Christmas, Christ-Mass and Home

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A few weeks ago, I gave the first “concert” of my life, a “Concert-Class” about the Right to Home. It contained a great mix of music, philosophy, photos and paintings displayed on a big screen. There we sang many songs related to home, to discuss their lyrics later in order to get some philosophical and legal conclusions.

For that “concert” I analyzed more than one hundred songs dedicated to home. Their lyrics contain very insightful ideas that most philosophers willingly accept. After analyzing them, I found that singers usually do not understand home as a set of walls, bricks, wood and roof. On the contrary, almost all of them have a personal understanding of home. For artists, the essence of home is the people. For instance, Edith Whiskers says the “Home is wherever I’m with you” (Home, 2009). Many artists repeat similar ideas.

In my research I have found that the most important ideas are quite repeated among the different lyrics. In the one hundred songs related to home that I have studied, three phrases show the highest rate of occurrence: “I’m going [back] home,” “I will be home for Christmas” (or “come home for Christmas”) and “Home is where the heart is.” Although at first sight they seem to be not related, after analyzing them closer I have found several links between their meaning.

The first phrase, “I’m going home,” expresses one of the deepest yearnings of the human soul, a yearning that has been there since the times of Adam and Eve: the longing of “going back home.” That longing is not exclusive to the Christian tradition. Many philosophers are quite aware of that feeling that we carry deep inside. That is, for instance, the love of Plato, the “Platonic love,” which expresses precisely that longing for an eternal world, the world of the ideas. Let’s remember the “Cave Myth.” In this world of “fleeting sights and sounds” where we can only see shades of the luminous world, we have a vague “anamnesis” of a lightful world, and a platonic desire of going back there.

The same feeling appears in many Christmas songs, like Bing Crosby’s classic: «I’ll be home for Christmas / if only in my dreams» (Bing Crosby, I’ll be home for Christmas, 1943). Matthew West has just released a beautiful song called “Come home for Christmas” (2022). There are many other songs with similar phrases. “Home for Christmas” is probably the second most repeated phrase in English songs related to home.

Finally, the third most repeated phrase is this one: “home is where the heart is.” Although Lady Antebellum says that «mama said home is where the heart is / when I left that town» (Home Is Where The Heart Is, 2008), the truth is that the idea was formulated a bit earlier – almost twenty centuries earlier. It is generally attributed to the Roman naval commander, Gaius Plinius Secundus, better known to historians as Pliny the Elder (A.D. 23-79). Above all, love is the element that transforms a few monotonous walls into a home.

All these phrases seem to be mystically connected in a big and eternal Heart. What does the phrase “I will be home for Christmas” mean? Christmas etymologically means Christ-Mass. Mass is traditionally conceived—according to the Catholic doctrine—as the Passion of the Christ. Who attends the Mass, attends the sacrifice of the Cross happened in the year 27 A.D. (most likely), and attends the eternal offering of the Son to the Father in Heaven.

We know very well what happened in the last moment of the Passion of Christ. In the late afternoon, the roman soldiers decided to break the legs of the thieves that were crucified with Jesus, and they almost did the same with him. Yet, after realizing he was dead, the soldier Longinus pierced the Heart of Jesus with a spear. Longinus underwent a conversion immediately after experiencing the blood and water that came from the Heart of Jesus. Years later his children will receive the faith too, and all the family will be much appreciated by the Christian community.

Over the centuries, many mystics, saints and sinners have found refuge in the Heart of Jesus. Mystically they found shelter in that Heart, as sparrows in the mountain caves when it rains and gets cold. The Heart of Jesus was opened by the spear, and now anyone can find haven and heaven there. It would be worth remembering it when our last day comes. When all this world—our temporary home—collapses in front of our eyes, when all the lights are dimming in our life, when the air is heavy we find it difficult to breathe, there will be only one  possible haven to escape to: the pierced Heart of God. The same will happen at the end of times. In the day of wrath, in the day when all this world will be dissolved in ashes (Mozart, Dies irae, 1791), the pierced Heart of Jesus will be the only possible refuge to seek: then, it will be haven and heaven together.

So, singing “I’m going home” we are saying “I will be home for Christmas,” highlighting we are going to that home “where the Heart is.” Our life is that: going home, to an eternal home, to the eternal Heart of Jesus. There, Home—Home with caps—becomes a sacrament that unites families of this fleeting world with the eternal Family that is waiting us in heaven. So, at Christmas home become heaven.

Merry Christmas!

Juan Carlos Riofrio

Washington DC, Dec. 24, 2022

On the photo appears the painting of Norman Rockwell, “Christmas Homecoming,” an oil painting for Saturday Evening Post published on December 25, 1948. Fifteenth days before was approved the right to home in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.