In my Father's house are many mansions

Today was a housewarming party for my friends N., J. and their children. Being Monday, it is also my Sabbath. And it was a beautiful sunny day of late summer. I was unsure of the parking in their neighborhood, so I left my Honda in the staff parking behind the church and walked, about fifteen minutes through a fine older neighborhood. And I found the place, which is on a street that I had never visited; a quiet side street close the children's school – once I got within about a half-block, all I had to do was to follow my ears to the house where lots of children were playing in the backyard – what seemed to be about half of our Youth Choir, plus many others.

It was the sort of house that I love: nineteenth century, with old wavy glass in the windows, what looked like pine floors, low ceilings, especially in the tiny bedrooms upstairs – which can be reached only by way of a narrow steep staircase. Too many homes of Episcopalians are cold and sterile, everything perfectly placed and mostly new, more like a luxury hotel suite than any place where a person could actually live. This was Home, a place that had clearly been home to several generations and brimming with life.

On this day, it was full of children, tumbling up and down the stairs, through the rooms, in and out the back door into the yard. I mostly stood in a corner of the kitchen with my friend's father and watched, talking of the Greatest Generation and what has followed, and comparing it to the generation of the War Between the States, who did what they could to ensure that nothing like that would ever happen again. It may have been such a family that first built this house, back in the 1880's or thereabouts. And I am sure that the great-grandparents of these children, who would have been of that Great Generation, would be pleased that they have a Home in a quiet neighborhood where they can walk to school, and would say a prayer that they never see the dark days of Depression and War.

I pray that for them, too.

All in all, it made for a fine Sabbath of rest for me to be there among these people, the parents who could almost (by age) be my children, and their children, running about and enjoying the day. It reminded me more than a little of the fictional household of Arthur and Molly Weasley.

Walking back to the church, I considered something that has sometimes nagged at me about Heaven – how could it be a perfect place and the Home of which all others are but a shadow without children running around and playing in the yard? It would not be fair for those who die as children and make their first entrance into Heaven as such to remain so; they must come to their full flowering of maturity, as must we all. So would there be no children in that place? On this day, the answer came to me: We are the children. All of us, clear back to Adam and Eve. In that place, the child that remains tucked away inside of us can peek its head around the door and see wonders beyond imagining. And all of his friends, all there. And a whole universe to play in. And at the same time, each of us with the maturity and wisdom of the ancients. And a Father who is more playful than the most mischievous child; one need only read in the Book of Nature and contemplate the God who created puppies and kittens and lambs in the spring.

Even so, come, Lord Jesus.