Jesus says simply, “Make your home in me, as I make mine in you” (John 15:4). Home is not a heavenly mansion in the afterlife but a safe place right in the midst of our anxious world. “If anyone loves me he will keep my word, and my Father will love him, and we shall come to him and make our home with him” (John 14:23).
Home is that sacred space–external or internal–where we don’t have to be afraid; where we are confident of hospitality and love. In our society we have many homeless people sleeping not only on the streets, in shelters or in welfare hotels, but vagabonds who are in flight, who never come home to themselves. They seek a safe place through alcohol or drugs, or security in success, competence, friends, pleasure, notoriety, knowledge, or even a little religion. They have become strangers to themselves, people who have an address but are never at home, who never hear the voice of love or experience the freedom of God’s children.
To those of us in flight, who are afraid to turn around lest we run into ourselves, Jesus says, “You have a home…I am your home…claim me as your home…you will find it to be the intimate place where I have found my home…it is right where you are…in your innermost being…in your heart.”
Brennan Manning, The Ragamuffin Gospel, 142,143.
