Come home

Come to me, all you that are weary and are carrying heavy burdens, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you, and learn from me; for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. (Matthew 11:28-29)

Lord, I have been lost lately. And I want to come home.

Consumed by the constant conflict of a nation at odds over what it is becoming, a cloud of anger, fear and sadness has descended on my heart, shrouding the place where you, dear Friend, abide.

And I need you. I need your friendship, the palpable sense of your love within, or I am not myself, let alone a pale shadow of the heart you seemed to have had in mind when you created me.

From earliest days, you fashioned my tenderness, I believe, as a partial expression of your unspeakable beauty. But in these days, I have lost the gentleness I long craved and wanted evermore to become.

The rancor of these times sours my heart. And I have offered little resistance, allowing myself to be carried away in bitter tides of cynicism and negativity that barb my words into weapons.

This is my Lenten confession, accept it, dear Friend, as the heartfelt desire of a prodigal soul eager to come home … where I can look in the mirror and see something of you in the weariness staring back at me.

The words of hearts deeper and truer than my own lift me these days. They tell me that I am not alone. Others have walked harder roads without losing themselves in the tumult of their times.

‘There is a deep well inside me,’ wrote Dutch mystic, Etty Hillesum, in the days before the Holocaust swept her away. ‘And in it dwells God. Sometimes I am there, too. But more often stones and grit block the well, and God is buried beneath. Then he must be dug out again.’

That’s what I am doing, digging, trusting—no, knowing—that beneath the detritus that consumes my consciousness, there is a place, a room, a quiet corner in the darkness where you, dear Friend, abide, beckoning me to come home that you might enfold me in the Love you are, restoring me to myself and the loving joy you intend for all of us.

You do not leave us to fight alone through the clamor to the place of Love’s abiding. You breathe through every gracious smile of our beloved, in every word of forgiveness and in every moment of beauty that awakens our senses as Spring’s hope dawns fresh.

And what they only whisper, you sing aloud from the cross of your Passion, ‘Come to me, you weary, and I will give you rest.’