Friendship and the Unspectacular

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.