WAY BACK HOME

Charity begins at home, an old adage says. Whoever thought of it, perhaps, forgot to say that faith, hope, strength, happiness, camaraderie, fraternity etc. began too at home. Home is the seedbed where everything in man begins and where everything in man can be traced back. Thus, there would always be an atmosphere of reminiscing, coupled with nostalgia, every time one who had been far away home, goes home. One begins to remember his humble beginnings, the dreams he wove under the old mango tree. Vivid images of childhood days begin to re-appear as one walks through the same dusty road back home. But more than going home to his place of origin, one actually ventures to journey back to himself, a return from the place he chose to be to the place the Other chose him to be, to the abode God first wish him to be.  

Last summer I went home. More than a compliance to the mandatory home vacation in the seminary, I took this vacation as an opportune time for me to go back to my beginnings, to my roots, a time to reintegrate with my family. It was a chance to waste time with my father and mother, to be there simply, recalling stories of the old. Yes it was to waste time with them. In this world where time had become so precious, and no amount of it ought to be wasted, each single second spent productively, expecting result/output, I dared to waste time with my family. I was simply there acknowledging them as important part of my life.

Along the years of being in the seminary, away from my family, I fell out of love from them. I thought it was totally fine putting them aside to the dark back burners of my self. It is not fine. They are my family. With all the hustle and bustle they bring with them to my life, I cannot deny the fact that I came from them. Denying them is tantamount to denying a part of me. That home vacation I took to embrace them. To love them again just like before when all I had in this world was them. I learned to love them again not for who they were in the past but they are now in my life. We cannot choose our family, our life situations. But we can always choose how we are going to take them, to have them in our lives. Will we love them? Hate them? Deny them? I chose to love them, to affirm them in my life, though how imperfect they are, as I am to them.