Article February 6, 1995 Issue

Progress is in going home

Joyce D. Wethe

Recently I visited the place where I grew up as a child. The house my father had built by the side of a country road was gone, though some of the sapling trees he had planted were now fifty feet tall. When I remembered what that house had been to our little family—a haven from winter storms, a shelter from summer rains, a nucleus of family life, of work and love and learning, of joy and sorrow—I must confess, I wept. I saw the spot where my mother had nurtured a bed of irises, the place where my dad had planted a garden—gone now to grass and weeds. I thought of the hopes and dreams my parents had shared, their struggles to make ends meet, the grace we always said before taking the first bite of a meal.

It is quite common, I suppose, to glance back at "the good old days" and entertain doubts as to whether the passage of time has brought progress or has merely complicated things. While we may hope for better times in the future, as I'm sure my parents did, do we always value the good that is right at hand and see it as a taste of the perfection God maintains here and now?

We are all, whether we know it or not, looking for, longing for, home. But true home is not a physical place. It is a heavenly state of consciousness—what the Psalmist called "the house of the Lord" (Ps. 23:6). Bringing out the spiritual sense of Deity in the twenty-third Psalm, Mrs. Eddy writes, quoting the final words of the psalm, "and I will dwell in the house [the consciousness] of [LOVE] for ever" (Science and Health, p. 578).