Category: Nature

Home

‘And so at last they came to the Last Homely House, and found its doors flung wide’ – J.R.R. Tolkien

I was walking Rossco, my wonderfully exuberant Aussie-Shepherd/Border Collie, along the creek, when suddenly, I heard scampering to my right.  My eyes went wide as I saw, of all things, a groundhog racing toward us faster and fiercer than any of his species had a right to move or be.  As he charged up the steep bank, his eyes were like saucers, his mouth open, and his teeth bared.  It appeared that he was attempting to launch a preemptive strike on Rossco (and/or me), whom he most certainly considered a threat.  I mean, what else could explain his running toward us, rather than away from us. 

I braced myself for the onslaught, but when he was about a foot away, thank God, he dove like a submarine and vanished.  I had not noticed, could not have noticed, that just below the lip of the bank, just below our feet, was the entrance to his burrow. 

As I pulled Rossco away (he of course wanted to follow the varmint into his den), the groundhog’s furry face flashed comically across my mind, and I realized that the look upon it had been one of fear, not ferocity.  His mouth had been open, and his teeth bared, not because he was preparing to attack, but because he had been gulping air to fuel his assent up the bank.  His eyes had been wide as saucers because, well, if he had possessed a thought balloon, it would have read, ‘Oh [expletive deleted], that dog is about to kill me!’  I had wondered why, instead of running away from us, he had run toward us.  Now I knew that as the groundhog’s brain processed the danger posed by our presence, a single word had flashed through his mind.

Home. 

And with that, I had to smile.  For in that, I had to recognize, not just the wisdom of the groundhog’s choice of direction, but the smiling presence of God. 

Home.  It is the place where we know we are safe, the place of comfort, warmth, and love.  Think about the word for a moment and you will likely conjure up all sorts of lovely images and memories.  Baking cookies with your mom.  Watching baseball with your Dad.  Sitting by the fire on a frosty night.  Sipping tea while reading a book or watching your favorite show.  Gathering about the table for family game night.  Lying next to the one you love.  Home is the feeling you get when you think of such things, the ache in your heart to experience them all over again.  Even in the absence of the underlying realities that forge such memories, there remains in every heart the hope of their becoming.  We all, in one way or another, share what Frederick Buchner calls ‘the longing for home.’  He writes of home as that ‘something that we feel we belong to and that belongs to us.’[1]  Deep within each of us is a yearning to be home, whether it be the home of our cherished memories or the home of unfulfilled desires. 

And let’s face it: the yearning is real.  The world can be a callous and cruel place, filled with dangers.  As we navigate the riverbanks of our lives, we encounter many threats.  When we do, there is a deep, instinctive drive to run, as the groundhog had run, for the place we call home.  To either return to the place where we have felt safe, warm, and loved, or else to find such a place for the very first time.  To take refuge there. 

Home is like Rivendell, the elvish haven in Tolkien’s world.  I have read The Hobbit every couple of years since I was in the fourth grade, and each time I get to the line, ‘And so at last they came to the Last Homely House, and found its doors flung wide,’ I choke up.  To me it speaks of the longing for home.  In the story, Bilbo and his friends have just escaped the clutches of a clan of trolls, and Rivendell is just the sanctuary they need.  It is home, so much so that later in his life, when Bilbo tires of his adventures, he settles there to ‘live happily ever after to the end of his days.’  We all long for a place like that, a place that is more ‘homely’ even than the comfort of our hobbit holes.  I know I long for such a home.  Not just the home of my childhood (as happy as it was), or even my present home with my wife and children (as wonderful as it is).  I am thankful for the refuge of such homes.  But even so, I long for the home that lies just beyond my grasp, that place that will put to rest, once and for all, the callousness and cruelty of this world. The home that will possess all the best of all the homes we have known or dreamt of, and then some. 

The good news is that there is such a home.  There is, in fact, a Rivendell.  Even better, in that you can be happy there for days without end.  The disciple John describes it at the close of Revelation:

‘I heard a loud shot from heaven’s throne, saying, ‘Behold!  The home of God is among his people!  He will live with them, and they will be his people.  God himself will be with them.  He will wipe every tear from their eyes, and there will be no more death or sorrow or crying or pain.  All these things are gone forever’ (21:3-4). 

This is the home we long for, the habitation of absolute safety and love.  Our home in God.  Buechner put it this way: ‘the home we long for and belong to is finally where Christ is.’  It is the place for which we yearn most deeply, the place where, in Christ, we shall one day be.

Until then, we walk as ‘strangers and aliens in the world,’ in search of our ‘homeland’ (see, Hebrews 11:13-14).  And as we do, we cherish the foretastes of home we experience even now, for, yes, where Christ is, there is home, and Christ is, praise be, everywhere.  He is in everything that causes us to ache for home.  He is in His Church, in that moment when a song or a word causes that tear in your eye or that catch in your throat.  He is in the bosom of our families, in those moments of wonder that make everything seem worthwhile.  He is in the rainbow that dazzles the sky in the wake of a violent storm.  He is even, as he was for me the other day, in the wide eyes of a panicky groundhog, racing up a creek bank, reminding me of the importance, and loveliness, of home. 

In such things, we catch glimpses of the day when we shall come at last to the Last Homely House, and find its doors flung wide.

Under Christ’s Mercy,

Brent

[1] Frederick Buechner, The Longing for Home: Reflections and Recollections. 

Bee Sense

‘Don’t just look to your own interests.  Consider the interests of others’ – Philippians 2:4

I recently spent some time in a community garden watching bees and butterflies.  Pollinators are amazing to observe, and I filmed several video clips and took even more pictures as they drank nectar from flowers.  One thing the pandemic era has taught me is to appreciate the simple things.  Enjoying God, the company of family and friends, and the beauty of the earth are pretty much all I need these days to be content, so spending an hour or so with my daughter and mother-in-law in the garden watching bees and butterflies was a kind of bliss. 

It wasn’t long after this experience that I serendipitously read an entry concerning bees in Peter Wohlleben’s, The Inner Life of Animals.  Bees are fascinating creatures, necessary for the health of our planet, but also capable of teaching lessons.  One such lessons struck me as I read Wohlleben’s discussion of how bees stay cool in the summer and warm in the winter.  In the summer months, the intense activity among bees can raise hive temperatures considerably, which could prove fatal to the colony, but bees have found ways to stay cool.  Worker bees bring water into the hive to cool things down, and the fluttering of wings produces breezes.  In such ways, the hive is climate controlled, and the bees don’t overcook. 

In the winter, warming measures are undertaken.  If it gets cold enough, the bees of a colony will huddle together in ball.  The queen, who must be protected at all costs, is of course placed in the center of the ball where it is warmest.  Moving out from the center, the temperature of course drops, placing the bees at the outer rim in peril of freezing to death, except for one thing: the bees take turns.  They take shifts on the ball’s surface, allowing each crew to take a turn closer to the center and warm up before returning to duty on the outer edge.  In this way, the colony, and each bee within it, has a chance to survive the winter. 

One wonders what motivates bees to look out for one another in this fashion.  Perhaps it is too much to suggest they care for one another (then again, perhaps they do).  It seems more likely that they simply understand that the success of the hive depends on the success of each bee.  If they lose even a single member of the colony, the ability to stay warm collectively is diminished.  Essentially, bees know that they need each other.  Each individual bee therefore considers the interests of the others along with their own.  Each bee knows that unless they look out for the other members of the colony, no one will make it. It is of course natural for bees to feel this way; they are inherently collectivists, not individualists.  They don’t live their lives in terms of ‘me’ and ‘I’ but ‘we’ and ‘us.’  They value one another’s contributions to the collective, and are willing to sacrifice, in this case, a little bit of warmth, for the sake of saving the whole. 

I could run in a thousand directions on this, most of which would produce controversy.  This would only prove the point of this post, but honestly, I’m just too tired to deal with it at the moment (I’m on vacation).  Suffice it to say that we humans could learn from bees.  It breaks my heart, and makes me more than a little frustrated, that some people (I won’t say most, although I confess, I’m tempted these days) can’t seem to understand that we need to look out for each other.  They can’t seem to understand that each one of us has value, and that we need to look, not just to our own interests but to the interests of others.  They can’t seem to understand that if we don’t look out for one another, say, by taking a shot in the arm or wearing a mask (okay, I just went in one of those potentially controversial directions), we will all be impacted detrimentally.  They can’t seem to understand that we should be willing to make sacrifices, for the sake of saving both the vulnerable among us and our society as a whole. 

Perhaps bees are just programmed to act the way they do.  Perhaps they don’t think nearly as much about their behavior as I have suggested.  But to my way of thinking, that only makes things worse.  We human beings have been gifted with the ultimate grace: we have been made in the image of God (Genesis 1:27).  We have the ability to reason, to think things through, to feel compassion for others, to experience community, to love.  Those of us who claim to be Christian claim not only these extraordinary graces, but the power of God to activate them fully.  How sad then, when we neglect our birthright and ignore the gifts we have been given, when we, instead of considering the needs of others, choose to only, and shortsightedly, consider our own. 

I leave it to you, reader, to consider the myriad of circumstances to which this lesson may apply.  Like I said, I could take this in a thousand directions.  All I choose to say in closing is this: its time we started acting a little more like the bees.

It’s time we all got a little bee sense. 

Under Christ’s Mercy,

Brent