Kingsview
Home after the Nest
Michael A. King
Four
years ago we left Youngest Bird at college. At that time I wrote about
how empty it was in that nest. Amid concluding Mother Bird Joan and I
would be okay, I reported on tears in a silent house. Then by the next
column I was confessing that, um, actually we were enjoying loving
Departed Birds instead of In-Nest Birds.
I also forecast that birds would
be in and out of the nest and that this would be fine, this is the way
our culture now is, let’s flex and grow in a world in which they come
and go. I didn’t know how true this would be. We had nine months of
empty nest. Then some bird has lived with us ever since. We were mostly
fine, but Parent Birds would sometimes say with glances at each other,
Remember, oh remember, that so sweet and so evanescent empty nest?
Now things are yet more complicated: Last week Youngest Bird finished
college. And now, except for Oldest Bird, settled in Olympia, every
bird is moving to a new nest:
Middle Bird moved last night. At
bedtime a ringing phone shattered the quiet of our first hours of new
empty nest. What now! our looks said. It was Middle Bird. “I love my
new life!” Okay, we could manage that interruption. And we scratched
our heads. How did this come to be? This was the bird who by her final
years in the big city was so traumatized in our increasingly dangerous
neighborhood (it seemed to become better after someone torched two of
the nearby crack houses) she was one reason we decided to try a
different type of nest for a while. Now this, of all birds, was the one
who had moved right smack into the big city’s downtown.
Today came another pile of
wedding invitation acknowledgments. I don’t open these; even as I
celebrate that in Christ there is no male nor female, for some reason
Youngest and Mother Birds seem more invested in them. But I know what
they mean: Youngest Bird will be married soon. And she and our
son-to-be will move into their own nest in Virginia.
I am aware of this because for a
time we competed for nests. Joan and I also needed a nest in Virginia,
because I’ll be living there much of the earlier part of many weeks due
to my new job, and she’ll sometimes join me there, even as I’ll often
live with her in our old nest much of the latter part of many weeks. So
for months Youngest and Parent Birds were trying to get an apartment in
the exact same area. When one day we found ourselves exploring the very
same apartments, Youngest Bird was unhappy with my thinking that if we
wanted the same one, whoever got to it first got it.
There was also the wedded
couple’s hope to build a new life away from parents. My taking a job in
the same town caused consternation. No problem, I stressed, I’d not eat
every meal with them. Youngest Bird assured me I could live in their
doghouse.
So here we are. Our primal nest emptied as never before, birds
scattered to the winds. Once more there is sorrow. There are the
memories, precious memories, come home come it’s suppertime
longing-filled memories, of those few fleeting decades we were all in
one place. There is the stretching of our love across old nest and
apartment nest Joan and I will need to work at.
There are also the signs that
home is more than being together in a nest. This matters, because if
home is only about the nest, then not only we but countless ones of us
are doomed to homesickness.
But a few weeks ago, mostly credit to Mother Bird who moved heaven,
earth, and airline schedules to make it happen, all of us achieved a
miracle: twenty-four straight hours together. We went to the shore,
checked into our hotel, and so soon were apart once more. Yet for those
few hours we lived in kairos—the fullness of time, God’s time, time
richer and deeper than the ticking minutes—and Home.
We don’t really know yet how to
live in Home, spiritual togetherness, when nest as home is more memory
than actuality. But we look forward to learning. And we also, poised at
the edge of what was and what is to come, can see just how vital to the
building of Home—for us, for all humans who long to be more than alone,
for a culture so often better at scattering than gathering, for a
church seeking ways to help us glimpse the meaning of being in God’s
nest—those earlier years of home are.
—Michael
A. King, Telford, Pennsylvania, and Harrisonburg, Virginia, is Dean,
Eastern Mennonite Seminary; and publisher, Cascadia Publishing House
LLC. This reflection was first published in The Mennonite (June 2,
2010), as a “Real Families” column.
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