My Hometown
I grew up in a small market town in Hampshire. We had our own General Hospital, where my father was a ‘Male Nurse’, as he was described then. We had a weekly Farmer’s Market where you could see livestock driven through the vibrant High Street, full of shops and banks. We had our own Police Station, Magistrate’s Court, Fire Station, and Cinema. These are now but a memory.
- I wonder what your memories of your hometown are?
- What are some of the best things you remember?
Often, it’s where we know everyone and they know us. We have a shared history. It is familiar and predictable. There is consistency and routine. There is stability where each have a place. Not much changes. We may say, “There’s no place like home.”
Now let me ask this. What are some of the most troublesome things you remember about your hometown? Is it that we know everyone and everyone knows us? Is it a familiarity that breeds contempt? Is it a stability that stifles everyone into knowing their place? Nothing changes and we may say in despair, “There’s no place like home!”
Whose son is this?
All four Gospels, Matthew 13:55, Mark 6:3, Luke 4:22, and John 6:42, make it clear that Jesus’ hometown was Nazareth. It is perhaps no surprise that Jesus himself meets opposition when he no longer ‘fits in’.
But when I talk about hometowns I am talking about more than Nazareth, or any geographical location. Our hometown isn’t just something outside of us, it’s within us. It’s not just a place, but our routines, habits, attitudes, beliefs, opinions, prejudices, assumptions, identities, and values – which Jesus equally experienced.
It can become a hardened pattern of how we’ve always done things and what we’ve always thought. The hometown is a lens through which we see the world, one another, and ourselves. And regardless of how often we have moved, we all have a hometown dwelling within us.
- What are the hometowns that shape and form your life, whether you still live there or not?
Maybe it’s your faith and the church, politics, national, or cultural identity. Maybe it’s an idealized memory, nostalgia for the way things used to be. Hometowns are rarely just one thing. Not all of these are negative, but they can become negative. Hometown thoughts often have a way of convincing us that it is the right way, the best way, the only way. Sometimes our vision of the world extends only as far as the town boundary. We value our closeness but in turn, risk becoming closed to someone new, or different. Overfamiliarity may keep us from recognizing, valuing, and appreciating what is often right in front of us.
T S Elliot captures it well in Little Gidding, The Four Quartets:
We shall not cease from exploration, And the end of all our exploring, Will be to arrive where we started And know the place for the first time.
Familiarity breeds….
They knew all about Jesus “and they took offense at him.” Because they knew nothing. That’s the hometown disadvantage. It happens whenever we become stuck and defensive against threat of change. We settle for what we know rather than opening our hearts and minds to what we don’t know. “Better the Devil you know…” we might say.
We let familiarity blind us to the new, and make our world smaller. Theologian and Trappist Monk, Erasmo Leiva-Merikakis, expresses the problem well when he says we believe…
“…that which is holiest and closest to God cannot coincide with that which is most familiar and closest to us” Fire of Mercy, Heart of the World, vol. 2, 333)
- I wonder if that disadvantage is at work today?
- If it’s preventing deeds of power from being manifest?
- Good News from being received in our midst?
- And I wonder what we are willing to do about that?
- Maybe we need to cross our hometown boundaries?
- Or write new community charters?
Or maybe we just need to shake off the dust from our feet and move on with the one who says, “Follow me…” Leaving our hometowns in order to return some day and see them: “as if for the first time.“
