Track 1: Not Yet Home
(Paired with Memory)
Meditations:
From Julian
Early in the morning on Labor Day 2024, in my beloved Chicago, Adrian Collins, Simeon Bihesi, Sean Jones and Margaret Johnson were murdered in their sleep on the CTA Blue Line. That’s the train line I take most often as an adult and was the one I took routinely from 7th to 12th grade to get to Whitney Young Magnet High School. All to say, this news was personally shocking because of my relationship to the scene of their deaths.
Our city is not yet home for us all and Lord knows this country is not yet home for us all. As a follower of Jesus, this world is not yet home for me, and I know it’s not even fully home yet for God. God is still making home here. These murders gruesomely testify to that. And even if you do have a physical home, you might still feel homeless – in your family, in your career, on this earth. We all need mercy as we search for home.
There is a passage on the piano that repeatedly flows upwards. I envisioned that as a eulogy for the fallen, a sonic depiction of the four’s souls wafting up to God, who invites us into forever home on the other side of death. Vocalists Tramaine and Eva sing “not yet home” underneath while Ethan sings with his bowed bass. What makes you cry with them?
From Dr. Alysia Nicole Harris
Yet… such a troublesome word. A tantrum word. I want to be home now!
Yet is where the trouble of hope originates: in yet’s interminable waiting. If only this land were already home of the free and courageous, many of our leaders would have grown old on front porches. Many of our loved ones would still be sleeping in soft beds.
The dissonance, the disappointment, the disturbance, and yet the possibility that if I keep going, and keep going with you, something/somewhere/someway might be different.
Hope is an irritant, like an eyelash below the lidline, a pea under thirty mattresses, an undismissable hiccup you think is gone only to disturb you mid-utterance. Not YET Home!
In “landless acknowledgment,” Chicago poet Nate Marshall says, “closest i got to a homeland is not never calling the police. closest i got to a homeland is my daddy’s laugh in a spades game.”
If home were a known impossibility, a neverland we are banished from forever, I might rest and be tempted to make do here. Or I might end the song before it even begins. Title it Not yet home.
“maybe ain’t no home except how your beloveds cuss or pray or pronounce.”
What if home is less a place and more a proximity? Like the nearness of love, the “closeness” of Marshall’s closest thing.
Which melodies will you sing as we walk towards closeness? Which songs will you teach me along the way? It may begin as a slow and low crescendo that only grows gradually, but grow, it does. Not yet home. Not yet. Closer still.