GOING HOME AGAIN

The first seven years of my life, 1945-1952, my family lived in a row house with white marble steps on Dukeland Street in the city of Baltimore, Maryland.

Aubrey Bodine, a photojournalist, wrote, "The white marble steps of Baltimore have become the city's trademark and a marvel to visitors. Most of them are white marble, from nearby quarries, and housewives vie in keeping them bright. In any block, there is seldom a day that someone is not out scrubbing them."

For me, those marble steps are symbolic of my entrance into a life in which family, faith, virtues, church, values, and friendships were essentials. As I reflect on those early years around the marble steps, the memories help me to recognize blessings of which I was unaware at the time.

Frederick Buechner once commented, "'For all thy blessings, known and unknown, remembered and forgotten, we give thee thanks, ' runs an old prayer, and it is for the all but unknown ones and the more than half-forgotten ones that we do well to look back over the journeys of our lives, because it is their presence that makes the life of each of us a sacred journey."

In 1983, after attending a meeting in Baltimore, I decided to visit the old neighborhood. It had been thirty years since my family and I had moved from Dukeland Street to a house on Gwynn Oak Avenue. I was curious about my childhood home.

When I drove to Dukeland Street and turned onto our block, I could immediately see the changes. I arrived in front of 610 Dukeland Street. I stopped my car and stayed inside of the vehicle. As I surveyed the property, I noticed that the row house looked smaller than I had remembered. Plywood had been placed over the windows, and the glass in the front door had been broken and poorly repaired. The white marble steps were filthy and appeared as if they had not been scrubbed recently. Of course, the family members I loved and who loved me were no longer there.

After some sad moments, I drove to my home in Easton, Maryland, where my wife and children were waiting for me. Perhaps Thomas Wolfe was right, You Can't Go Home Again, as the title of his book correctly expresses my experience.

However, in the meditations which I included in this book, I have attempted "going home again" another way. The good and bad memories we have made in our childhood homes continue to influence us throughout our lives.

We all are responsible for our decisions and actions and reactions in various situations. Prayerfully, in our backgrounds, though, there are beliefs, attitudes, and values which can become blessings as we grow. Many parents are comforted and challenged by Solomon's wisdom, "Train up a child in the way he should go, and when he is old he will not depart from it" (Proverbs 22: 6).

"Going home again" in that way, we can be recipients of blessings, "half-forgotten" and "unknown." My prayer is that the following meditations will provide a glimpse into my early years and also a challenge for others to remember blessings from the past.