By Deacon Corey Close
This month, as I enter my last full month of being at the North American College (NAC) in Rome before ordination to the priesthood, I want to do something a little different with my column. I would like to share a poem I wrote a few years ago.
Four years ago, I left the relative safety and comfort of my home and came to a foreign land. As I look back and reflect on my time here, I realize that I, and my world, have changed much over these past few years. But it is not so much how I have changed, but who I have begun to look at more closely.
I hope you enjoy! God bless!
Dorothy
There’s no place like home,
There’s no place like home,
There’s no place like home …
When Dorothy returned home, was it really home?
Is it true, that you can never go home again?
What if, after the initial burst of joy she felt to return to Kansas,
She realized that the place she left was not the place she returned to?
What if, after having left home in search of adventure,
She returned to find out that she had lost home somewhere on the journey?
Misplaced somewhere back on the road, never to be found again?
The houses are the same, the people are the same, but Dorothy has changed.
It’s not that her love for her family has changed, it has grown,
But home, a place to rest and lay still, a place of no worries,
A place to call one’s own, to put down roots and grow old,
This has been irrevocably lost, never to be found again.
For in her journey to a place she did not want to go,
She learned that home is not a place anywhere on this earth.
In fact, in leaving home for a slight instant,
She lost home forever.
Instead she has found something new,
Something incomparable to the sad grey landscape she left behind.
She has found Love, and that…
That makes all the difference.
She has discovered her Lord,
And fallen head over heels in love,
She knows that her true home lies in Him.
No longer will the beds of this world truly satisfy,
And the sign “Home, Sweet Home” now holds a queer irony,
She smirks and laughs to herself,
For her home is truly sweet, for He lives there.
And whether it be Kansas or the Emerald City,
And though foxes have dens, and birds of the sky have nests,
She has no place to rest and lay down her head.
But that doesn’t matter, for He is with her always,
And that, that is home enough.
So she will love, and rejoice in Love,
And she will sing the age-old tune with a new lyric,
For there is no place as humble,
No, on this earth,
There’s no place that’s home.
(Deacon Corey Close is a fourth-year seminarian studying for the Diocese of Davenport at the North American College in Rome.)
