any real attachments to it. Yet, somewhere inside, there was still some notion of “home” in that big house on the Westside of Jacksonville. Is “home” just another word for nostalgia, a hazy memory that feels good for a little bit?

Rachelle and I have been married for almost fifteen years, and we have lived in 8 different houses (last time I counted, anyway). Some felt more like home than others. Some we knew were temporary—our home in Sewanee, for instance. While our current home feels like somewhere we’ll be for a long time, it’s confusing. What is “home,” and will I know it when I’m there?

On the Feast of the Epiphany, we remember the magi. They come to worship Jesus a few years after his birth. As they prepare to leave him, after their gifts have been presented and their worship is complete, they are warned about Herod’s plot to kill them. The angel tells them to go home, to return to their land, but to take a different route, to find a different way to get there. Did they get lost as they struggled to find their way back; is the road home a costly road, a difficult one?

I heard Mother Nancee, a wonderful priest from back in Florida, pray one time, and the way she addressed God has stuck with me. It has
become a regular way I pray. She said, “O God, who is our true home.” And maybe that’s the piece that brings it all together. These other homes are simply ways that God, our true home, makes grace known to us. They participate in the way that God is truly Home in a final sense. Our Home who isn’t mere nostalgia, who is constant and true. Our Home who doesn’t ask us to come by a different way, but comes to meet us at every turn.

God bless,
Fr. Quinn Parman+