By Derek Olsen
Every few years, I take my “epic tour.” Never leaving my armchair, I travel miles and centuries and states of mind by re-immersing myself in the great epics of former days, the Aeneid, Homer’s Odyssey and Iliad, and even that recent vernacular upstart, Beowulf. I find this tour grounds my spirit and placates the shade of my departed grandmother, the Latin teacher who never understood why I chose a major in Japanese rather than Classics.
When last I read the Aeneid, I was struck—hard—by the presence of a theme I’d never noted before. After the frenetic escape from burning Troy, the homeless prince Aeneas and his ships of salvaged companions make landfall on the holy island of Delos—birthplace in classical mythology of Apollo, god of music and divination. The ancient shrine of Apollo was tended by the priest-king Anius, a friend of Aeneas’s father. When the hero consults the oracle of the shrine, asking where he and his band should turn and make their new life, they receive this reply:
Tough sons of Dardanus, the self-same land
That bore you from your primal parent stock
Will take you to her fertile breast again.
Look for your mother of old. Aeneas’ house
In her will rule the world’s shores down the years,
Through generations of his children’s children.
(3.130-135)*
The Aeneid and its quest for a new home is—at root—a quest for origins. The new land is the primal land. Look for your mother of old. This is one of the deep stories of humanity—an archetype coded deep in our understanding that resonates at a subconscious, an unconscious, level. Look for your mother of old. And, lifting my eyes from my armchair Aeneid, I find it again in books dotting my shelves—from Asimov’s Foundation series to the Holy Scriptures themselves.
The oracle’s message to Aeneas becomes the prophet’s cry to Israel as Isaiah’s second portion (Isa 40-55) exhorts the people from their place of exile, beguiling them from their slothful security to a vision of the beckoning arms of Mother Zion; no longer the shamed and shattered woman of Lamentations but clothed in clean and costly garments Zion awaits her children (Isa 54): Look for your mother of old. Creation itself will be sundered in the Almighty’s eagerness to guide the wayward children home (Isa 42:15–16) and the elements themselves shall lose their nature least they hinder the people’s return (Isa 43:2).
Psalm 107 borrowing and condensing the theme of Isaiah begins and ends with a glorious city rising where once was waste, a home for exiles, a refuge for the weary. The first vignette (Ps 107:3–9)—the wanderers in the waste, lost in alien lands—finds consummation in the bounty of the last (Ps 107:33–43) where the new city rises above the fruited plains. But no name is given. Look for your mother of old. But the city is never identified and transcending name and physical place points to something beyond the earthly dwelling. Further, the path from first vignette to last traverses curious ground, with images oddly resonate. A people sitting in darkness—upon them a light is shone, bounteous food given to the hungry, a tempest tamed by divine word at sea…and I am reminded of the old tradition linking the shattered doors of bronze and iron bars to the now-sundered gates of hell itself. A path of liberation, a path of redemption, presented as if pioneered by a God who has felt hunger, pain, and darkness in his own flesh…
And finally Hebrews, an enigmatic book of eloquently literary Greek, sees Isaiah and the Psalter as signposts pointing into the fullness of the truth. It speaks of Abraham, father of the faithful, leaving his home by strength of faith and “sojourning in the land of promise as in a strange country…For he looked for a city which hath foundations, whose builder and maker is God” (Heb 11:9, 10). And the litany of “strangers and pilgrims on the earth” (Heb 11:13) wends its way through patriarchs, prophets, and martyrs, all making their way to the heavenly country, for God “hath prepared for them a city” (Heb 11:16). But the one who leads the way, the one who goes before—in truth if not in time—is the pioneer and perfecter of our faith, he who shatters the gates of bronze and throws open the doors of paradise: even Christ Jesus our Lord. He is the way, the gate, the door of our heavenly home.
Look for your mother of old. Look—press on—for the land that gave you birth. No, not in your flesh but in the root of your being.
But the metaphor twists and bends on the point of a paradox for the place is not a place and the wandering people wander towards the place where they already dwell. For the city, our ancient home, is near to us. It hangs—just a moment’s breath away from us, closer indeed than our hands and our feet. The carpet—the tile—the hardwood—under my feet is shaded and shadowed by its glistening pavers. For the place is not a place but a people. And the people is not a people but a Body. And the city is not a city but a bride. Look for your mother of old. Washed in clearest water, fed on finest wheat, our Scriptures, songs, and stories urge us to realize what has already been attained for us. The heavenly country lies not only in heaven; the heavenly country lies where its citizens may be found, where they proclaim its light and its truth, yes, even in the midst of hurried and exhausted lives that feel decidedly less than spiritual.
We are citizens of a different homeland, of another place. The land of promise. Our ancient home and source. Though we forget ourselves in our exile here, its call recalls us to who and what we are—to whose business we are to be about. While we obey the laws of this land there is a higher law, another legislation, a yet more excellent way that commands our words, our deeds, our actions. For the law of our homeland is the law of love—love of God, love of neighbor. Isaiah recalls and reminds; the Psalter recalls and reminds, Hebrews recalls and reminds: Live into the land of promise; look for your mother of old.
* The quotation is from Robert Fitzgerald’s translation of Virgil’s Aeneid (Vintage, 1990) which I cannot recommend highly enough.
Derek Olsen is completing a Ph.D. in New Testament (with a healthy side of Homiletics) at Emory University where he teaches in homiletics, liturgics, and New Testament. His reflections on life, liturgical spirituality, and being a Gen-X dad appear at Haligweorc.