The house with golden windows
This is a story told of a young boy who lived with his
parents in a cottage on a hillside, overlooking a wide valley. His greatest joy
was to sit on the doorstep on summer evenings, and gaze across the valley to a
house miles away on the opposite hillside, for, just as the sun was sinking in
the west, the windows of that house would burst into flame, shining dazzlingly with golden light. How perfectly happy the
people must be who live there, he thought!
One day he packed sandwiches and set off to find the house
with the golden windows, but it was farther off than he expected, and it was
already towards sunset as he climbed steeply uphill. To his disappointment the
house was a plain cottage after all, and the windows ordinary windows. The good
people there offered him supper, and made up a bed in the kitchen, for it was
too late now for him to return. That night, in his dream, he asked directions
of a girl about his age. ‘The house with the golden windows? Yes, I’ve seen it.’
And she pointed.
He woke to the early song of the birds. Drawing the curtain
aside” “he looked out. There far across the valley, was his own house–and,
wonder of wonders, its windows flashed with gold in the brightness of the
morning sun.
And the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the
first time.” T.S.Eliot
As I was re-reading this well-known story and even more
well-known verse from T.S.Eliot it struck me how appropriate it is for our
current lockdown time. The house of
golden windows that the boy sets out to find is a post lockdown vision of what
life might be. We look forward to it and
dream ‘how perfectly happy the people must be who live there’. As we gradually make our way there, through
the unknowns that still lie ahead this autumn and beyond, we may eventually
discover that it is a very ordinary place after all.
But that’s okay. We will
be the same people, living with the same people and our societies will have
made some changes but they will take time to become evident and there will be a
new normal of sorts. Being human though
we get used very quickly to a new normal, just think of how we don’t think
twice about people wearing masks in shops, or going to church online etc.
As T.S.Eliot points out though and the boy discovered there
is something wonderful about the normal but often we need to be away from it
for a while to really appreciate it. In
the lines of his poem as we draw towards the end of ‘all our exploring’ during
this lockdown and ‘arrive where we started’ as a new normal emerges in the
coming months perhaps we will notice and value it in a fresh way.
‘Noticing’ is a wonderful spiritual quality in the Christian tradition,
the ability to see the presence of God in the ordinary and to be able to wake
up each day and know that we too live in a house with golden windows. As Jacob said, ‘surely the Lord was in this
place and I was not aware of it.’ Genesis 28:16.
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