Home for Christmas? 1

Home, sweet home? Reflecting on our experiences of home

In the next few weeks, we will be looking at the idea of home from a lot of different angles, but we need to start in the obvious place, by thinking about what home means to us and what our own experience of home has been. For some home has been happy, for others perhaps not so happy, but whatever it was like it will have shaped us in ways that we may not be aware of for good or ill.

I have no idea why the questions below are called Quaker Questions - they have nothing to do with the Quakers as far as I know - but they do get at one of the central features of our idea of home, that it is, or should be, a place of warmth.

The Four Quaker Questions

• What was your home like when you were a child?
• How was it heated?
• Was there a person (or people) who represented warmth to you when you were a child?
• When, if at all, did God become a source of warmth for you?

In this video, Bobby Horton performs "Home, Sweet Home" which became popular at the time of the American Civil War among both armies. It expressed the longing the soldiers had for the homes they had left behind in order to fight.