Home, Semi-Sweet Home

Teachers of writing might, for good reason, caution movie writers to use the concept of "home" cautiously. The problem is that it can easily lead to sentimentality – to an expression of emotion that seems overdone to the movie viewer.  If the opening scene of a movie depicts a family seated quietly in their living-room with a needlepoint of "Home, Sweet Home" on the wall above the fireplace, the viewer should be wary.  Unless that self-proclaimed label of domestic sweetness is tongue-in-cheek about the dysfunctional nature of the family beside the fireplace, we are likely to find the movie becoming saccharine.

Nevertheless, the concept of "home" can genuinely touch deep resonances within us if it is skillfully used by a poet.  The very word "home" can express a place of belonging we'd like to get back to, even if we've never quite been there.  Some of the best instances I've encountered of the use of "home" also speak to a relationship with Nature.

One poem that makes an explicit correlation (and which seems to portray an actual event in the poet's life) is written by Joseph Bruchac.  The poem has the unusual title of "Geese Flying over a Prison Sweat Lodge."  A session together in a sweat lodge (similar to a sauna) is one Native-American way of bonding socially and re-grounding spiritually.  In the incident this particular poem describes, however, being in the comforting interior space of the lodge ("inside our memories /  waiting to be born again") is contrasted with the imprisoning walls of prison life ("mortared stone / with razor wire on top").  Paradoxically, once enclosed within the set of walls of the sweat lodge, the prisoners find release through a contact with Nature they cannot even see.  That is because they hear "the cries of the geese... their touch deep as bone, / speaking words never written / That always mean home."

The "home" metaphor can be powerful (if deftly used) because it speaks not only to our inner resonances with the natural world but also to our loneliness and our fear of separation. I know of no better expression of the two elements together -- Nature and longing -- than in the following short poem by Rainer Maria Rilke.  Interestingly, Rilke, like Bruchac, draws upon migrating birds' astounding homing instinct -- their urge to get home.

"Ah, not to be cut off,

not through the slightest partition

shut out from the law of the stars.

The inner – what is it?

if not intensified sky,

hurled through with the birds and deep

with the winds of homecoming."

~~~

Do you have a way of getting back home spiritually?

(The Bruchac poem can be found in

 Native American Songs and Poems, ed. Brian Swann, © 1996.)

(The Rilke poem, trans. by Stephen Mitchell, is from

 Ahead of All Parting:  The Selected Poetry and Prose of Rainer Maria Rilke, © 1995.)

The Starry Sky

I most recently encountered the idea in F. C. Happold's Religious Faith and Twentieth-Century Man.  Like a number of other thoughtful Christian writers over the past half-century, Happold (a modern mystic ) has commented upon the contrast between the cosmology of Biblical times and the one provided by our contemporary astronomy.  These writers know that the Bible was not meant to be science.  Nevertheless, they raise the question of whether "modern man's" way of thinking about the world is now so different that we cannot respond spiritually in a way paralleling that of people several centuries ago.  They point out how we now have detailed scientific knowledge of the cosmos, and ask if the kind of religious sentiment felt by people centuries ago is not diminished in contrast.

But I wonder.  I recognize that there has been an immense change in our scientific knowledge of the cosmos... but still I wonder.  I wonder whether it is our increased knowledge of astronomy that poses the problem, or perhaps something else.  I wonder if the challenge doesn't come more from some side effects of our scientific technology.

In Biblical times, people did not know about light-years of distance, or about the millions of galaxies, or about an expanding universe.  Those people could, however, simply look up at the sky at night and see more stars than anyone could count.  The stars were to them as innumerable as the grains of sand upon the shore (Gen. 22:17).  And those people's response could be sacred awe.

Today, most people rarely have the same experience, but I do not think it is because our scientific knowledge is so much greater.  It is instead because our firsthand experience of the night sky is so limited.  When we today look up at the sky at night, we most likely see only a fraction of the number of stars Biblical man saw.  All the ambient city lights prevent us from seeing a black-velvet background of sky studded with stars beyond anyone's counting.

Even if there were not so many electric lights outside to interfere, would that mean there wouldn't still be another problem?  Wouldn't all our technological temptations (TV., computers, and cellphones) distract us?  Even when there are a fair number of stars visible, how often do you see people in U.S. cities pause from their activities to look up and survey the starry night sky?

time exposure of night sky

Even if I cannot see as many stars as I would like to, I still like to look up and see as many as I can -- and I find it so wondrous!  That is why I like to periodically leaf through my book of Gerard Manley Hopkins' poems and read the opening lines of "The Starlight Night."  Those lines read:  

"Look at the stars!  look, look up at the skies!

O look at all the fire-folk sitting in the air!

The bright boroughs, the circle-citadels there!"

~~~

Do you have a favorite remembrance of having experienced the starry sky?