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the homecoming

4 Comments

stairs

He stands at the top of the stairs, bare feet dancing in dinosaur pajamas. His bright eyes meet my own as I climb. His face beams with delight, blue stars flashing with brimming joy.

MAMA!

He shrieks with joy. MAMA! You are HERE!

He tips his head backward, golden curls bouncing with glee. He laughs with bliss, bursts of chortles from deep within his being.

You are HOME!

He turns back to me, wide-eyed and grinning.

You came HOME!

He spins in delirious circles of disbelief as we laugh, all of us grinning and watching, his sitter standing ready to leave, his father kneeling next to him, and his mother climbing stair after stair toward him as he squeals, unable to contain his eruption of love.

He dances like a drum major, knees high, arms pumping through the air. He is electric and reborn. He is enthusiasm personified: God-in-us, seized by Spirit, overflowing with loving, inhabited presence of indwelling divine. In him there is no space for anything save joy. Everything he feels is the fullness of this moment: the present moment, the only moment, the embrace of perfect reunion.

He throws himself into my arms, and I breathe in the sunlight of his hair.

Every quivering cell within me reaches out toward him. This, I know, is what the moment of final homecoming will feel like, too: the recognition of the One who is Love, the head-thrown-back delight that this is real, the soul’s dancing toes and peals of laughter that good God, this is Everything! Here, now, me, You, within, without end, beyond, Amen.

You came back!

He keeps saying, pulling back from our hug to marvel at my face with his eager smile. He pats the sides of my cheeks with his pudgy hands, as if I am soft clay, as if he is creating me anew.

You came back!

“Yes, my love, of course I” – but he tackles me so hard I cannot finish so I laugh and we laugh and he flings chubby toddler arms around my neck and settles squirming into my lap to be surrounded by the here of me. We are together again.

There are no questions about where I have been, why I left him, what happened while I was gone, or what we will do tomorrow. There is only here and now and him and me. I see through his sparkling eyes that this is all a heart desires: the enough-ness of love in the present tense.

Here is joy. It exists in the everywhere of now.

Jesus said behold, it is among you. 

If heaven is anything, it must be light years exploding more than this, fantastical leaping beyond the mind’s stretched limits of imagining.

But this – the foretaste, the fullness, the flinging of one’s whole self into love, the freedom of surrender into joy’s pulsing present moment – homecoming must begin like this.

The laughing and the dancing and the pure delight of joy.

You came back!

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Comments

  1. Clark Hendley says

    21 November 2016 at 7:32 am

    You nailed it!

    Reply
  2. Wendy Caduff says

    21 November 2016 at 9:27 am

    So beautiful Laura! I can just picture it… The top of your stairs and heaven.

    Reply
  3. Kaitlyn Mason says

    21 November 2016 at 9:15 pm

    Love this! ❤ Peace to you and to all His precious children.

    Reply
  4. Tara says

    22 November 2016 at 1:12 pm

    I really enjoy your writing style. Thanks to you, I now see a few events in life in a new light. I adore when our youngest greets me this way, even when I have been gone for a couple hours. Thanks for sharing your talent and insight of the Catholic faith.

    Reply

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About Laura

I’m Laura Kelly Fanucci. Mother, writer, wonderer. This space is where I explore mothering through writing. It’s where I celebrate how God shows up in the chaos of raising children. It’s where I love to build community with readers like you. Read More…

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Watch me try not to laugh while my kids are scream Watch me try not to laugh while my kids are screaming upstairs at my spouse while I muse on motherhood & creativity 😝

Check out @grottonetwork for thoughtful reflections on relationships, work, faith, and life’s big questions. And let yourself thank someone this week for the creative work of nurturing new life in you!
Pilgrimage update! I shared in my last newsletter Pilgrimage update! I shared in my last newsletter that we were able to add Chartres & Mont-St-Michel to our itinerary, plus an extra day in Paris. Three of the most beautiful places I’ve ever been, so I can’t wait to pray there with you on pilgrimage in October. Check out my bio for details.

Want to hear more about the trip? Join me on Friday, May 6th, at 1:30 pm CT for an Instagram Live with Claire Swinarski - founder of @thecatholicfeminist & leader of last year’s pilgrimage to France with @selectinternationaltours 

Claire will share her experience on pilgrimage, her favorite places in France, & her wisdom for anyone thinking about joining us this fall. 

Have you ever been to France? Or made a pilgrimage? I’d love to hear your favorites!

#pilgrimage #travelwithselect #holyplaces #travel2022 #france #thesacredway2022
For years these words hung on the wall of my offic For years these words hung on the wall of my office. A reminder to behold the beauty in the ordinary.

I took them down after grief tore apart my world. Normal days, what a joke.

But years later I pulled the words out again. Turned out they were true, of course.

I had always caught my breath at the line about war, barely able to imagine longing for boring days from bloody battlefields.

Today I keep the wise words before my eyes again, as a way to keep praying for Ukraine.

For all the places where war or violence make for (ab)normal days.

May the common rock of any ordinary day we’re given remind us to remember all whose earth is upheaved right now.
The sun came out for the first time in days (weeks The sun came out for the first time in days (weeks? gloomy where you are, too?).

So I followed every ladybug in the bedroom to the window, closed my eyes and sunned my face. I could have curled up like a cat for hours. But the sun slipped back, retreating behind the grey wall as quickly as it came.

May today hold a gentle reminder to turn wherever you find the light, to let it warm and delight you. The spiritual practice of sunning ourselves (for a whole holy second!) is not trite or toxic: we are creatures who crave what is good and this is not wrong.

If you linger there for a moment, to remember God and grace and any good gift that has been poured out upon you, unasked or undeserved, you can return for a flash to the Source of your Being.

All the Psalms about the sun sing the same. We were made for the Great Light.
I spent years wondering about the opposite of grie I spent years wondering about the opposite of grief.

Would it be joy? To hold happiness again, to have tears turned into dancing?

Would it be gain? To find what was lost? To have arms full again around the ones I love?

Would it be peace? To breathe into the space of calm? To soak up healing as balm?

This morning I rose and realized: the opposite of grief is Easter.

Joy, gain, peace, hope, love, healing—all of it rolled into one and heaps more besides.

You know that awful feeling in grief’s first weeks, after someone you love has died, when you rise and remember yourself back into reality, and the grief-pain of loss washes over you again? The terrible turning moments that torpedo the day.

Easter Monday was the first morning that humans got to experience the utter opposite.

The undoing of what seemed undone. The resurrection of what looked impossible to restore.

The flip side of every grief and loss.

This morning I pictured the women rising again on Monday, the first ones to find and preach the Resurrection.

What joy & delight & hope & astonishment must have washed across their faces in their first few moments after waking, as they remembered themselves back into a world made new.

This is what every single one of us has yearned for, in the impossible imagination after loss. What if I could wake up and they would be back here again?

Exactly what all who loved him found when they woke up on Monday morning.

Now we only taste it, glimpse it, grasp it for a moment—but one day it will rise for us and never leave.

The opposite of grief is here.
To see others in pain while you are in pain— To To see others in pain
while you are in pain—
To reach out to the grieving
while others are grieving for you—
To lift up the least
while you are the greatest—
To speak to the suffering of women
while your own body is suffering—
To stop for others
while you walk the hardest road—

Until now I never noticed how much it meant that Jesus stopped for the women of Jerusalem.

He stops for the women of Ukraine, the women of Juarez, the women of Afghanistan, women everywhere who suffer and grieve and mourn.
 
He stops for them and for us. He tells us not to weep for him but to weep for this world, not to despair of the present but to steel ourselves for the future, not to lament unless we are willing to change.

What is he calling me to grieve? How is he calling me to change?

What might he see in us—our lives, our sorrows, our griefs, even our bodies—that we have not let ourselves lament?
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