Wandering your way home | Greg DeLoach, Ph.D.

By the time you read this, students have moved into housing, faculty are keeping regular office hours, and staff and administrators are humming like honeybees with new semester routines.

Over 40 years ago, for my first attempt at college, I moved to Atlanta to attend art school. From the start, I was a starving artist. Lonesome and homesick, living a million miles away from the red clay of Putnam County dirt roads, I felt as far away from home as you could get. Most weekends, I could not get home fast enough, and when the weekend ended, I dreaded making the drive back to my lonely apartment off Peachtree.

My grandmother would bake a loaf of bread and fry a whole chicken and send it back with me. I made it last all through the week. Every bite tasted like home.

Although much has changed in the passing decades — for starters, I am far removed from art school! — home is still a wandering journey. Strangely, life is an unfolding of dislocation and disruption. This is not just for the student living away from home for the first time. It is true for all of us, as life flows onward. We are wandering our way home but also making a home right where we are.

This past May, a doe gave birth to two little fawns right outside my office window. Here we are, just inside the perimeter that encloses Atlanta, and we get to see a family of deer who have found a home. I could say the same for the monarchs pausing in migration, the moss glazing the landscape or the hummingbirds sipping from my feeder. All creation longs for home, and blessed is the one that finds it, even while on the move.

In a critique of higher education, Wendell Berry writes that for many, the idea of education is for a better place, and the better place is somewhere else. I think he is correct. What if we — not just at Mercer University, but everywhere — reimagine what home looks like? Perhaps it is the journey itself. Or, like the mission of the School of Medicine, it is commissioning the students to return home to make a better place in their practice of healthcare.

What if home is helping others feel at home? Many Friday nights my wife and I invite our neighbors to join us on the back porch. We have neighbors from places like New York, Virginia, Mexico, Alabama and Kansas. Come to think of it, we are the only ones from Georgia. Our neighbors gather with us for food, drink and conversations that run from salty to silly. The point is, for a brief moment in time, we feel at home with each other.

We are all wanderers of one sort or the other, searching for home. Blessed is the one who finds it, especially on the journey. Blessed too is the one who makes a home for another.