Longing for Home with C.S. Lewis and Tyler Childers

“What disturbed me about the gospels was that it sounded awfully like they had a post code to them. It’s very site specific. . . The gospels are gnarly and strange, and they’re all happening in an area you can walk around. That’s a little too much like real life to me. I better stay away from it.”

That’s how mythologist Martin Shaw describes his experience of encountering the four gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John before his eventual conversion to Christianity. Unlike so many other sacred texts from world religions, Christianity prioritizes place. Jesus didn’t fall from the sky; he was born of a virgin named Mary in the town of Bethlehem. At every major point in his life, we are given geographic details: the Sea of Galilee, the Garden of Gethsemane, and the Mount of Olives; Nazareth, Samaria, Capernaum, and Jerusalem. Jesus’s life takes shape in the particulars of local culture and geography.

We, too, settle in specific places. We choose a plot somewhere on earth and make a home there, and as a result, our life is shaped uniquely by that place’s unique customs, history, and landscape. From the accent of our voices to the interests and values we pursue, place plays an enormous role in making us who we are. That’s what Shaw means when he says that the gospels initially scared him. As a teller of myths, he feared he had stumbled upon what C. S. Lewis called, the “true myth.” Something about the story of Jesus rooted in the landscape of the Judean countryside resonated profoundly with something deep within his own humanity.

C. S. Lewis, in fact, meditated profoundly on the role of place in our lives. Tara Isabella Burton recently wrote that in Lewis’s novels “violence is legitimate not to expand territory but to preserve parochialism, the smallness, of Narnian life: sweet badgers and sleepy bears sipping tea and cordial and gathering around the hearth to tell stories.” Lewis created memorable characters who were content to live their ordinary lives enjoying the particularities of their local communities. Conversely, Lewis’s villains never respect place, instead seeking to rule beyond the reach of given limitations. For Lewis, there is something rightly human and good about loving the place from which we come. The feeling of inner warmth when something reminds us of home, the pleasant sound of South Alabama twang, the instant camaraderie upon meeting someone else from our neck of the woods—these are gifts. God roots us in the particularities of a place on purpose. We’re supposed to love where we’re from.

Burton draws her own profound conclusion from Lewis’s appreciation of place. Meditating on his observation that our longings for home remind us that we have not yet arrived at our ultimate home, Burton writes, “Our love of home is also, always, a homesickness for that place beyond the place we remember. To love Narnia is to love real-life England, but it is also, no less importantly, to love the country Narnia points to—and, at the end of the Last Battle, collapses into: Aslan’s own country.” Her conclusion: “The closest way to glimpse [heaven] is not to fantasize about a higher calling, a higher place. It is to see it, instead, in what is already here.” We glimpse heaven, in other words, as we learn to love the place we now call home.

We live in a discontented, rootless age. Rarely do we experience the loyalty that arises from a sense that we rightly belong somewhere. Rarely do we pass on the opportunity for economic advancement because we feel duty-bound to these people in this place. As a pastor, I notice a continual drive to climb higher. When the bigger church with the bigger salary comes calling, it’s rarely a difficult decision for many. I once heard an older church member remark, “It’s funny how God never calls pastors to smaller churches.” The constant digital bombardment of pristine images of better places elsewhere, capitalism’s ability to create discontentment, and the spirit of our age’s FOMO epidemic combine to keep our restless hearts ever ready to uproot our lives in chase of what’s next.

But can we flourish if we aren’t rooted? Might our perpetual rootlessness be another manifestation of the ancient human desire to gain the whole world while forfeiting our souls (Matthew 16:26)?

I’ve always loved all kinds of music, but for the past few years, I find myself gravitating toward certain artists like Jason Isbell, Tyler Childers, and the Turnpike Troubadours. For the longest time, I couldn’t figure out what it is about this kind of music that keeps me coming back again and again to listen. But I think Lewis is helping me understand their appeal. These artists write songs that remind me of home. They root their songs in the particularities of place—Alabama pines and Kentucky hollers and Oklahoma red dirt I’ve never even visited. They tell stories about particular people—both people that I think I know and people who remind me of myself. It’s funny because none of these artists, as far as I know, are Christians. Yet their songs, strangely, help me love the place I call home, and in doing so, help me long for the far away country I haven’t yet found. I think that’s a good thing.

The post Longing for Home with C.S. Lewis and Tyler Childers appeared first on Remembrance of Former Days.