The Longing for Home
For the past few years, it has become a New Year’s Day tradition of mine to tweet pretty much the exact same thing. It’s a quote from Frederick Buechner that goes like this: “Here is the world. Beautiful and terrible things will happen. Don’t be afraid.”
Those three short sentences sum up so much of Buechner’s writing. They sum up so much of our lives. It’s that attunement to the reality of living that keeps me returning to his work, time after time, year after year. And blessedly, because he has been writing for so long, there are still “new” Buechner books to discover, even in 2021.
In the essays that comprise The Longing for Home, which was published in 1996, Buechner writes with characteristic verve and eloquence about longing for the homes of our youth (“the home we knew”), and also yearning for a future home that lies somewhere off in the distance (“the home we dream”). He writes from and about the particularities of his own life, while reflecting on how his “longings for home” have changed, how they’ve grown more acute, with age. It’s those particularities that resonate, even though the details of Buechner’s biography are neither yours nor mine.
At the end of a chapter that is jarringly specific and, one feels, probably twice as long as it needs to be – it’s the history of the Old Whipple Mill in Shaftsbury, Vermont, a history and a home to which he is only loosely connected – Buechner brings the story full circle and leaves us dazzled:
“Generally speaking, the threads that bind us to each other are no less real for being mostly invisible, no less important and precious. In the long run, each of our stories turns out to be the story of us all, and the home we long for has in all likelihood been home to others whose names we don’t even know and will be home again to still others when the ever-rolling stream of things has long since borne us away.”
Buechner is a wonderful writer, and while this is hardly the book I’d recommend to a newbie, I’m so glad The Longing for Home was and is there to discover.
