Hobos for Heaven
A mentor priest of mine once gave a conference about hobos. That’s right, hobos. Hobos first came about after theAmerican Civil War. Many men were displaced around the country and they began heading back home. The hobos were known for jumping on trains and stopping from town to town for the journey was long. Although there are a couple of theories about the etymology of the word hobo, my mentor, Father Swift, always insisted upon one. Hobo, he told me, comes from the contraction of ho-meward bo-und. From these hobos, Father Swift went on to say, we can learn an important lesson about the spiritual life. After all, Abraham the Patriarch and St. Paul were hobos too: As St. Paul says to the Corinthians, “We are fools on Christ’s account ... to this very hour we go hungry and thirsty, we are poorly clad and roughly treated, we wander about without a home.” (1 Cor. 4:1011) Similar to Abraham who wandered in the desert as he led the people of Israel to the promised land, St. Paul also saw himself as a pilgrim, as a wanderer spreading the good news of Jesus Christ. Abraham and St. Paul were hobos. They lived their life homeward bound, desiring “a better country, that is, a heavenly one.” As Father Swift likes to say, Abraham and St. Paul were hobos for heaven, homeward bound for heaven.
Abraham and St. Paul’s faith are an example for us to follow. In Jesus Christ, we are invited to heaven, wanderers on a journey until we finally make our way home. Yet as J.R.R. Tolkien reminds us, “not all wanders are lost.” Jesus is the way and has revealed to us the way home. God invites us to receive heaven as an inheritance, as co-heirs with Christ. Through baptism we are sons in the Son, or as Fr. Swift likes to say from our Catholic Latin tradition, “filii in Filio.”
“See what love the Father has bestowed on us, in letting us be called children of God.” (1 John 3:1) How amazing it is to be adopted by God!
If we remember that we are pilgrims on a journey and consciously live as hobos for heaven, we will not forget our goal for parenting, for grandparenting, for life: getting home. And this will change how we live in the present, how we spend our time and our money, whether or not we choose to live out our faith. We must remember that hobos are not bums; we have work to do while on earth. Although earth is not our final goal, it is our current reality and Jesus invites us to live with him in the present moment. We are hobos, willing to work where we are and keeping our eyes fixed on heaven, the home Jesus promised to prepare for us. My friends, just like Abraham and St. Paul, Jesus invites us all to embrace the life of a hobo: to be homeward bound for heaven.