Go, go, Gadget heart!

“The world is charged with the grandeur of God.
It will flame out, like shining from shook foil.”
- Gerard Manley Hopkins, God’s Grandeur

That’s what this coming weekend is to me: a last-minute blessing that I trust will “flame out like shining from shook foil.” (Why is it that without fail, whenever I most need something big and enormous and wonderful, it comes at me blindside, takes me completely by surprise, and fills me up?) I’m coming Home! Not for good - only for a few brief sparkling days - but it will definitely be good. No doubt about it.

This is Home with a capital H that I’m talking about here. A place that is very specific in my heart and yet geographically expansive: it encompasses, depending on my mood, parts of Minnesota, most of Iowa and chunks of the Greater Chicago Metro area—all of those places where roommates and suitemates and soulmates reside, where outstretched arms await me. And, lovely of lovelies, these arms are converging next weekend into what I hope will be a gleeful melee of melodies and memories and a whole lot of just plain filling up.

More than I want to admit, I live lately for these brief, intense chunks of time in which I can utilize my newfound skill of appreciating my friends in fast-forward mode. These blessed hours, these sparkling weekends filled with Home have been much of my lifeblood these past three years. Maybe you know what it’s like to be too far away for too long a time. Maybe you know that feeling of never quite being whole, of living with a heart stretched thinly over continents. I suppose I’ll be glad, sometime, to have this rubber Gumby-heart. At least I’ll have practice in bouncing back...

Lately this place I’m right now in has become home. "Home" with a little h—that’s all it will ever be—but home nonetheless. Familiarity is starting to seep through the cracks in the mortar of my self-pity. I don’t remember exactly when I stopped needing the bulletin in order to sing the liturgy at church. I’m not sure when I last walked down the main street without seeing at least one person I know. Slowly but surely, it’s happening. Like the plants that now line my windowsills, I’m putting down roots—reaching down gingerly, and then more confidently—and reaching up, too, letting the new leaves unfurl.

Familiarity, as the saying goes, breeds contempt. But for me, familiarity actually tends to breed acceptance (or resignation?). I bristle and chafe at the beginning of a tumultuous situation, but then it inevitably grows on me... an initially annoying friend becomes a trusted confidant, a cold, standoffish congregation worms its way into my heart, a little one-horse town takes on shades of home.

If it weren’t for my pesky heart...

*Edit* So I thought it might be nice to put the whole poem in here, since it is beautiful and bite-sized:

The world is charged with the grandeur of God.
It will flame out, like shining from shook foil;
It gathers to a greatness, like the ooze of oil
Crushed. Why do men then now not reck his rod?
Generations have trod, have trod, have trod;
And all is seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil;
And wears man’s smudge and shares man’s smell: the soil
Is bare now, nor can foot feel, being shod.

And for all this, nature is never spent;
There lives the dearest freshness deep down things;
And though the last lights off the black West went
Oh, morning, at the brown brink eastward, springs—
Because the Holy Ghost over the bent
World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings.