Tuesday, October 13, 2026
Researcher and storyteller Brené Brown shares her sense of spiritual homesickness.
The word “homesick” often conjures up images of a child’s fleeting sadness or their temporary yearning for home and family. In today’s culture, the emotion itself is often dismissed … [as] a fuzzy overnight-camp feeling, not a fierce emotional experience that is key to the human experience and central to our hardwired need for a sense of place and belonging.
Brown tells of her soul’s regular longing for home:
Spiritual homesickness has been a constant in my life. It was not an everyday experience, but a predictable and always reoccurring desperation to find a sense of sacredness within me, not outside of me: my soul, my home, God in me. It was homesickness for a place that exists only inside me.
Through my thirties and forties, I would occasionally succumb to the yearning, drop everything, and run as fast as I could to visit the home within me. The door to my internal spiritual home would be one simple experience, one encounter with a thin place—maybe sitting in my car listening to Loretta Lynn sing “How Great Thou Art,” or an afternoon swim with God in Lake Travis, or one night praying the Daily Examen. But then, after that visit, I would leave and go back to my first-half-of-life world. I’d describe this first-half-of-life spirituality as the ebb and flow of [the Greek words] nostos and alga, homecoming and pain.
Over the past two years, I’ve found that I’m more spiritually homesick than not. Spiritual homesickness has become an almost daily dulling grief. It’s not depression or exhaustion. It’s an uncomfortable knowing that I’m coming to the end of one thing and the beginning of the next. I’m leaving and arriving. There’s fear, but there’s also joyful anticipation.
Today, when I return home to the place in me where God dwells, I’m no longer interested in making it a quick visit so I can run back to the world of “what other people think” and “what I can get done.” Today, I can barely be dragged out of the house. I’m drawn to different conversations and deeper connections. I want this sacred space to be my home, not somewhere I visit to buttress my “real life” that’s on the outside of my connection with God. I’m starting to wonder if my alga, my pain, is fueled by my separation from God and from my True Self.…
Leaving the first half of life is scary. Most of us have the first-half-of-life hustle down. The thing is, I’m just never, ever homesick for the first half of my life when I walk away from it…. Maybe I’m not homesick for the first half of life because it’s really never been my true home.
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Friday Five on Tuesday
1.
“For the most part, these anxieties and struggles come from the fact that we don’t understand ourselves.”
– St. Teresa of Avila, Carmelite Spanish Mystic
Teresa of Avila was the first Christian mystic to make sense to me.
I had tried reading her works before, but then, after a very difficult and trying season around 2013, she finally clicked.
At the King of Prussia Mall, outside Philly, I distinctly remember sitting at a Starbucks and reading her magnum opus, Interior Castle. Plenty of people milled about, and I found myself crying while reading Teresa of Avila.
Why?
Because there was something about her and the way she wrote about the human soul that brought tears to my eyes. It was the right combination of words at the right time, and it led me to several realizations about myself: how I am a walking, talking, and gloriously beautiful bundle of contradictions.
I absolutely agree with her that most of our problems stem from not understanding ourselves.
Not only that, but I deeply regret the way that religion is sometimes interpreted in a manner that confuses or even blocks us from coming to understand ourselves more.
For many of the Christian mystics (if not all of them), self-knowledge and God-knowledge are two sides of the same coin… One affects and influences how the other is done. Hopefully, the more we come to understand ourselves, the more we come to understand God… and vice versa.
2.
“Jesus, my feet are dirty. Come, even as a slave to me, pour water into your bowl, come and wash my feet. In asking such a thing, I know I am overbold, but I dread what was threatened when you said to me, ‘If I do not wash your feet, I have no fellowship with you’. Wash my feet then, because I long for your companionship…”
– Origen of Alexandria, Early Church Father
Wow.
Isn’t that poetic?
It is something of a prayer after reflecting on John 13, the passage in which Jesus washes the disciples’ feet.
3.
“Moses’ vision of God began with light; afterward God spoke to him in a cloud. But when Moses rose higher and became more perfect, he saw God in the darkness.”
– Gregory of Nyssa, Early Church Father
This is a great example of “Apophatic Theology.”
In German, Immanuel Kant coined a word: “Grenzbegriff.” It denotes a concept or idea that exists beyond the boundaries of human comprehension.
There are many concepts or ideas that are Grenzbegriff.
Time.
God.
Death.
Infinity.
The ever-expanding edge of the known universe.
Quantum physics.
Black holes.
Transcendental experiences.
Many things exist beyond the boundary of human comprehension.
Gregory of Nyssa, the Cappadocian Early Church Father, understood God as utterly beyond human comprehension; if you can understand it, then it isn’t God. For Gregory, the longer one stays with the mystery that we call “God”, the more mystery, darkness, and unknowing there comes to be.
Most of us in the West believe that the longer you stay with a concept or idea, the more you come to understand it… Well, not so in Christian theology.
The more we try to comprehend God, the less we should feel like we understand.
4.
“I am burning.
If anyone lacks tinder,
let him set his rubbish ablaze with my fire.”
And thus, holiness spreads like a fire by exposure to holiness.
It is not a matter of doctrine, teaching, or argument.
It is a matter of passing the fire on.
5.
“It is to the Cross that the Christian is challenged to follow his Master: no path of redemption can make a detour around it.”
– Hans Urs von Balthasar, Jesuit Theologian
Hans Urs von Balthasar was an interesting fellow. While doing the Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius of Loyola, he found a vocation to join the Jesuit order. Then, many years later, he did the Spiritual Exercises again, and they led him to decide to leave the Jesuit order! He considered both decisions right and true, and a matter of correctly discerning how best to show his love of God and neighbor.
As a Catholic, he sounds here as though he was deeply influenced by Martin Luther (the Protestant Reformer) in that the Christian life will make a way straight through hardship, rather than around it. In short, this is known as having a “Theology of the Cross.”
It is impossible to follow Jesus and yet believe that we will be spared hardship. Oh, and this hardship is not just the simple consequence of our own actions; no, it is suffering imposed on our lives from without.
Fortunately, the Cross is only one side of the coin; the other side is the Resurrection.
The Cross might be an inevitable fact, but then so is Resurrection.
Which Quote Most Jumped Out at You?
Individual Reflection
What are you still asking God to help you get around that may only be gotten through?
Group Discussion — choose one
- Why do we read unknowing as God’s absence rather than God’s nearness?
- What makes it harder to let our feet be washed than to wash someone else’s?
- Whose fire did you catch, and is anyone catching it from you?
