Happy Birthday, Dave! 

We wish you joy and peace on this day and every day in your new year. Thank you for being part of our Center for Action and Contemplation family. Know you’re foundationally chosen and beloved, woven into the fabric of a benevolent universe.

Peace and Every Good,

Center for Action and Contemplation

Holy Homesickness

Letting go into God is coming home to our true selves.
—Ilia Delio, Oneing, Fall 2023 

Richard Rohr considers how the spiritual journey of “homecoming” requires holding the tension between the past and future:  

The archetypal idea of ‘‘home’’ points in two directions at once. It points backward toward an original hint and taste for union, starting in our mother’s body. We all came from some kind of home—at times, bad ones—that always plants the foundational seed of a possible and ideal paradise. It also points forward, urging us toward the realization that this hint and taste of union might actually be true. It guides us like an inner compass or a homing device. In Homer’s Odyssey, it’s the same home, the island Ithaca, that is both the beginning and the end of the journey. Carl Jung offered this concise, momentous insight: “Life, so-called, is a short episode between two great mysteries, which yet are one.” [1]  

Somehow, the end is in the beginning, and the beginning points toward the end. We are told that even children with sad or abusive childhoods still long for ‘‘home’’ or ‘‘mother’’ in some idealized form and still yearn to return to it somehow, maybe just to do it right this time. What is going on there? I believe the One Great Mystery is revealed at the beginning and forever beckons us forward toward its full realization. Most of us cannot let go of this implanted promise. Some would call this homing device their soul, some would call it the indwelling Holy Spirit, and some might just call it nostalgia or dreamtime. All I know is that it will not be ignored. It calls us both backward and forward, to our foundation and our future, at the same time. It also feels like grace from within us and, at the same time, beyond us. The soul lives in such eternally deep time. Wouldn’t it make sense that God would plant in us a desire for what God already wants to give us? I am sure of it.  

To understand better, let’s look at the telling word homesick. This usually connotes something sad or nostalgic, an emptiness that looks either backward or forward for satisfaction. I am going to use it in an entirely different way. I want to propose that we are both sent and drawn by the same force, which is precisely what Christians mean when they say the Cosmic Christ is both alpha and omega. We are both driven and called forward by a kind of deep homesickness, it seems. There is an inherent and desirous dissatisfaction that both sends and draws us forward, and it comes from our original and radical union with God. What appears to be past and future is in fact the same home, the same call, and the same God, for whom ‘‘a thousand years are like a single day’’ (Psalm 90:4) and a single day like a thousand years. 

God Is Bringing Us Home

We shall not cease from exploration / And the end of all our exploring / Will be to arrive where we started / And know the place for the first time.
—T. S. Eliot, Four Quartets 

In the Everything Belongs podcast, Father Richard speaks about the spiritual path that winds both away from and toward one’s true home:  

The first going out from home we can say is the creation of the ego. While this is a necessary creating, it is also the creating of a separation. It’s taking myself as central. We probably need to do that, at least until we reach middle age. But then we need to allow what we’ve created to be uncreated. Maybe I was a great basketball player, but that’s gone now. Or maybe I was good-looking, but that’s gone now.  (Hi JD)

When we can say “yes” to that uncreation and still be happy, we’ve done our work. My True Self is in God and not in what I’ve created. My self-created self gave me a nice trail to walk on, and something to do each day, but it isn’t really me. It might be my career or my vocation; yet as good as it is, it isn’t my True Self.  

In the metaphor of life as a journey, I think it’s finally about coming back home to where we started. As I approach death, I’m thinking about that a lot, because I think the best way to describe what’s coming next is not “I’m dying,” but “I’m finally going home.” I don’t know what it’s like yet, but in my older age I can really trust that it is home. I don’t know where that trust comes from or even what home is like, but I know I’m not going to someplace new. I’m going to all the places I’ve known deeply. They’re pointing me to the big deep, the Big Real. I do think homecoming is what it’s all about. [1]  

Father Richard continues to reflect upon finding his home in God in this season of his life:  

Well first, I have to say, I don’t fully know how to live there. I’m used to living for 80 years out of building an education, a persona, a reputation, a career. When we’ve worked at those things for so long, on a very real level we don’t know how to live without them. But thank God, they’re taken away from us. God slows us down, I think necessarily, or we won’t fall into the True Self.  

My understanding of the second half of life is mostly homesickness for the True Self. I want to learn to be who God really created me to be. And I think all God wants me to be is who I really am. [2]  

Years ago I taught a class about the Sermon on the Mount. On the first day, we read the entire sermon (Matthew 5-7), which contains many of Jesus’ most familiar teachings including his counter-intuitive calls to not worry, not retaliate, and to love your enemies. I asked the class, “Do you think Jesus was serious? Does he actually expect us to live this way?” I was surprised to discover most of the adults in the class did not take the Sermon on the Mount seriously despite being committed Christians. They had accepted a popular interpretation that says Jesus’ ethical teachings are impossibly high standards and he didn’t intend for his followers to obey them. Instead, Jesus’ commands should help us recognize our moral imperfections and therefore our need for God’s grace. While this interpretation of the Sermon on the Mount fits neatly within certain theological systems, it fails for three reasons. First, the Apostles appeared to take the sermon seriously. Matthew said that the disciples who heard Jesus’ sermon were “astonished” because Jesus taught with authority, and many of the commands in the sermon are repeated in later parts of the New Testament written by Paul, Peter, James, and John. For example, the command to love one’s enemy is reiterated by Paul in Romans 12 without any hint of insincerity. Second, Jesus lived out the commands in the Sermon on the Mount and calls us to copy his example. Throughout the gospels we find Jesus doing the very counter-intuitive things he spoke about in the sermon. Most notably, he loved and forgave his enemies. He also commands us to love one another as he has loved us (John 13:34). None of this makes sense if the sermon was merely a long-winded way for Jesus to make a theological point and he didn’t intend for us to actually practice it. Third, Jesus concluded the Sermon on the Mount with a parable about the terrible consequences of not taking his commands seriously. “Everyone then who hears these words of mine and does them will be like a wise man who built his house on the rock…” To be clear, the rock in the parable is not intended to represent God, or Jesus, or proper doctrine. The rock is the security that comes from hearing and obeying Jesus’ words. The person who builds his house on the rock is the one who takes his commands in the Sermon on the Mount seriously and does them, not simply the person who goes to church, affirms the right doctrines, or who displays a Christian identity. The rock is not identifying yourself with Jesus but actually obeying him. Taken together these three points make it abundantly clear that we are to practice and obey the radical teachings we find in the Sermon on the Mount. If you find yourself in a Christian community that tries to minimize, dismiss, or limit the seriousness of Jesus’ commands, that ministry may appear popular and impressive but beneath the surface its foundations are sand. DAILY SCRIPTURE MATTHEW 7:24-27  JOHN 14:23-24  MATTHEW 21:28-32 WEEKLY PRAYER From Charles Kingsley (1819 – 1875) Lift up our hearts, O Christ, above the false shows of things, above laziness and fear, above selfishness and covetousness, above whim and fashion, up to the everlasting Truth that you are; that we may live joyfully and freely, in the faith that you are our King and Savior, our Example and our Judge, and that, so long as we are loyal to you, all will ultimately be well. Amen.

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