It is over 300 miles from my house to the town I grew up in. I drove to my hometown for a conference. I drove through familiar streets that were suddenly not so familiar. My hometown of San Antonio, Texas has grown since I actually lived here. My old neighborhood, that was my known universe as a child is so tiny. I remember walking the streets of that neighborhood and even two streets over seemed like an adventure.
I love my home town, I truly do. I am not sure I miss it, it has been 43 years since I went off to college, but I sometimes long for those much simpler days. Days when I did not know that my family had very little money, didn’t realize I lived on the wrong side of the tracks. I see it all now and it is very different and yet strangely familiar. I do miss being innocent. The not knowing.
I am guessing you miss being innocent as well. Oh, and I was naïve about so many things too! I grew up in my teenage years, to learn about church and the bare bones of the spiritual life. I am glad I got my start here at home, but I am very glad I “left home”. I don’t really want to be innocent anymore, it is too painful to come to awareness. Have the t-shirts and scars from those multiple trips.
I understand why scripture says that once you put your hand to the plough, you cannot look back. In farming life, in those old days, if you took your eyes off of the focus ahead, the furrows would go everywhere. What a mess, looking back surely gets you off track. The only time you get to see those nice, straight lines is at the end of a hard day of ploughing. Then, and only then, you can survey your work.
That’s what coming home does for me. I love this place. It is full of memories but I can only see the lines after all this time. I don’t want to go back and I don’t want to waste time looking back, that is surely a way to get off track. And yet, I do it all the time. In life, looking back is when we start putting “should” or “ought to” into our lives. If only I had…..I wish I could…….. Brene Brown, a fellow social worker, has written a book, the Gift of Imperfection. She describes me perfectly. In her book she talks about “shame storms”. Those moments when we are sure we are inadequate, unloveable, and not good enough. That is looking back.
I struggle every day with shame storms and looking back. I think we all do, especially as contemplatives. But that is a real problem, looking back. Contemplatives have to be careful of this danger: everything is so serious, everything must be questioned, how else can I be authentic and contemplative?
Sometimes, you just go home. You look at the old streets, remember the good old days and give yourself a break. Neither God nor good sense says you cannot choose to only remember the good. It is what the Eternal does every moment looking at us!
TMM