The Long Journey Home

I am guilty of “Geographic Idolatry”— thinking I am already in heaven here in the Puget Sound. Over the last twenty years my wife and I have made a home for ourselves in the Pacific Northwest, with its Old Growth Forests, Mountain Ranges, Alpine Lakes, dramatic ocean coast, and the great Northwest cities of Seattle, Portland, and Vancouver, Canada. But we are closing in on our retirement, and our place is now back in Alabama with our children and grandchildren.

I have artist renditions of the Olympic and Cascade mountain ranges, Mount Rainier, and our Puget Sound home hanging on my study wall. Throughout the rest of our home are pictures of our children and grandchildren, all living over two-thousand miles away in Alabama. It seems a house divided.

“Where is home?”, I ask myself. Fredrick Buechner said home is more people than place. I agree, though place is a close second.

After twenty one years in one home, preparing to relocate across the country is both a physical and emotional exercise. We climb around attics, garage, nooks and crannies and we rummage through our past—a past hidden for years in dusty boxes or shoved back in the dark corners of drawers we never use. We spend most of our time poring over old artifacts, photos with our parents, children’s Mother’s Day cards, and report cards. As I pondered over pictures of my children as young grade-schoolers or the old cars I owned and the homes we lived in, I was transported back to those days with all the feelings that came with them.

That is the power of nostalgia – that sense of longing for time and place long gone—a place I remember in the most positive light, selectively leaving the more difficult and dark memories hidden. Yet, can I really return to whatever it is I choose to remember?  Preparing for this move has prompted me to ask myself why my memories, precious as they are, do not answer the nagging question “where is home?”.

In the past one-hundred years most of the world has moved from a stationary agrarian society to a mobile industrial and technological one. The average number of jobs we hold in a lifetime is fifteen, and we live in at least twelve different homes before we settle in our final one. This is a lot of movement—a lot of dislocation. What does that do to our interior life, our sense of inner stability, and our confidence in the future?

As we went through our attic treasures and made decisions on what to keep and what to donate or discard, it began to occur to me how my life has traveled full circle. Twenty -one years ago, as a direct result of my alcoholism, I appeared at the front door of this, my dad’s home, holding two army duffel-bags—one full of my books, the other my clothes. That was the extent of my possessions at forty-seven years old. I was jobless, homeless, and estranged from my wife and children.

I remember driving around my hometown in Alabama with a bottle of cheap wine between my legs, and a Blind Faith song came on the radio (this was the seventies, by the way.) Steve Winwood was singing “Lord, I’m wasted, and I can’t find my way home”. Steve Winwood “Can’t Find My Way Home” That was where my life was, and that was my cry. Finding home was my most fundamental need. How to do that has been the path of recovery.

Now, here we are today, planning our return together to our new home and to our children. My recovery is the story of losing and finding again my true home.

The most common characteristic I hear in the stories of addicts and alcoholics is their incessant but frustrated search for belonging—for a connection with others, with themselves, and ultimately with God. The addict feels “apart from” everything and everyone. Even in their own home, they feel like an outsider. Getting “high” temporarily numbs the pain of their isolation and loneliness, only to have it return ten-fold.

The Swiss Psychoanalyst Carl Jung said, “an alcoholics craving for alcohol was the equivalent, on a low level, of the spiritual thirst of our being for wholeness; expressed in the medieval language: the union with God.” (Wilson/Jung Letters, 1987).  Addicts are existentially and spiritually “homeless”, and their recovery is the story of finding their way back home.

This is however not just a phenomenon of the addict. It is an ancient and repeating story.

When my wife and I started our own family, we would occasionally visit our parents on holidays. And while the place and faces were familiar, there was the sense that this was no longer my home. It was my family, but not my home. I felt like a visitor, which in fact I was. It seems that the question “where is home?” has always hovered over me, sometimes unnoticed, but at other times dreadfully present. I felt a little like Sam Gamgee in “The Lord of the Rings” when he said, ‘You know, coming home and finding things all right, though not quite the same’. James Baldwin once wrote: “You don’t have a home until you leave it and then, when
you have left it, you can never go back.”  At some point, we all must leave our parents’ home- physically and emotionally and set up our own.

It has been said that there are only seven basic plots from which every story is told. The most common of these is the story of the journey away from and back to home—the ten year journey of Odysseus back to his wife Penelope; ‘he longed as he journeyed to see once more the smoke going up from his own land, and after that to die.’,  to the story of  the nation of Israel forcefully removed from their land  time again .

By the rivers of Babylon we sat and wept
when we remembered Zion.
² There on the poplars
we hung our harps,
³ for there our captors asked us for songs,
our tormentors demanded songs of joy;
they said, “Sing us one of the songs of Zion!”

⁴ How can we sing the songs of the Lord
while in a foreign land?
⁵ If I forget you, Jerusalem,
may my right hand forget its skill.
⁶ May my tongue cling to the roof of my mouth
if I do not remember you,
if I do not consider Jerusalem
my highest joy.

This is an existential homelessness, where one is not simply out of place, but without a place within the world. Throughout our history, whole peoples, such as Native Americans, African Americans, Syrians, Ethiopians, and others have been taken captive or dispossessed from their home–with devastating generational effects. The recitation each year during the Jewish Seder meal is “Next Year in Jerusalem”., signifying their never-ending homesickness.

The wandering Abraham, patriarch of the Jewish nation is the very image of our search for home.

By faith Abraham, when called to go to a place he would later receive as his inheritance, obeyed, and went, even though he did not know where he was going. By faith he made his home in the promised land like a stranger in a foreign country; he lived in tents, as did Isaac and Jacob, who were heirs with him of the same promise. For he was looking forward to the city with foundations, whose architect and builder is God. People who say such things …show they are longing for a better country—a heavenly one. Heb. 11

In October 1944, the Nazi occupiers of the Netherlands attacked the village of Putten and took nearly all of its male population to concentration camps, from which only a few returned alive. When deported, the village men sang Psalm 84. In an annual commemoration at the location every October since the war, a choir sings verses of the psalm.

Ps 84              

How lovely is your dwelling place,
Lord Almighty!
2 My soul yearns, even faints,
for the courts of the Lord;
my heart and my flesh cry out
for the living God.
3 Even the sparrow has found a home,
and the swallow a nest for herself,
where she may have her young—
a place near your altar,
Lord Almighty, my King and my God.
4 Blessed are those who dwell in your house;
they are ever praising you.
5 Blessed are those whose strength is in you,
whose hearts are set on pilgrimage.

The longing for a place of belonging goes deep—so deep we may not recognize it for what it is. I may be feeling a little empty, melancholic, or just plain bored. Or, I may feel utterly alone, wandering around this life without a sense of purpose or belonging. I am homesick and I don’t even know it.

I believe we are all searching for that place we can call home— the place where we are at ease and comfortable and safe and can be our true selves. Or as Robert Frost said in his poem The Death of the Hired Man: ‘Home is the place where, when you have to go there, they have to take you in.’

Finding and keeping a home has always been an instinctual drive for all living things, from the birds nesting in the trees, prairie dogs in their burrows, and lions creating their den. For humans, we began our search for home in 10,000 BC when we carefully selected a dry and secluded cave, covering the floor with animal skins for comfort and warmth.

Today, home finding and making is a multi-billion-dollar industry. We are searching for the perfect modern home with a view. Just consider the numerous shows and even whole network’s (HGTV) dedicated to making and improving your home. I can testify firsthand that the home-making business is booming. My wife is an interior designer, and she works ten hours a day helping others realize their dream of home.

Our penchant for finding and making a safe and comfortable home foreshadows our yearning for a permanent home.

“We yearn for a long time for something that is a long way off and something that we feel we belong to and that belongs to us. The longing for home is so universal a form of longing that there is even a special word for it, which is of course homesickness,” ― Frederick Buechner

“Something has spoken to me in the night…and told me that I shall die, I know not where. Saying: “[Death is] to lose the earth you know for greater knowing; to lose the life you have, for greater life; to leave the friends you loved, for greater loving; to find a land more kind than home, more large than earth.”  ― Thomas Wolfe, You Can’t Go Home Again

And, as the Psalmist says once more,  “My Home is within you.” 

There is a longing for home our earthly home only pre-figures, or as the excellent essayist Hilaire Belloc said, “there is an Unknown Country lying beneath the places that we know and appearing only in moments of revelation.”  I recently heard a priest describe death like this;  when we were young visiting friends or relatives with our parents, we would sometimes fall asleep, and would then  wake up later in our own beds in our own home. Our parents had picked us up and brought us home without our knowing. Similarly, when we die, we fall asleep in one place and wake up in another–God picked us up and carried us home.

Home is much more than a structure on a parcel of land. It is a state of ease and comfort and confidence in the future. The disciplines of prayer and meditation, combined with connecting to a specific group or church—or some other aspect of community, are what gives me that inner sense of being at home, regardless of the house or city I live in. It is these practices that relieve me of my existential homesickness. Scientific research as well indicates that these two practices, prayer and mediation combined with regular connection to others increases our lifespan and decreases depression, loneliness, and general unhappiness. 

The search for home is both a search for a place in this world, as well as a search for one enduring beyond. For the past fifteen years, I have had the honor of accompanying friends and family in their last days as they went thru the process of letting go of this life. I have witnessed their bravery as they reach out for their next and final home. Often beginning in fear, they settle into a place of peace and contentment.  I watch as it gradually or suddenly dawns on them that what they always hoped for is true. Death is not annihilation as the ortho-materialists claim. It is the doorway to our final home.

As Ram Dass says, “We are all just walking each other home”. It is worth considering what roles we each have in walking with other’s as we all make our way back home.

I would say that from the moment we are born, we set off on our journey back to where we came from, back to our source, back to our origin, which is God, and in every moment of that journey, through the twists and turns, the detours we take, the ditches we fall into, the times we get lost, there is a call to us, a presence, a fellow traveler of sorts that never leaves our side but will not be seen or heard unless we look and listen, a traveler who helps us back up, points us in the direction we should go, and tags along with us until we reach our end.

As my wife and I continue our preparations for our transition to the South, I reflect on the fact that my search for home will not end in this final move. I may be getting a little closer to it, and I hope this will be my last move. But I know I will still have one more move left. When I make that move, there will be no homesickness left, for I will finally have arrived home.

Until then, my home is with the friends, family, and community God gives me to cling to, and with my God, who is always beside me.

To finding your way home,

Bob