WALTER BOUZARD RELIGION PROFESSOR
As a professor, I’d heard students say it. Still, I wasn’t fully prepared when my own daughter, sitting in our living room, casually mentioned that she needed to go back to her college.
The way she said it was this: “I need to get back home.”
It was a bittersweet moment. She knows, I hope, that she always has a home with her mother and me.
But she has matured into the young woman we’d hoped she become—that woman and so much more. And part of that maturation now involves her exploration of the world.
She is discovering new places where she can learn, love and grow. She has found that her college is, for her, a place of safety as she learns to live ever more deeply. It is a place where her heart can be broken. It is a place where her passion for justice and her deep sorrow at its absence can be expressed.
In short, her college truly has become her home.
Colleges—good ones like Wartburg, anyway—always become “home” for students and alumni. I cherish Wartburg’s homecoming weekend because, for a shining moment, Wartburg family members of all ages come back to this place.
They come home.
They come home where they learned of mysteries and wonders in classrooms. They come home to where they tested personal freedoms and responsibilities in the unchartered waters of residential life.
They come home where they discerned and took ownership of their talents. They come home to where they dreamed dreams of how education, talent and vision all might be woven into a life of meaning and purpose.
I cherish homecoming at Wartburg because, in some distant way, this homecoming is like what I hope—what I dream and imagine—the great homecoming will someday resemble.
I carry about with me an image of that homecoming. People from all walks of life and from every imaginable circumstance will be welcomed.
A wealthy aristocratic investment banker will walk beside a homeless, unemployed machinist and the mother of a successful graduate student. A doctor will skip with a nursery school attendant.
All of them will head home together, every last one agreeing that they never quite figured out all the steps of life’s dance, but knowing that it didn’t matter in the end for, at gracious long last, they are headed home.
And there they will be greeted by Jesus who will say, simply, “Welcome. Welcome home.”
College homecomings, as well planned and perfect as they may be, will never match that homecoming. But for now, for a shining moment, we can sense the warmth of that homecoming.
Peering past black and orange bunting, we can almost see the wine and bread heaped on the table of the “hungry feast”.
We can hear the glad babble of friends long lost seeing each other again.
And we can be reminded that the promise of God is more, always more, for the homecoming ahead.