The Rev. Noah Van Niel

The Chapel of the Cross

July 4, 2021

Proper 9 (B Track 1): 2 Samuel 5:1-5, 9-10; Ps 48; 2 Cor 12:2-10; Mark 6:1-13

In 1940, the novelist Thomas Wolfe, a son of the Old North State and Carolina grad, published a book with the memorable title, You Can’t Go Home Again. I say he published it but that’s not quite true. It was published by his editor and released posthumously, two years after Wolfe’s untimely death at just 37 years old, silencing what some considered the most original and talented American literary voice of his generation (which is saying something because he was writing at the same time as Faulkner, Fitzgerald, and Hemingway).

Wolfe may not have lived long, but he had learned the hard way that “You can’t go home again.” In his first book, he had painted a less than flattering and less than fictional picture of his hometown of Asheville and the people in it. This made him a less than welcome figure in their eyes. Who was this guy, son of a gravestone carver, youngest of the eight Wolfe pups, to embarrass them to the rest of the world? And they took offense at him. As a result he stayed away a full eight years before coming home again, and even then, it was just for a visit. He just couldn’t go home again.

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