What's home?  This was the question an artist friend and I discussed for a couple of hours today.  Now that we've collaborated on one project (he's the artist, I'm the writer) about journey, we're looking at one about home.  Like journey, however, home means nearly an infinite number of things.  We all have our own ideas of what home is, we all have our own experiences of home.
     That, we decided, is the point.  Home is not so much a place as it is an experience, an experience for which we all long.  But why?  Why do we long for home?  Evolutionary biology would say that we're developed a need for home because we have come to realize that it benefits us, that it enables our species to survive more effectively.  Maybe so.  But this doesn't answer the question:  what is it about us that we long for home?
     Existentialism, as Paul Sartre articulated it, insists that we are alone in the universe. In all the cosmos, there's no one but us.  There's certainly no God.  Echoing this, some cosmologists say that we are nothing but a plop, a plop with no reason to be here, but a plop just the same.  As biologist William Provine remarks, "The universe doesn't give a damn that we are here."
    If this is true, we see why we long for home.  In a lonely, forgotten, and pointless (as author Stephen Pinker once said, "The more I learn about the universe, the more pointless it seems to be") universe, it's all we have.  But if the universe is pointless and indifferent, should not home be likewise?  What could home possibly be?
     So maybe, I suggested, we're looking at something more metaphysical.  Maybe we're seeing that we long for home because there is a "home" to be found.  Maybe the universe is our home.
     It is.  But it only is because a personal God made it.  How could a pointless universe be home?