There is something deeply heavenly about the lights of home at night. Now, I don’t mean wispy heavenly, puffy-cloudy heavenly, cherub heavenly, because this vision is quite earthy. And neither am I simply talking about the magic of your desk lamp.  I am talking about echo- in- the- deepest- cavern- of- your- heart heavenly, about that fourth-dimension-unavailable-to-sight-but-sensed-by-some-unknown-seventh-sense heavenly.  It is the pearl of parable encrusted in the hard shell of what we know as reality, only seen if you poke and prod enough, if you dust away with your hands, if you brush back the dirt— if you are active.  Sometimes flashes of this pearl may chance to catch your eye when you are not expecting, but for the most part you will only see it if you pursue it in a quiet way, like walking on a windy night.

I like walking through the city at night.  Dangerous, I know, but nonetheless I do, and no doubt in part because of that dangerous element.  After all, it is only to those who sit in darkness that the light shines.  And it is here that I see the lights of home.  I like looking at people’s houses as I pass— not in a peeping Tom sort of way.  I have no voyeuristic impulse, and I keep to my place on the sidewalk.  But my eyes are open, brushing back the veils of dust and dusk to see.  And there is something beautiful to see.

There is nothing necessarily alluring about a house during the day, unless perhaps it is a particularly nice house, an eye-catching Victorian perhaps, with gables and angles that tease you in and make your eye travel, and a nice half-wild flower bed in the front.  But many other such bland houses are seemingly transformed by the coming of night and the turning on of light. Like the elves of J.R.R. Tolkien’s high mythology, they glow from within.  They emanate light— homely light.  I say homely very particularly, for that is the essence of the feeling conveyed— of home, of place, of belonging.  And you are out in the wild night, at the mercy of the cosmos.  Around and above you is the sublime, in all its awesomeness and wonder and wildness, and there is a sort of pleasure in that.  And there in front of you, as you are whipped by the winds, is a window, framed softly by curtains, and inside is a light on a side table, and next to it a comfortable chair.  Or upstairs is light reflecting off the walls of a bedroom, covered with someone’s favorite posters.  Someone is watching a baseball game.  Another one is sitting by the window, on their computer.  And they are unaware of you, comfortable in their sphere, they are home.  And if it is a good home with good people, it is there they are safe.  It is there they are at rest.  There they are themselves, the facade shown to the world packed away into the closet for the time being.  A man’s home is his castle, and best when not under siege.  And there you are, wind whipping your coat, under the much higher roof of the wild stars and their cold light.  It is beautiful in its own way, awesome, but not warm like this light, not softened like this is softened, not framed like this is framed.

When I was a boy, my brother and I were staying with our friend and his family on their farm in Maine.  It was an open and wild place.  One afternoon we were hunting in the woods with our fathers.  We had with much effort stashed ourselves up in a tree, where we giggled and talked and watched as the sun slowly slipped down.  We were oblivious to the approach of night until, echoing through the woods at a distance, the call of our friend’s father snapped us from our reverie.  All of a sudden we feared being stuck in the dark forest at night, and scrambled hurriedly down, stumbling our way through the swiftly velveting woods and into the clear.  The stars were peeing out and the cold creeping in as we made our way back across the misting fields.  And then suddenly I saw it, and the memory has since burned itself into my mind.  There in the distance, a single light shining from the farmhouse, across that dark space.  And it was as if a single light had been match-struck within me.  I suddenly desired food, and fellowship, and the laughter of an evening around the fire.  I desired warm blankets and comfortable chairs, and music, and maybe a good book, and after such times falling to sleep in soft comfort, oblivious to the whirling of the planet world high above.

It is in such times you realize that you are being called, that all of us have been called all of our lives, to home.  The world is often very beautiful, but it is also wild and dark and dangerous.  You may walk safe most times, but there are times when the darkness may take you, and the darkest nightmare is that one day it will take you and you will not escape.  But even as we walk, coated and wind-whipped, we are sometimes graced with light that falls through a window in the world.  And then we get a glimpse of home, the home that we have been made to belong to.  Our father is there, through the veil of curtain that denies full sight, tantalizing.  He is by the fire telling stories. We know here is a comfortable seat for us, and a good warm drink, and we somehow feel that if we could get inside, we would be content forever to let the stars wheel in darkness above us, oblivious.  There we could shed our coat, and shed every other layer of pretension and protection we had ever worn, and simply be ourselves, or maybe find the self we never knew lay underneath, now basking in the glow of love and light.  And we might sing and dance, or tell a story, or hear a story, or simply sit before the blaze in silence and contemplation and contentment.  And the heat and glow of that blaze would seep to the deepest of ourselves, and we would finally be full— we would finally be satisfied— we would no longer need to walk towards a light through darkness, for we would be in it, and we would at last, eternally contented, be home.