Strangers in Your Home: A Song of Gratuitous Love
Life if not a fast-food menu, life is not a video.
You can't get a ticket telling you where you'll go.
And you're already in your coffin if you feel you're in control.
Life is taking a stranger into your home.
We come in this world as strangers, and we feel from time to time
That the place where we are resting is our own.
But that old parking meter's ticking, and that feeling is a sign
That it's time to take a stranger into your home.
Home is where the heart is, and the heart's a living thing,
Not some treasure we can lock up and call our own.
You've got to find your reflection in unfamiliar eyes.
You've got to dare to take a stranger into your home.
If an angel rings your doorbell or the Lord stands in your yard,
They will prob'ly look like someone you don't know.
Don't expect them to remind you, you're a traveler in this world
And you hope to be a stranger in their home.
*****
A common example of this is parenthood. You take under obligation an unrealized potential for good or ill, maybe imagining that you are in control, but that is an illusion. Children may turn cold or criminal after years of love, or disability may make them live-in dependents for the rest of your life. I know of fertile and solvent couples who refuse to have a child because of the uncertainty and the--indeed vast--inconvenience of nurturing an unformed life. I try not to judge. What do I know of their motives? But my first reaction is that this is selfish.
We exist through the sacrifices of our parents, grandparents, and uncounted generations before them, so it seems only fair to pass on at our expense what was given to us at the expense of others. It is a crapshoot, parenthood. My present scorecard is four sons--one distant, one dead, and two close--that and a final count of three grandchildren. But, if I'm reading a scorecard, I'm missing the point. What matters is the act of free, unconditional love and the years of imperfect sacrifice--a term that means making holy--years of living into that act of love.
Of course, parenthood has a way of happening on its own--the unconditional love, if any, piling on after the sex act--and there is strong brute instinct behind it. Sacrifices of parenthood happen within a narrow scope and, even if massive, don't imply sainthood. You may love your children, scorn your neighbors, and hate your enemies. Only the worst don't love their own. Christ's call to love of neighbor demands a more radical hospitality, its purest form something like Mother Teresa's taking in the dying of Calcutta. It certainly includes caring for the sick or needy who are close to you, as I did for several months when I was retired and my mother suffered a heart attack. But when I wrote "Stranger in Your Home," I was thinking about the one time my wife and I rose well above the call of common decency and saw our reflections in unfamiliar eyes. I celebrate that we did this, but, being no saint, have great difficulty repeating it.
In 1990, we were living in Phenix City, Alabama, a bedroom community of Columbus, Georgia. Our house once belonged to the mayor (c. 1910), but we bought it as a half-restored "haunted house" and finished restoration by hand. It was, counting the huge hallways, eleven boomy rooms with space to spare after two of our sons left for college. My wife credits our hospitality to her mid-life crisis, but, if so, hers took a much more wholesome form than mine, and I thank her for it. After playing a blazing "Stairway to Heaven," our 16-year-old son was recruited by a rock band of older boys, recent high-school graduates living in a rented house in Columbus. My wife drove him to and from rehearsals and bonded with the kids.
One day she met a 17-year-old woman who was crashing at their house, having been kicked out by her mother, and we took her in, giving her one of the empty rooms as her own. Soon, the band was kicked out of its house for drawing graffiti on the walls, and two of them were also strangers in our home, one of them (and his dog) for months. He moved on, but the woman stayed with us. After my wife got a job in Kentucky, she and I lived as daughter and father for over a year. Later, she and her husband lived with us in Kentucky and had a child while there, finally moving back to Columbus, where we visit her whenever we can. She is part of our family in every sense now.
There was a summer night in 1990 when the doors of the old house stood open, overrun with teenagers, and my wife and I slept in our bedroom under the noise cover of a window unit. There were strangers in the rooms and hallways, friends of the band guys, maybe friends of friends. Happily, with kids in college after years of private high school--all paid for on a teaching job--we didn't have anything worth stealing, not unless you fancied used books and kitchen appliances, so that wasn't a worry.
But I remember that summer night hearing loud conversations after midnight through the bedroom walls, venturing into the hallway to discover every light, it seemed, turned on and strange faces everywhere, upstairs and down, nowhere but back into the bedroom to retreat to. I dodged past them in sweatpants into the night backyard and stood there for a long time staring at the blazing windows. I may have cried. I was hurt, The guys, I was told, distrusted older men--their fathers--and so they kept their distance from me, though they were close to my wife. The presumption and injustice of it all! In my own home! I had no home!
Little ego was pushed to the wall that night, and it hurt, but I eventually went back to bed, and it all worked out. Nothing valuable was stolen. Our youngest son--his late teen years benignly neglected in chaotic brotherly love--arguably turned out best of all the kids (it's not a contest). He lives a block away from us, a government engineer, family man, and fixture of the Fredericksburg music scene, where I'm known, not so much as Banjo Bill, but as his dad. Maybe I earned credit with the angels that summer in Phenix City. I know I'm drawing dividends now.
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