Sentimental journey
It wasn’t exactly planned that way, but several months ago my wife and I found ourselves steering a rental car through the towns in northern New Jersey where we had grown up, met, courted, married and started a family.
There was the alley where I used to play, where once I got beat up and, in turn, beat up the bully. We saw where I went to school and where my friends lived and where we played marathon games of baseball. And the tall fence in center field I could finally conquer.
Look, that’s where Kathy lived as a child, sliding down what was the greatest sledding hill in the world. And there’s the corner where she and her best friend sold the blueberries they’d picked from a nearby field. Her Catholic high school still stands, though we learned it will close next year. But over there is where Kathy crowned Mary at a May celebration enough years ago to be painful.
Don’t forget The Corn Field. That’s where we met as teenagers and through which we took a long walk and got to know one another. That now overgrown patch of history has been crowded almost out of existence by encroaching suburbia. Except for the small sliver of weedy underbrush we found, the rest has been sliced and diced by highways, office complexes and homes.
But The Corn Field remains an icon for us.
It was a sentimental journey of sorts which included lunch at a restaurant we favored when dating and other reminders of long-ago youth. For an afternoon at least, time stopped, reversed and replayed like an old movie, flickering as the scenes flashed from one memory to the next. It was home.
Reliving the past didn’t change anything that’s happened in the passing of the years, but it sure was a nice place to be.
Thomas Wolfe once wrote a book titled “You Can’t Go Home Again.” He was wrong.
However, the poet Robert Frost got it right. He once wrote, “Home is where, when you go there, they have to let you in.”
The literary references leapt to mind, not so much when we were driving through the memories of our growing-up years but over the bashing the church is taking these days by the clergy sex-abuse situation.
Such abuse surely takes its toll on the victims and their families. It’s a horrible thing and must be faced and corrected. Abusers certainly are subject to punishment, civil and canonical.
However, clergy sex abuse and the many reports of it take another toll, too often driving a wedge between people and their faith. Trust is too easy to lose and too hard to restore.
Processes can go awry. That truth, however, may not mollify critics or restore missing trust. Neither does it heal the wounds suffered by the everyday person in the pews. (Still, it can be good to remember that, despite the drumbeat of controversy, Chicago is not Boston, the crisis’ epicenter where such actions were apparently ignored for decades. That’s not the Chicago situation.)
This is Lent, a time for public admission of sin and for seeking reconciliation. Despite the sins and missteps of its members and leaders, the church is home. It’s more than memories of May crownings and marriages, more than the smells and bells of celebrations past. The church is home because it resonates with a faith that, while not overlooking the actions of sinful people, is somehow larger. It is a faith centered in the Gospel of Jesus.
Maybe that’s a good thing to remember as we move deeper into this season. Church, like home (well, it IS home), when you go there, they have to let you in. And welcome you back.
Tom Sheridan
Editor and General Manager
