Coming Home

'For Catholics, it is not simply the church or churches of our childhood or youth that are home. It is every Catholic Church or Chapel from whence the sacraments are administered.'

From Crisis

By Charles Coulombe, KCSS, STM

For Catholics, it is not simply the church or churches of our childhood or youth that are home. It is every Catholic Church or Chapel from whence the sacraments are administered.

“Home is the place where, when you have to go there,
They have to take you in.”
—Robert Frost, “The Death of the Hired Man”

We still remember, we who dwell
In this far land beneath the trees
The starlight on the Western Seas.
—J.R.R. Tolkien, “Hymn to Elbereth”

After many months in Europe, I have come home for a little while to Los Angeles—although by the time you read this, I’ll have returned to Austria. As ever, it is a bittersweet thing—the more so because, in the six years I have lived abroad, Southern California has been declining in a great many ways. This process has been exacerbated by the Covid experience and the attempt by State and City government to show that one can govern without knowing the first thing about either morals or economics. 

Los Angeles is a city of ghosts for me, so many of those family and friends I have loved having died. But during the course of one week, I showed members of my unofficially-adopted Austrian family my boyhood haunts in Hollywood and elsewhere in the area. Despite all, seeing it through their younger and foreign eyes was a great joy.

Blessed Sacrament Church, where I received my First Communion back in 1968, is still impressive. Miceli’s and Musso and Frank were the wonderlands they had been to me as a boy. Beverly Hills was redolent with glamour, and Silver Lake’s Shakespeare Bridge displayed its faded Golden-Age-of-Cinema grandeur. I took them by the Santa Anita Racetrack, and “Old Town” Monrovia—the latter’s foundation in the 1920s did not impress these voyagers from an antique land nearly as much as its constant use in film and TV as “Anytown, USA.”

After their departure, I visited a great many places, from the Los Angeles Breakfast Club to Pasadena’s Vroman’s Bookstore and San Marino’s Huntington Library. I drove up the Central Coast, revisiting a number of Missions and the over-the-top Madonna Inn. A great many get-togethers with old friends and relations have certainly dipped me into an ocean of nostalgic pleasures. We have entertained one another with memories of old revelries, renditions of the dear old songs, and joyful drink—but rather less than was our wont in days gone by. Home is not merely a place; it is a time. What these past few weeks have shown me is that one may return to the one but not the other.

As with many people, moreover, the whole of my life has not been spent in one place, and there are other areas of the country that are part of that elusive locale called “home.” I first saw the light in Manhattan’s late-lamented Doctors Hospital on the day John F. Kennedy was elected—supposedly, Marilyn Monroe was in the same institution the day I was born. In any case, my parents claimed I had taken on neither her looks nor his charm—for which all three of us were grateful! But to this day, although we left when I was a small child, that island and the area of Westchester where we lived seem far more like home than Southern California ever has. 

Of course, my love of Washington Irving has reinforced that of my native State, and similar literary and historical interests have given New York City a place in my imagination far greater than my few years there. Nevertheless, standing under the Atlas statue at Rockefeller Center or by the big clock at Grand Central Station, where many a time we rendezvoused with my grandparents, my childhood returns to me.

But home is far more than mere memory or nostalgia; it also encompasses an element of belonging. Although I have never lived in Massachusetts, my father was born in New Bedford, and Bristol and Essex Counties are filled with relatives. Moreover, my family plot is at Notre Dame Cemetery in Fall River—my great grandparents, grandparents, and parents are all there. I accompanied the last two to their final resting places, and I know that one day I shall join them. In a real sense, that quiet and lonely plot, too, is “home.” 

Beyond the personal, of course, “home” can have a wider meaning. When I was young, Americans were encouraged to look at the Nation’s Capital as a common home—the White House and Capitol building were our mutual property, while the Smithsonian Institution, the National Archives, and the Library of Congress were repositories of our national memory. Indeed, all the historic sites against which the chapters of our national saga were worked out were seen in the same light—as were the National, State, and local parks and forests. To this day, official publications will tell us that these places “belong to all Americans.” To the degree this is still true, there is an element here of home. 

But the United States is only one of the countries that together make up the once and future Christian West. If you come from the States or one of our fellow settler countries in the Americas, Australasia, or elsewhere, Europe is, in a real sense, “home”—the Mother Continent. This is true on three levels: 1) it is the culmination of that civilization based upon three hills: Golgotha, the Acropolis, and the Palatine Hill—which, in a sense, incarnated Christianity; 2) it is the place from which came our dominant culture and language—be it English, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, or Russian; and 3) it is the place from which our own particular DNA comes. As the Italian cultural movement Identità Europea says in its manifesto: 

By encouraging a European Identity, we do not intend to promote a “western culture” which absorbs and dissolves all diversities in a levelling attempt. On the contrary, our aim is to enlarge this identity beyond the European boundaries, thus recovering that large part of our continent “outside Europe”—from Argentina to Canada and from South Africa to Australia—which looks at the old continent not as a distant ancestor but as a real homeland.

So it is that whenever anyone from the daughter nations visits Europe, he often feels a sense of homecoming, of returning to his sources—and of course, he is. He can visit the places mentioned in his language’s great literature and see the historical sites that shaped those who crossed the sea and founded his country—whether he be descended from them or from later immigrants from other parts of Europe—which he can also visit and so have yet another kind of homecoming. Novels, histories, movies, television shows, and family stories that he has read, seen, and heard, all come to life for him.

But homecoming is not merely about space; it can also be about time, as earlier suggested. One’s parents and grandparents may be long gone. But as Halloween, Thanksgiving, Christmas, Easter, and July 4th, among others, make their appearance over the course of the year, one can also come home in a sense. As we carve the Jack O’ Lantern, trim the Christmas Tree, roast the turkey, or do any of the other tasks that come with each holiday’s observance, family, friends, and locales long gone come back to us and sweeten the present with what was best in the past. Here, too, we are home. But as with visits to our personal or ancestral homes, these nostalgic turns cannot last long, sadly enough.

All three types of home come together in one space and time, however, and that is the Church. The church or churches where we were baptized, first went to Confession and received Holy Communion, were confirmed, and, at last, married or ordained (or both, for some of the Eastern Rite and Ordinariate clerics among us) must always have a special place in our hearts. Laetare Sunday, the fourth Sunday in Lent (one of the two Sundays when Old Rose vestments are worn, the other being Advent’s Gaudete Sunday) was called, in the Middle Ages, “Mothering Sunday” because of the references to motherhood in the readings.  

The custom grew up of visiting the church where one was baptized on that day. In England it survived the Protestant Revolt, and domestic servants were allowed to visit their home churches and their families on that day. As a response to the American custom of Mother’s Day, Mothering Sunday was reinvigorated across Britain and the Commonwealth, and it retains today its dual character of church-and-mother visiting.

But for us Catholics, it is not simply the church or churches of our childhood or youth that are home. It is every Catholic Church or Chapel from whence the sacraments are administered. Wherever we go to confess our sins and/or to receive and be received by Our Lord in the Blessed Sacrament; to bless ourselves with Holy Water; to pray to Our Lady and the saints—there is home. It encompasses as well as transcends all of the homes of which we have been speaking. 

To take one example, when we receive the Blessed Sacrament, we are of course united with God Himself; as also with the Last Super and the Crucifixion, the two of which in tandem and beyond time were the commencement of the Eucharistic Sacrifice. But on a lesser level, we are also united with every valid Eucharist that has ever been offered—with all those offered by those saints who were priests and bishops, and received by all the other saints and the great heroes of renown: with Arthur, Charlemagne, and Godfrey of Bouillon.

More familiar to us, we are united with every reception of the Host that any of our family had—and that we ourselves have ever had over the course of our lives. We are at once back at our First Communion, our graduation day Mass, our Nuptial Mass. For that matter, since the future is transcended as well, we are also united with our Requiem, and all the Masses that shall ever be offered for the repose of our souls.

This, too, is an important note because the yearning that we feel for home is ultimately not for any place that we have ever been. As Dom Guéranger puts it in his article on the Vigil of All Saints in The Liturgical Year: 

Let Us prepare our souls for the graces heaven is about to shower upon the earth in return for its homage. Tomorrow the Church will be so overflowing with joy, that she will seem to be already in possession of eternal happiness; but today she appears in the garb of penance, confessing that she is still an exile. Let us fast and pray with her; for are not we too pilgrims and strangers in this world, where all things are fleeting and hurry on to death? Year by year, as the great solemnity comes round, it has gathered from among our former companions new saints, who bless our tears and smile upon our songs of hope. Year by year the appointed time draws nearer, when we ourselves, seated at the heavenly banquet, shall receive the homage of those who succeed us, and hold out a helping hand to draw them after us to the home of everlasting happiness. Let us learn, from this very hour, to emancipate our souls, let us keep our hearts free, in the midst of the vain solicitudes and false pleasures of a strange land: the exile has no care but his banishment, no joy but that which gives him a foretaste of his fatherland.

All of our yearning for home is really a yearning for Heaven, for the “Land of the Living,” the “Realms of Endless Day.” We wander through this world of sin and shadows like lost sheep, wondering where our shepherd and our sheepfold is; its beyond what Chesterton called “the decent inn of death.” This is a hard saying in many ways because we moderns are taught that death is the greatest evil there is—and to avoid it, whole populations willingly surrender their liberties to their rulers in the vain hope of escaping it. But if we are wise, we shall learn gradually to fix our eyes ever more upon our true home, which has been all along the real goal of all our journeying. As C.S. Lewis masterfully ended The Chronicles of Narnia: 

All their life in this world and all their adventures in Narnia had only been the cover and the title page: now at last they were beginning Chapter One of the Great Story, which no one on earth has read: which goes on forever: in which every chapter is better than the one before.

Pictured: Blessed Sacrament Church, Hollywood, CA