This week I share some recent resources from Richard Rohr’s Center for Action and Contemplation. With these reflections, we are invited to discern our own experiences and understanding of home. For me, it’s all about belonging and community. I have been blessed throughout my life to feel at home in a variety of settings – indoors and outdoors – and now embrace the opportunity and privilege to enjoy home across settings. God is good!
This week’s image represents a mural and stairwell new to me from an urban hike last week in a nearby neigborhood. I love encountering newness amidst familiar journeys. Blessings on your week ahead!
The overarching narrative of the Bible is that of humanity searching for home…. It is a powerful story, rich in literary ambiguity—the earth, us, home, and God are almost interchangeable characters in this ancient record of humankind’s aching search to dwell.
—Diana Butler Bass
Our Heart’s Longing for Home
In an episode of the Everything Belongs podcast, James Finley reflects on homesickness as part of the spiritual landscape:
Imagine you’re driving home at the end of the day and the sun is setting. At first you don’t pay any attention to it, because the sun sets every night. But on this particular night, it’s particularly beautiful, and you’re prompted to pull over and get out of the car. You sit on the ground, giving yourself over to the beauty of the setting sun, giving itself over to you.
If we meditate on that moment, we notice that it’s a moment of heightened awareness. It’s not lethargic or dull, but it’s also true that in this moment you’re not thinking, or whatever thing you are thinking doesn’t measure up to the richness of the awareness.
So one way to put it is: In this moment, the “thinking you” and all that it thinks is transcended…. In all the eons from the beginning of the universe till now, the sun has never set before tonight, ever. And for all the eons to come, it will never set again in this same way, so it’s virginal and new. So, the remembering self and all that it remembers is transcended; there’s just the newness of the eternality of now….
In that moment you experience a deep kind of homecoming, like you belong there, and there’s a resting in this. You’re also not in time, because it’s prolonged. When you get up to leave, you have to look at your watch to see how much time passed, because you weren’t in time.
So you get home and pull the car in the garage. You’re standing in the kitchen, going through the mail, and you remember the moment of the setting sun, and you ask yourself this question: “Why do I spend so many of my waking hours trapped on the outer circumference of the inner richness of my life? I know the inner richness is there, because I experienced it, but it’s like I’m not at home in my own home.”
What is the path through which I can become more deeply at home in God, resting in me, resting in God forever? It’s a foreshadowing of eternal life. That’s what I think of as homecoming, a longing to be at home…. All our ways of living have built right into them opportunities for that kind of homecoming. I think as we move along, a deeper insight is that this longing, this homesickness, is an echo of God’s longing for us. For in the reciprocity of the longing, the longing is consummated.
