Notice the Little Homecomings

If you want to feel a little relief and a lot of joy, pay attention to the little homecomings woven throughout your ordinary days.

To be human is to hope for a homecoming.

Many of us hope for a heavenly homecoming. When I was a boy, I learned in church about that big homecoming in the sky. Angels blowing trumpets. Streets made of gold. A mansion of my own. Agreeable neighbors. And there, no tears would be shed. Unfortunately, it was suggested we’d be singing hymns for all eternity, which was difficult to imagine given how badly my church shoes pinched.

But, hey, you can’t win them all.

Nowadays, I still imagine a homecoming beyond this human life, though I’m guessing the mansions were more a figment of our capitalist infatuation than our spiritual imagination. I’ll be surprised if tears are outlawed there, because I feel most at home in the places where my tears are not banished but cherished. And I suspect we’ll love our neighbors there not because everybody votes like us, but because we’ve shed the parts of us that hate.

Also, these days, I’m more interested in the homecoming that happens inside this human experience. Jesus called that kind of homecoming “the kingdom of heaven.” He said it was near. He said it was here. He said it was happening now. I think we’re all hoping for a more immediate kind of homecoming.

I think that’s why we strive for such extraordinary human homecomings.

We had one of those last weekend in our town—it was high school homecoming weekend. Young men concocted homecoming invitations like wedding proposals. Young women went dress shopping in stores where they serve champagne while an assistant fetches accessories for you. Everyone gathered for more pictures than were taken at my wedding. The dance floor was mobbed. The kids needed days to recover.

I adored all of it. To quote the Lord Byron:

On with the dance! let joy be unconfin'd;

No sleep till morn, when Youth and Pleasure meet

To chase the Glowing Hours with Flying feet.

But the most satisfying homecomings aren’t the loudest ones, they’re they littlest ones.

For instance, I witnessed the tiniest, most ordinary human homecoming, over and over again, under Friday night lights.

My daughter plays clarinet in the marching band, so my wife and I arrived early for the football game. We snagged seats low in the bleachers, near the 50-yard line, so we could see her clearly with our aging eyes. It was the perfect vantage point from which to observe fans entering the stands via some steps in the middle of the bleachers. One by one, they’d turn and scan the crowd for the person or people they were there to join. At first, the look on every face was identical.

It was anguish.

It was the lonely stress of not finding at first that person you belong to. There was grimacing. There was frowning. There was anxiety in the eyes. It was the first day of kindergarten all over again. The first day in the middle school cafeteria. The first hours in your first dorm room. A first date. A first day on the job.

Is there anything more human than arriving in a crowded world, looking into the vast sea of faces staring past you, and searching for someone who actually sees you and wants you?

“I want to find one face that ain’t lookin’ through me,” howls Bruce Springsteen.

On every face I witnessed, as soon as their eyes landed on the person they were looking for in the bleachers, the anguish was transformed into a thoroughly human alchemy of relief and joy. Each time, their eyes lit up brighter than the lights over the field.

It didn’t matter if it was a grade school kid who’d gone for a soda and was trying to find her family again, a high schooler looking to join his friends who arrived before him, or a spouse searching for their partner. Same anguish. Same relief. Same joy.

Same homecoming, every time.

I can only assume there was a similar smile being smiled each time in the bleachers behind me. After all, as the poet e.e. cummings writes, “Your homecoming will be my homecoming.”

Homecomings don’t happen only in heaven.

And we don’t need to create extravagant homecomings here on Earth.

We need only notice the little homecomings already happening all the time, right here, right now.

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Where do you experience little homecomings in your life? I’d love to hear in the comments about what you’re noticing. Or if you want messages like this to spread, hit the ❤️ below to like this post, and/or the 🔄 to share it on Substack.