True home

What Bowen's text got me thinking about is his intimation, the implication, that "home" is not to be found here, but only once we die, in the afterlife, in Heaven, if you will.

My trouble with this is the fact that it is precisely this view of "home" that has been perpetrated by organized religion for as long as I can remember, and it would seem - if you read even just a little bit of history - for a long, long time. What bothers me about it is the fact that it provides too much "justification" for our miserable lives here. Granted, we've made all kinds of "progress" and we are drowning in creature comforts, but oddly enough, even in this day and age, in the very straightforward, down-to-earth mind of the singer, we still haven't managed to have Heaven on Earth. There is still something missing, there is still the loneliness, the isolation, the alienation ... all those sensations that are the opposite of what we consider to be "home".

Oh, I can hear some of you already: but it's always been that way (the "way-it-is" fallacy, again), and who is little ol' me to change something that big (the "I'm-just-me" fallacy, also again)? We're just always getting in our own way, it would seem.

I can't be the only one that it might have occurred to that maybe that's why we've been put here in the first place: to make this place our home. We're all in this together folks. The history of DNA shows us that we're all somehow related, if you go back far enough, or if you take the Adam-and-Eve story seriously. What we do is just limit ourselves in the oddest kinds of ways and we do so with an energy that could just as easily be redirected to something a lot more constructive.

No, folks ... I hate to be the one to break it to you (OK, not really), but it's just us, right here, right now. You can believe in a Creator, something greater than ourselves, and you can believe that there is nothing but the matter we encounter in this particular reality. It doesn't matter. All of us on this planet, whether we like it or not, or whether we can satisfactorily explain it or not, are simply all faced with the same, common fate. In other words, if we don't do it, it just isn't going to get done.

If things are bad, if things aren't like they should be, if things aren't like what we would like them to be, there is nobody to blame but ourselves. This is our home, and it seems to me that it's high time to start treating it as such, and treating each other as the family we actually are. If we did, we wouldn't have to wait for death before we had our togetherness. Instead, we're just killing ourselves with a loneliness that is self-induced, because we apparently can't see the obvious.