Back to the Homeland

One of the characteristics of the United States that sets her apart from any other country in the world is the fact that she is a “nation of immigrants.” The vast majority of citizens at some point in their past have come from somewhere other than the continent they currently reside in. It is for this reason that America is rightly known as the “great melting pot” of peoples, cultures, traditions, and ideas.

My family is no exception. We are the descendants of British, Irish, Scottish, Dutch, and Germans peoples. One can visibly see the traces of such lineage from my freckles to my hair. Yet, it is a fact I hardly think about. Not before arriving in Europe anyways. Being back here where I know that people I share blood with have strolled, worked, and spent their lives made me think. It also made me act. So I got the addresses of some distant German relatives whose great-grandparents my grandmother kept in touch with, and I wrote them a letter.

And then, quite suddenly, I found myself sitting around a table laden with cakes and black coffee on Easter Sunday drawing out a family tree with cousins in Berlin, Germany. After hugs and introductions, we had decided that it would be nice to know how exactly we were related since that minor fact none of us knew. It is all clear now. My grandmother use to live in Dresden; she and one of her cousins there were quite close. Then, between the wars, my grandmother left her life in Germany to join the rest of her family in Florida. Most immigrants who arrived in the States at the time came knowing that they were shedding all traces of their past lives. There was no such thing as commercial airplanes or email accounts. Connection and communication literally had to cross oceans. Thankfully, my grandmother did not view difficulty as limiting, and she and her cousin persisted in writing letters which would slowly traverse across the waters throughout the time of the second war, the Communist take over, the closing of the Iron Curtain, and the same’s fall and reopening many years later. Once again today, connection has been restored between our two countries after many years of tangible and intangible barriers. And it is this cousin of my grandmother who was the grandmother of the relatives whose house I was at and the great-grandparents of the cousins my age I passed Easter day with.

My grandmother has never returned to her homeland even after all these years which have seen so many technological advances. Instead, I was blessed to do so. These are people I should never have known. I mean, our family ties have not been renewed physically since the early 1900s. And here it is 2008. Yet, nothing seemed odd about it. They were family, and I was back.

How great to be reunited with physical, earthly family. Yet, what joy there will be on that day when we will be reunited with the great spiritual family that resides on every continent, has members in every nation, speaks every tongue, and has lived during every age. All of our differences and things that should hinder our union fall away. We are family. And soon, we will be back home. Praise God our Father!