Home Is Where We Begin
Sunday, October 11, 2026
Letting go into God is coming home to our true selves.
—Ilia Delio
Father 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 come from some kind of home—at times, a bad one—that 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 use it in an entirely different way. I 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.
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Returning Home
Monday, October 12, 2026
Indigenous People’s Day
Home is a feeling in the centre of my chest of rightness, balance and harmony of the mind, body and spirit…. To be away from it, even for a day, is that acute awareness. It is also knowing that home is what I bring to it, and in that is the sure and quiet knowledge that home is within me and always was.
—Richard Wagamese, Embers
In the Everything Belongs podcast, Father Richard speaks about the spiritual path that winds 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.
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, my home in God.
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. 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 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]
The retired Episcopal bishop and theologian Stephen Charleston offers a benediction for our life’s journey:
We are forgiven for the mistakes we have made.
We are loved without condition.
We are blessed without asking.
We are watched over when we are careless.
We are understood when we are not making sense.
We are remembered
Even when we have forgotten ourselves….
The Spirit around us is compassion.
We may not understand it all.
We may differ widely in how we describe it.
But we each have an invitation to freedom
A chance to see more deeply, a path to follow home.
We awaken to what is sacred. We grow into the holy.
We find what has always been there. [2]
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Individual Reflection
What in my self-created self am I still unwilling to let be uncreated?
Group Discussion — choose one
- When has your homesickness shown up as dissatisfaction rather than nostalgia?
- How has the home you came from, good or bad, shaped the home you long for?
- What would change if we truly believed we’re not going anywhere new?
