They are calling, gently calling,
Sweetly calling me to come,
And I’m looking through the shadows
For the blessèd lights of home.
When I was a child, I built. Our living room was a field of Legos and Lincoln Logs, wooden blocks and shoeboxes arranged into castles, forts, and villages, the missing parts of which were completed in my imagination. My play was in cycles: warring invaders and valiant last stands one week, jungle explorers and adventurers another, then a few days of building small towns. The tabula rasa of an empty floor became platted with streets, each block anchored with a small Lego building: a bank, post office, grocery, or gas station. Tiny toy cars cruised up and down the lanes, with an occasional drag race to liven things up. The fussiness of scale didn’t worry me—so what if my toy dump truck was no larger than the windows of the bank? Reality bent to the story as needed.
After the excitement of building, testing doors and windows and walls, demolition and reconstruction, there inevitably came a late evening when all was done. I remember winter evenings most prominently, perhaps because the early sunset kept me confined to the house. My dad had given me a penlight, which was not just a small flashlight, but literally a pen with a tiny incandescent light surrounding the ballpoint. It was one of the coolest gadgets I’d seen in my young life. With the living room lights turned off, I sprawled on the floor, my chin resting on the back of one hand, and placed the penlight in each building in turn. Then I quietly laid there and gazed from street level at the ensuing magic.
Surrounded by the dark, a warm, yellow light glimmered from the tiny windows and doors. The words for the feeling that enveloped me only come now, decades later. But there, here, then, now, what do such designations of distance and time mean in the face of the numinous? I am here and then caught in the glow of the light of home. The light in the darkness, welcoming, calling me into its arms.
I’ve seen this light at other times in my life: arriving at a backpacking camp late at night, glimpsing the glow of a campfire arising behind a picket of trees. Deep in the troubled days of an isolation retreat, seeing a fellow retreatant’s kerosene lamp shining from their window on a hilltop. Standing by a mountain spring deep within a valley, below me a farmhouse framed in the bend of a creek, every window lit with fullness in the falling evening. My own home, on no particular night, catching my eye for a moment as it glimmered in timelessness. I mention these occasions only in hopes of sparking a memory in you of a similar sight seen both with your eyes and heart.
Within me the feeling is the same across the days of my life: my heart both reaching out and being pulled, as if I could fly forward and leap into the light. There’s no void, no fear, but a fullness and a longing. It’s the Everything that is part and parcel of the Nothing.
It’s time to end this story, but not harshly. As children, we wordlessly intuit beauty even as we are drawn into the game of building and creating. As adults in the prime of our selfing, perhaps we pause from exhaustion or momentary defeat, and grace grants us a glimpse of eternity. And as the arc of life begins its downward trajectory, we look to the past and see hints of the future—children playing with penlights in the next room, building vessels in which God manifests again… again… and again. Youthful eyes aglow in the dazzling dark. Thus, we remember the longing for that which is right in front of us… and behind, above, and below. So what to do? Slow your reading of these words. Pause. Let the room around you fill with silence. Gently move the attention from inner to outer/within to without. In that seamless passage, look for any distinction between self and other. Do you see/feel the light of Home?
The Lights of Home hymn by Fanny J. Crosby