Goodbye for good: A liturgy for moving away from a beloved home
Plus: my review of Metallica's latest album, '72 Seasons'
Hey. It’s been a while.
(If you know, you know. If you don’t, then let me introduce you to my freshmen year of high school.)
I contribute most of the gap since my last post to a wild and busy June. You know about our almost-fostering adventure with our girls’ half-brother. We also sold our old house.
Yes, the Uranus St. house. The one with the playhouse in the backyard that my granddad helped refurbish. The one with the platform swing hanging from the ponderosa pine.
This spring, Lindsey and I spent a considerable amount of time considering the demands and opportunities of life. We realized that we needed less on our plates. We needed to free up some existential open space. Space, that elusive territory which “represents sanity,” per Gretel Ehrlich in The Solace of Open Spaces, her memoir about life in Wyoming.
We saw our old house, which we flipped into a rental property, as a space-occupying domino that if tipped over could knock over a few others. We closed June 30, and the new buyers moved in about a week later. And somehow it’s already the end of July.
(I could share more about this, but we’re thrilled with who God brought our way to buy the house. It’s a young family and first-time homebuyers. Just like we were when we bought it.)
Our tenant moved out in late May, so we had the house “to ourselves” one last time. This was a gift. One night, about a week before close, all five of us were there. I was outside pulling weeds when I saw the party lights come on over the patio, and there I found my wife and kids with eyes full of tears. They had been going through the house, room by room, recalling the life that we had lived in that space.
And as much extra time and energy as it ate up in June, I was thankful for the opportunity to tend to the yard and flowers again. We picked strawberries out of the back garden and stood underneath the ponderosa. And I got to mow my beloved buffalo grass again. Owning a place does something to you. As Ehrlich points out, there are ways “in which the place possess me.” After 10 years there and one as a landlord, it will forever own a place in my heart. “Mowing hayfields feels like mowing myself,” writes Ehrlich.
On the last night of our ownership of that piece of Uranus, after checking off the remaining to-dos, I sat on the front step and looked about me. Yes, I certainly did cry. Then I prayed a prayer I had written for my family when we moved out last summer. It’s a liturgy “for moving away from a beloved home.” We prayed it together on our last morning as residents last year, and I needed to pray it again myself on the eve of that final farewell.
I’m sharing it here in the hopes that it helps you say goodbye to those places that have taken out a mortgage on your heart—no matter how long ago you left them. Or perhaps you’re facing a move from a place that owns you as much as you own it—whether in actuality or metaphorically—and you’re fumbling for words. And you’re finding yourself as excited as you are sorrowed.
You’re in good company. Keep mowing those yards, and may these words become your own.
The metal legends are back. And on ’72 Seasons,’ Metallica invites us to take the hill country of our past.
In the June 24 issue of World Magazine, I review Metallica’s latest studio album, 72 Seasons. Here’s how I open the review:
Caleb the son of Jephunneh did not believe in retirement. He was 85 when he asked Joshua for the hill country of Hebron as his inheritance. He knew he was as strong as he was 45 years prior when he spied out the Promised Land, and he knew the Lord would be with him to drive out the fearsome Anakim from Hebron. Joshua honored Caleb’s request. And Church tradition teaches that Caleb blasted Metallica’s 72 Seasons as he drove the Anakim from the hill country of Israel.
OK, that last part is a stretch, but there are Caleb-esque qualities in 72 Seasons, Metallica’s 11th studio album, which dropped in April. James Hetfield, Kirk Hammett, and Lars Ulrich—the remaining original members of Metallica—are all 60. Yet they sound every bit as young as they did on, say, 1984’s Ride the Lightning.
Proud to say that this is likely the first time ever that Joshua chapter 14 appears in a review of a Metallica album. You can read the whole thing here—and consider subscribing to World while you’re at it. They do good work and occupy a unique place in the American media environment.
About halfway through 72 Seasons, I had to remind myself that I was in fact listening to Metallica. And not because it didn’t sound like Metallica. As I mention in the review, 72 Seasons is a throwback to the “real,” pre-Black Album Metallica. It’s fast and heavy and hard and long—but I suppose at 60, you don’t have time to edit. No, it was the subtle but persistent theme of hope and light that kept breaking through the shadows that had me wondering what had happened to Hetfield and co. Again, I don’t think these sentiments have ever been paired together before, but Hetfield sounded a lot like Aragorn, son of Arathorn, as he attended to Faramir in the Houses of Healing: “Walk no more in the shadows, but awake!”
Likewise, Aragorn could not have healed those with the Black Shadow had it not been for his long, hard years as a Ranger. And 72 Seasons is an album only old, haggard, seen-it-all-and-then-some men could have made. As I said in the review, “Given Metallica’s history, there is plenty of material to deconstruct. Six-fingered giants like withdrawal, shame, and temptation lurk in the shadows of these hills.” This is no country for young men.
The best song on 72 Seasons is probably the last, “Inamorata,” an 11-minute power-ballad. Yes, 11 minutes. Your faithfulness will not go without reward, though. “Inamorata” is a riparian area of riffs, flowing and churning and spilling over the song’s banks. The song is the album in miniature (if you can call an 11-minute power-ballad “miniature”). All the elements are there. All the themes and vibes swirl together. Amidst the riffs and on the other side of the shadows, we hear a voice calling. Awake, O sleepwalker: arise, shine, and put on your strength. Take the hills. Your light has come.
All that to say: 72 Seasons is pretty freakin’ rad, and you should give it a spin.
Thanks for reading. Would love to hear what hills you’re “taking” in your life right now.
‘Til next time…