Paradise Remembered: Longing for Our Home

Nostalgia has as its lightly buried foundation a longing for a place we have never been to, Eden. Home is but an echo, a shadow of our first and final home. Most of you were not blessed as I was, to grow up in an idyllic combination of peace and beauty. Many of you suffered early the curse of Cain, to wander east of Eden. Others had a childhood fueled more by the fruit of the fall than that which preceded the fall.

For all the hardships I have been through, a traumatic childhood was not one of them. Indeed of all the blessings I give thanks for that flowed through hands of my parents I count among the dearest that they raised me in the mountains of western Pennsylvania, a stone’s throw from the Mayberry like hamlet of Ligonier, Pennsylvania.

It certainly helped that my beloved Pirates, played in the postseason when I was 7, 9, and 10. And won the World Series when I was six and 14. The Steelers made the playoffs every year I lived from 7 to 14. They won the Super Bowl while I was 9, 10, 13 and 14. But all that was just icing on the cake of a boyhood marked by glorious fall festivals, summers tromping through a 20 acre wood and winters marked by a blazing fireplace, hot chocolate and sleds careening down sundry hills.

Each time I visit Ligonier I feel a perceptible weight lifted off my chest, breathing my air. While of course the apostle is right when he tells us of eternity, that our minds cannot begin to imagine what awaits us, there is a contrary corollary- eternity is everything good and blessed we enjoy now. When John Denver sang “almost heaven, West Virginia” he was right. Just keep driving north over the Pennsylvania border and you will be there.

My goal in writing isn’t to persuade you of the glories of my youth, and my hometown. Rather it is to give thanks, and to encourage you to do the same. While we were certainly sinners, indeed totally depraved sinners, there yet remains an innocence to youth, a trusting, wide-eyed wonder that could not help but give thanks.

There was in our youth a perspective not just on the gifts but the Giver that inverts the wisdom of CS Lewis. You remember when Lucy, coming upon Aslan in a later adventure remarks at how much bigger he had become. Aslan gently corrects her, explaining that he had not grown, but she had grown in her capacity to see him. All true, gloriously true. But it is likewise true that the weight of growing up, the burden of our daily wounds in time dulls our eyes to what we once knew by His common grace- that He was here, and He was with us.

Youth, we must come to understand, isn’t so much something we are to grow out of, but something we are to grow into. For of such is the kingdom of God. It is a deep blessing to know that home is where I am going. We remember innocence that we might long for it; we taste eternity that we might hunger for it. We believe He takes us there, and there, feeds us.