from the Rev. Canon Brian Cole
The magnitude of the moment didn’t hit me until it was past and we were already on our way back to Memphis.
In September, I traveled to Missouri to celebrate my mother’s 80th birthday and to mark her transition from house to apartment. Though I have not lived in that house since 1986, it is still the location of all my dreams that have to do with home.
During the weekend back home, my brothers and their families and I gathered with my mother, to give gifts, to share a meal (Shogun in Dyersburg, TN—a story for another time), to worship together, to receive friends and family for an afternoon reception in my mother’s honor. So many of those tasks, in some way or another, were things we had done before and so it seemed to me we would do them again. This was the latest trip home, not the last.
On Sunday morning, we agreed to gather at my mother’s house so we could take another version of “the Picture.” I have no doubt many families have their version of “the Picture,” that photograph that has the children in some kind of setting and with the passage of time, the photo is reshot, with each person taking their place again.
Our version is of the four sons seated on the steps up to the bedroom above the garage. My eldest brother is at the top of the stairs and I am the bottom, with the second and third brothers sandwiched in between as the steps descend towards the garage door. The first version was in black and white and then a version was taken with mustaches present or absent upon faces. I have always been clean-shaven in all these photos, though the hair on the top of my head is now missing.
The photographs, taken as a series, show the passage of time yet also promise that nothing has changed—we are still here and the steps and the house are still here. It wasn’t until my eldest brother and his wife and I were driving back to Memphis that I realized we were at the end of something. The next time we head to Missouri, that house will belong to someone else. While it may continue to be the landscape of dreams for years to come, those steps will belong to other people.
If I had thought about it beforehand, I would have taken a photograph simply of the steps, the steps that held us. At one time, those steps led up to the coolest bedroom ever. Later, the room became a catchall space, the archives to mine and my brothers’ boyhood. In the last few years, my nephews have traveled up those steps to remove from the room items and clothes so tacky as to be cool again. Always, you get there by going up the steps.
In the Christian house and especially in the Anglican room included in the Christian house, we value the “steps,” the passageway of Holy Scriptures and Christian calendar that carries us through each year back to the place where our lives and our faith unfolds. We go through that passage each year with different reasons for searching, for returning. But, by the grace of God, we show up again, to walk through the steps, to be recollected as family and Body of Christ.
And while we might wander off as prodigal, the house never gets sold. It never becomes simply dreamscape. It always holds the invitation of a new incarnation for us in God’s story.