Home(s)

Eight days ago, my son and I left home and visited in another person’s home.  Then we returned home.  Later in the week,  for separate reasons, thoughts came about the meaning of home.

My grandfather sang the song “Hills of Home”¹ when concertizing or singing at home with my grandmother or mother accompanying.  Prompted by my mother, I included that song in a brass medley arranged for the grandparents’ 50th anniversary.  I had no particular attachment to the song then and have not remembered any of the lyrics except the chorus.  Now, though, as sentimentalness sets into my life and “home” seems ever more elusive, it comes to mind.  If you’re into nostalgia and would appreciate an older recording, try this.

Other songs and singers come to mind.  Roger Whittaker’s sense of his home in Kenya; John Denver’s association with Aspen, Colorado, and all the Rocky Mountain territory.  I particularly love Fernando Ortega’s earthy songs of his homelands, and also a tender song about a girl whose mother prays for her safety and her eventual return home.  Fernando, like many others, produced this entire album titled “Home,” and the title track includes the line “May it be a refuge.”  Of course there is the American classic lyric, “Be it ever so humble, there’s no place like home,” which famously surfaced musically at the culmination of Dorothy’s Wizard of Oz experience.

Although music often reflects² thoughts, human experience, and culture, music has no exclusive claim on the notion and experience of home.  Stories and movies also speak often and loudly.  Thanksgiving and Christmas and other holidays often carry with them rich memories of home.  Not all of the memories are good.  One of my most heartfelt musical works was an arrangement of the Stephen Foster song “Slumber, My Darling,” which is the vision of a mother bending over her baby at home.  On the one hand, home and family can be so sweet, but there is another hand.  Somehow, in most cases, no matter how problematic or annoying or painful the home experiences, most of us still find ourselves heading home at Thanksgiving and many other times.

Sentimental Christian songs of home (not hymns, but songs, properly speaking) have rarely if ever floated my boat.  The category in one hymnal is “Eternal Home” and in another, “Heavenly Home.”  I’m not sure this eternal-home imagery is helpful or accurate, but it’s there nonetheless, in songs such as “Home of the Soul” and “O Think of the Home Over There.”  Some home songs seem to contain nothing but stupidity and sap, such as “Winging My Way Back Home,” made popular by the Gaither Vocal Band and sung by many.  The notion of “home” is more subtle—and, for me, more God-oriented and therefore more palatable—in “On Jordan’s Stormy Banks” and “There Is a Habitation.”

I’m hard-pressed to name a single reference to a heaven-home in our scriptures.  If you can call one to mind, please comment below.  For now, I think I’ll think a little more on the saying of Jesus:  “the Son of man has nowhere to lay his head” (Matt 8; Luke 9).  Rich Mullins sang of that in one of his later songs, “You Did Not Have a Home.”  Demo version     Live version     Posthumous studio version

Now that I think about it, the idea of not having a home jibes nicely with one of my principal life-themes:  not being “at home” while existing as a pilgrim in a strange land.

Here’s Michael Card’s song “Home.”  This doesn’t necessarily resonate in me now, but perhaps someday it will again.

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¹ Apparently others thought this song was worthwhile, too:  it’s memorialized on a monument.

² The reflective, backward-looking nature of art music is known by musicologists and others.  It has been said that visual art and literature may be more predictive, on the leading edge of culture, while music tends to reflect.