Canter Bridge

It is difficult, in these mangled days, to focus. One lives distracted and, therefore, enslaved to the mundane blur that swirls on all sides without pause.

Yet not all have lived this way, and not all must.

These all died in faith, not having received the things promised, but having seen them and greeted them from afar, and having acknowledged that they were strangers and exiles on the earth. For people who speak thus make it clear that they are seeking a homeland. If they had been thinking of that land from which they had gone out, they would have had opportunity to return. But as it is, they desire a better country, that is, a heavenly one. Therefore God is not ashamed to be called their God, for he has prepared for them a city. (Hebrews 11:13–16 ESV)

I come uneasily to this company of exiles, for I love this soil, this place, this fecund rooting.

Yet, as a follower of Jesus, I must admit to an exile’s fate, must embrace the stranger’s reality, must grit my teeth and acknowledge with a dozen bad hymns that ‘this world is not my home’.

The trudging heroes of the  New Testament’s Letter to the Hebrews honed a desire for a better country. If the text calls it ‘a heavenly one’, we must resist pictures of static bliss, of puffy clouds and blonde angels, of escape from physicality to pure spirit. This cannot be the Letter’s intent.

Rather, a city.

An urban scene with lodgings and events and roads and activities and people engaged in tasks both earnest and playful. Yet it is not this world’s city, for its basic principle, its way is governed by another ethos, by a different rule.

Yet I live here, in this well-known world, with its expectations and its compromised joys, its bent callings, its dented product. I have, unlike those ancient heroes, little desire for another city, little hope of being welcomed into that God-city if access is based on the intensity of my longing. I am too much of this one, too little predisposed by glimpses of the other to desire it above all else.

O City-Builder, have mercy on these myopic eyes. Help me see beyond these shadowed streets to brighter ones prepared for those who walk here as strangers, aliens, as limping sojourners passing through.

Bring us home, especially me, a straggler in this mobile company of hopers.