Madonna - May/June 2007

Homing and letting go- Chris Gleeson SJ

Several years ago in Sydney I attended the Mass of Thanksgiving for the life of that fine human being and eminent historian, Oliver Macdonagh. In his homily, the celebrant and Oliver’s parish priest, Fr Rex Curry, referred to his homing instinct. Like a homing pigeon, Oliver knew instinctively where to find his true home. He understood, in the words of St Augustine, that his heart would remain restless until he rested in God.

On the feast of Our Lord’s Ascension we celebrate the fact that Jesus is returning home to the Father. While he knew little of the comforts of home during his public ministry—‘the Son of Man has nowhere to lay his head’—Jesus remained perfectly at home with his Father and the Spirit.

This perfect at-homeness with one another, this communion, is what we know as the Trinity. For too long we have looked on the Trinity as an insoluble arithmetic problem—how can one equal three? It has forced us to see God as a self-contained divine individual—one in three and three in one—residing in heaven far distant from us.

Yet the invitation from Jesus in John 15 is clear:‘Make your home in me as I make mine in you’. St Augustine reminds us: ‘If you see charity, you see the Trinity’. When we orient ourselves to the needs and concerns of others, we are being drawn into the divine life of God.

It is one of the paradoxes of life that we need to remain on the move, to leave behind various stages of life, if we are to find a true home for ourselves. In an article entitled ‘Dying before Death’, Jock Dalrymple wrote once in The Ampleforth Journal:

‘Another area of life where we successively die to be reborn is that of parting. How poignant parting is; how difficult it is! Personally I never get used to parting, either from places or from people.

Am I alone in having found that it is just as sad to leave a place where I have been unhappy as it is to leave a place where I have been happy? In both cases, the places where I have lived and worked, the house, the streets, the landscape twine themselves round my heart like ivy round a tree-trunk. Every corner has a memory which tugs at me to keep me from leaving. ‘Partir c’est mourir un peu’. It really is. Leaving people is, of course, even more difficult than leaving places …

And yet we know that unless we part from one place and stage in life, we cannot begin in another. Our affection for the first has to be released and purified before we can treat the new place with seriousness and respect. So also with colleagues.

In his recent book, Already Within, Daniel O’Leary has written many catchy lines – none more so than ‘If you dare to love, be prepared to grieve.’ I am sure that at his Ascension Jesus was sad at farewelling his friends, his disciples. Certainly, he promised that he would not leave them orphans, that he would soon send them the inspiration and confirmation of the Spirit. But it was time for him to move on, to return to the Father, and be present to those he left behind in a new and different way.

Kathleen Norris has captured this paradox of homecoming very well when she writes: ‘To hold on to those you love, you have to let them go’. True lovers are never hoarders. They give their friends and those they love the freedom to be themselves.

Surely, this is what Jesus does when farewelling us at his Ascension. He leaves us free to continue his presence in the world, to be ‘God carriers’, but fired anew with the strength of his spirit. We strive to let him go, only to love him all the more.

The Ascension is about homecoming, reminding us of the sometimes painful reality that unless we leave one place and stage of life, we cannot begin in another. Cecil Day-Lewis captures this very well in the poem he dedicated to his first-born son, ‘Walking Away’:

It is eighteen years ago, almost to the day—
A sunny day with leaves just turning,
The touch-lines new-ruled—since I watched you play
Your first game of football, then, like a satellite
Wrenched from its orbit, go drifting away
Behind a scatter of boys. I can see
You walking away from me towards the school
With the pathos of a half-fledged thing set free
Into a wilderness, the gait of one
Who finds no path where the path should be.
That hesitant figure, eddying away
Like a winged seed loosened from its parent stem,
Has something I never quite grasp to convey
About nature’s give-and-take—the small, the scorching
Ordeals which fire one’s irresolute clay.
I have had worse partings, but none that so
Gnaws at my mind still. Perhaps it is roughly
Saying what God alone could perfectly show—
How selfhood begins with a walking away,
And love is proved in the letting go.

Prayer is exercising our homing instinct. In coming home to ourselves, may we find the Lord very much at home within us.