Back ‘home’ (a Travel Blog Post)

12 January 12 – Capernaum and Tagbha (Mark 1.21-40)

The first full day of the pilgrimage in Israel-Palestine (‘part deux’ for moi)…seeing many of the SAME places I saw the first time around…even with the SAME Palestinian guide, Claudia (who is wonderful)…but at a DIFFERENT time of year (winter), at a DIFFERENT hotel (The Scots Hotel in Tiberias) with a DIFFERENT group of people (pastors from my own Presbytery in western/northern Montana).

Back to the SAME place…but a DIFFERENT pilgrimage…in a very DIFFERENT season of life.

Capernaum is the place that Jesus called ‘home’ for his adult life and ministry.

I arrive asking lots of questions about what truly defines and determines what we like to call ‘home’ in our lives.

Capernaum is the little fishing town from which Jesus and his followers set out on all kinds of unexpected, unbelievable, mystifying, miraculous, ordinarily extraordinary, secularly sacred, tangentially transformational adventures. No matter how far and wide they traveled, nor the breadth and depth of their encounters, when it was all said and done, they would return to Capernaum.

Back to the place where they could slow down, breathe deeply, and once again simply BE.

Back ‘home’.

I have literally no idea what kinds of unbelievably unexpected and miraculously mystifying experiences area awaiting me here of the extraordinary hidden the ordinary, the sacred revealed in the secular, the transformational embedded in the tangential. I am in a place in my own journey best described by Leo Bebb (the fictional con-artist/saint written about so lovingly by Frederick Buechner) when he said, ‘The night is dark, and home is a long ways off for all of us.’

Wherever I am right now…on this beautiful blue ball tumbling and fumbling through outermost space…in the unfamiliar and uncertain rumblings and ramblings of my innermost space between my brain and heart, my spirit and stomach…there is one thing of which I am absolutely sure.

The night is dark. And I am a LONG way from ‘home’.

And I am LONGING to get back there…back to the place where I can rest in all those spaces…between the practical and the possible, the imminent and the imagined, the religious and the relational, the responsible and the radical, the rehearsed and the real.

Between my head and my heart.

Between my spirit and my stomach.

Back to the place where I can slow down, breathe deeply, and in the midst of all the hysteria flooding through my frazzled life and the history flowing through this fraggled piece of rock called the ‘holy land’, to once again simply BE.

BE still.

Back ‘home’.

Wherever ‘home’ may be.

-Brian