TURN YOUR HEART TOWARD HOME

Autumn may cause you to “turn your heart toward home.”

Years ago, my wife and I heard Steve and Annie Chapman in concert at The Church of the Nazarene in Greenville, S.C. They sang “Turn Your Heart toward Home.” The chorus of that ballad, as I remember, contains these words: “Turn your heart toward home; turn your heart toward home. You’ve been gone so long; turn your heart toward home.”

That song often plays in my mind when summer leaves begin turning to shades of yellow, orange, crimson and brown.

Autumn signals that the year is drawing to a close. Homegrown tomatoes sliced for sandwiches slathered with Duke’s Mayonnaise have gone the way of summer. We want warm soup and maybe a fire in the fireplace.

Many churches hold autumn homecoming services and invite former members and friends to return and enjoy fellowship. And, as someone said, “Homecoming is not homecoming without dinner on the grounds (even if it is on tables).”

A minister told me that people don’t like to return to churches they once attended and find change. They want to hear the same hymns and see the same people they saw in days gone by.

I suppose we all grow nostalgic, at times.

After President Abraham Lincoln visited the place where he grew up, he wrote “My Childhood’s Home I See Again.” That poem contains these words: “My childhood home I see again, / And sadden with the view; / And still, as memory crowds my brain, / There’s pleasure in it too.”

In one verse, Lincoln called “memory” a “midway world” between earth and paradise, “Where things decayed and loved ones lost / In dreamy shadows rise….”

He wrote of “woods and fields, and scenes of play, and playmates loved so well.”

He recalled leaving his childhood home and the passing of time: “The friends I left that parting day, / How changed, as time has sped! / Young childhood grown, strong manhood gray, / And half of them are dead.”

Lincoln concluded his poem with this verse: “I range the fields with pensive tread, / And pace the hollow rooms, / And feel (companion of the dead) / I’m living in the tombs.”

In 1688, Johannes Hofer, then a Swiss medical student, reportedly coined the word “nostalgia,” to describe “a longing for the past, often in idealized form.” The word is made up of two Greek words that mean “returning home” and “pain/longing.” It once referred to a serious medical disorder, but the word nostalgia entered everyday language and is now used to describe a yearning for a lost time and place. The Spanish call nostalgia “el mal de corazón” (heart-pain). We often call it “homesickness.”

When I return to Faith Temple, the interdenominational church I attended while growing up in rural Greenville County, S.C., I enjoy worshiping with present-day members; and sometimes, even as we worship, I envision a joyful groundbreaking ceremony held on Sunday morning, December 30, 1956, when I was nine years old. In a dream-like mental photograph, I see cars parked along Highway 253 (now called “Rev. James H. Thompson Road”) and see Pastor “Jimmy” Thompson ditch a shovelful of dirt as church leaders stand around him. Then I feel “heart pain” as I see the faces of my parents, grandparents and friends who once worshiped at Faith Temple but have passed on.

Turning one’s heart toward home may bring pain, but as President Lincoln said, “There’s pleasure in it too.”

When I think about my childhood church and about places where I’ve lived, and I begin to feel the pain and pleasure inherent in memory, I often recall these words found in an old hymn: “O think of a home over there, / By the side of the river of light, / Where the saints all immortal and fair, / Are robed in their garments of white. / Over there, over there, O think of the home over there.”