[Magdalen] Where is home? (was Re: RIP Dorothy Mengering, 95.)

[Roger Stokes]

On 13/04/2017 21:34, Jay Weigel wrote:
> I was sad when my mom died, and I still miss her, more so than my dad. When
> your parents are gone, it means you can't ever go home again. I'm not so
> sure I like this business of being at the head of the generational train,
> either.

This weekend should really focus our attention on that question. Do we 
hark back to where we came from as home or look to our eternal home? Not 
long after Joan and I got together I took her to the city where I was 
brought up (Rochester in Kent which traces its roots to Roman times). It 
didn't take me long to realise it was not home for me. My parents still 
lived in the general area, but they had downsized into a retirement 
apartment block from the house I left in 1965, over 20 years previously, 
to go away to university. My old school had been demolished, leaving 
holes in the old city walls where corridors had passed through, and 
while much remained it had a different feel. I had moved on and so had 
the city.

When retirement beckoned, and with it the need to find somewhere else to 
live as I had to leave the Vicarage, I had to decide where my new home 
would be. It didn't take long. I was coming up to 15 years in Bedford, 
the longest period I had ever spent in any place in my life by a 
considerable margin. I also knew that I would need to build a new life 
apart from the parish and I already had the basis of that here with 
non-Church activities. My parents had died, so there was nothing 
attracting me back to Rochester. I was not going to move to be closer to 
my son and his family who might well move (they have) and my older 
brother lives half an hour away, not that we are close because we had 
not been in the same part of the country since he went to university in 
1961 when I was 14.

Basically it was a no-brainer, possibly helped by the number of times I 
have moved. This is my 19th, and hopefully last, home on this earth. 
Joan was similarly loosely attached to any concept of "home", defining 
it as where you could put the kettle on. This has been a bit of a stream 
of consciousness but are we not, as Christians, called to sit lightly to 
the things of this world while we focus our hopes on what is yet to be? 
We are called to be in the world but not of it.

Roger