Places and people affect us; some of those affect us deeply. And some of those places and people are good, holy, life giving. God meets us there, speaks to us and loves us in ways that define us. And as our spiritual vision grows it is also true that we see those people and places differently.

Have you ever returned somewhere or seen someone after a long absence? We note the changes in details, the differences in people, and can feel a bit of nostalgia as we realize it’s not quite the same as it was, as it still is in our memory. But we can also feel, in returning and rest, a profound joy, a renewed sense of the holy. It can almost feel like we reconnect with God in the old woods or buildings or people or streams or churches. We can feel a deep sigh of relief that we can…, we really can go home again. And in that return we may also find that our perception has changed; we might even feel we can see clearly what before we saw through a glass darkly.

My wife, Calder, and I have places and people like that. For us it would be Collegiate Peaks Wilderness in Colorado, our back yard, Panama City Beach, some friends, Oak Mountain State Park south of Birmingham, our boys, St Christopher Episcopal Church, some hymns, our kitchen, our favorite restaurants, our devotional books. God loves us into life in those places and people.

The return to the holy is a necessary food group for soul nourishment. It is a Sabbath thing. And when God is active in that Sabbath our perception of the holy also changes. It’s like you really can teach an old dog new tricks!

We returned to St Christopher Episcopal Church recently. We were very pleasantly surprised to find how much we had missed the worship, the people, the life ritual of that church. The return was good, holy.

We hope to return to our growing up places in the near future. I’m sure we will find there, too, uplifting surprises and will also feel some absences of the family and places of our childhood. But we look forward to seeing the tall trees, feeling the humid days, and reconnecting with childhood roots that are never far from our hearts. And, of course, we will for sure see some things differently than they appeared long ago.

T.S. Eliot said, “We shall not cease from exploration and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know it for the first time.” It’s as if time, growth, perhaps the wisdom of God’s Spirit irradiate both the triumphs and traumas to which we return.

When God’s eyes look through the prism of our experience the vision changes shape, aquires new meaning. The contour of the holy shifts, the significance of the people emerges fresh. And perhaps…, just maybe we can find that our return is not just a remembrance.

It can be a resurrection.