Empty Room

I found myself, today, standing silent in an empty room, listening to the space. Shadows were left by paintings taken from the walls, or weary impressions where a bed or a desk once proudly stood. Memories ooze from the walls like rich aged oil - I know them, I etched their history. It all comes alive before my hidden eye in fountains of dusty significance.

Ah, sentimentality! How you torture me. For 19 years, this had been my room.

I look it over, one last gulp before the plunge, and backed out the door. To move on and surely soon enough forget.

It’s a reminder, not altogether pessimistic, of that precious little myth about the poor man Sisyphus; cursed to sweat his boulder up the mountain again and again, ever and ever - all for that second of victory, that phantasm of accomplishment at the peak, before that terrible weight rolls gloomily back down the other side. Them ancients knew how to cut us moderns deep down to the soul. So often I find that I’ve made my life consist of simply a stupid big rock to lug up the mountain, somehow forgetting that it will not stay where I want it. Chasing after moments, tastes of pleasure like sugar, to find my home for a second, and then always the crushing emptiness as it tips and falls away from me. Climbing the same mountain again and again like some stupid wheel spinning on the spot; we live for moments, not eternity.

Yes, there is a wheel, by all means. But it does not turn aimless forever on the fickle axle of change, spinning itself into oblivion (as the Pagans once thought and are wondering again today). It truly is, as Bob Dylan might tell us, “rolling down the road”; and what road was ever paved that did not intend to take us somewhere.

So, it is precisely because I can leave my home that I know it is not my home. It is because we can pack it all in and chuff on off to a new house to diffuse all our baggage, that I know that I have not yet come home. For once a puzzle piece has found its place there is no real need to move it, and there is no better place for it. By itself it is irregular, a piece of rubbish that will only be thrown to the dump, eventually. Coming home, disappearing into the landscape, there it is content. Something’s end is not its destruction, not by any means, but its perfection; its triumphal glory, its final rest. The universe is not merely a chaotic storm of pointless things, drifting bewildered through the grey, but a delicate web of precise and deliberate movement, like a grand cosmic dance - all things having an end to which they are drawn by some almighty magnetism, a point to which all things converge, as rivers flow down to the sea. Everyone with a place, a harmony upon the eternal stave, a part for them to sing. Otherwise, the harmony falls to discord, or the puzzle is stained by a missing piece. We all have an end, not where we end so to speak but rather where one may say we truly begin to be who we were made to be.

It seems I’ve always been a romantic at heart, but a steady realist by trade. So, imagine my ecstasy to find that this cold hard reality we live is in truth a romance. To peer through the murky gloom and see it dancing colours; of tragedy and redemption, celebration and battle, flowers and thorns, like that deadly rose. That we wander through life like lordless knights, lost pilgrims, and keening lovers, chasing honey on the summer wind. That elusive taste of home, calling us on.

So perhaps I shall roam, tomorrow, tomorrow, and tomorrow, from home to home … restless, dissatisfied, and always homecoming. But I raise my eyes to the end, the finish. Not a place in this world, but beyond it. A home that will stay when the world surely passes away. In secret. The arms of my Maker.

For the tragedy of Sisyphus lies not in that he must never cease pushing his boulder, but that he never does give it up and take up the Cross. The boulder does not lead us anywhere, but the Cross leads to an empty tomb, eternal reunion, our beautiful end; Home.