What tension there is in this painting. It is titled Going Home. But where is home? This mother and child are walking along a rutted road. There is nothing to the left (a barren field with a weedy ditch border) and nothing to the right (except a cow field). Is that their home up the road on the left? How desolate. The little girl looks tired, but do unhappy thoughts fill her mind as well? The mother is patient — not dragging the child but seeming to speak encouraging, consoling words. "Not to worry, everything will be all right."
But why did the mother and child leave home in the first place? The basket seems pretty empty — had they gone to a town or city to sell things? She's a young mother, did she have to go and take care of ailing parents? Had war, famine or disaster displaced them for a time? Is it dawn or dusk?
I can ask myself, where is home? I might think immediately of the building I live in and the people I live with. Yes. But then of course, I am aware of the millions of persons around the world who have lost that kind of home — the building gone; the people scattered. It seems to me then that home is an interior place. It is the interior place where I attend to the things that are meaningful for me most personally: the music I listen to, the books I read, the garden I tend, the art I appreciate, the exercise I take, the relationships I cultivate, the prayer and faith I live in. Of course, what's meaningful for me may well be keeping a house, preparing meals for my family — but it's the interior place from which those energies originate that we can most fully call home.
I wonder if that's what the artist hopes we'll consider —the interior road leading to the building ahead, yes, but more than that, to the inner sense of home. Jesus knows that home is an interior place:
"Anyone who loves me will observe (follow, embrace) my teaching, and my Father will love him (her) and we will come and make our home with him." John 14:23
Though desolation can be all around me, carrying the sense of loss and insecurity, I want to walk that interior road to home. But I don't want to take the easy way out by saying something like, "Oh yes, there's all this trouble here but heaven is my true home." A lot of people have collections of religious one-liners that are supposed to solve the big questions. Real searchers are not satisfied with that. Young people certainly aren't. I don't want to live a surface-y religious/spiritual life. What's meaningful to me today, right now? That's home and God is there.
