For all who know the security of home--in all its iterations--and for those who don't, finding home is complicated. Home always is characterized by joy and sorrow, grief and gladness, the realities of complicated lives. What is it like to flee the horrors of war as a refugee in search of home? When daily life is unbearable, what exactly does home mean? How do we learn to be at home in our bodies, at home with ourselves? What does it mean to be made in the likeness of the Holy One? Can we find home in the company of strangers and how do we reclaim our earth home? So many images swim just below the surface of my memory, all the houses where I came to know home. It takes little to retrieve them--a shared story, the pungent smell of tide flats, the sound of rain on a tin roof. But home, of course, is much more than houses. These reflections invite readers to explore identity, the importance of rootedness, discovering home away from home, what it means to be home for one another. Finding home--literally and metaphorically--is challenging.
Julie K. Aageson has served as a resource specialist and writer for the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America. For a decade, she wrote a monthly column for the ELCA magazine, GATHER. Her books include Benedictions: 26 Reflections and Holy Ground: An Alphabet of Prayer.
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“Finding Home offers luminous, grounded wisdom from a luminous, grounded writer. Julie Aageson invites us into a journey of spiritual reflection upon the things that matter most—relationship, story, divine indwelling, vocation, generosity, gratitude, failure, and those pesky questions of meaning underlying them all. Read with pen in hand, this book will open the reader to undiscovered corners of their own soul.”
—Laurie Larson Caesar, Bishop, Oregon Synod, Evangelical Lutheran Church in America
“In this world we have no abiding city, and yet here is Julie Aageson conjuring that world in the olive groves of Palestine, the smoky fires of wintry England, the saltwater flats of her childhood. Attention must be paid to its haunting beauty and instability—to the loving but desperate asylum seeker, to the kindly parent unmoored by depression—for in it we find the suffering and redeeming God, our heart’s true home.”
—William Craft, President, Concordia College, Moorhead, Minnesota
“To be human is to be a homemaker! If you thought you had risen above all that, Aageson shows us how we all want and need to make of every one of our human experiences a place to hunker down, body and soul, and take root. We long to be at home and whole. As we spiral through our developmental cycles and find ourselves off center and clumsily groping, it is some solid sense of arriving at home we grapple for. More than an actual roof, we finally want to be at home in ourselves . . . we want the Divine to find a home in us.”
—Gertrud Mueller Nelson, liturgical artist and author of Here All Dwell Free
“Wanderers, wonderers, seekers, and centered ones—come on in! Julie Aageson’s Finding Home is a safe place where you can let down your defenses and, with unguarded hearts and utter gratitude, rest in her rich hospitality.”
—Mike Woods, Pastor, Prince of Peace Lutheran Church
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