Longing for Home
“No place feels like home,” I recently told my husband. We were talking over our current life situation, from our satisfactions and dissatisfactions to our potential next steps and goals for the future. Bruised by professional disappointments, weary after our peripatetic lifestyle over the past decade of marriage, I thought about what a relief it would be to say: Let’s just move back home.
It’s not that we don’t love the town where we currently live, because we do. We knew when we came here that we might not stay for long; but we have worked, over the last few years, to settle here as much as possible. Our attempts are reminiscent of the science experiments my children have done in which they’ve put beans into plastic bags and taped them to the window. The beans are, of course, expected to sprout and send out thread-like green shoots. The roots we are beginning to put down here remind me of those little green bean sprouts- not sturdy like tree roots, and perhaps not destined to last, but holding their own charm and a sense of promise. We are happy here in many ways.
Still, it doesn’t feel like home. Not really.
My husband, who grew up with minister parents and made several big moves throughout his childhood, has many beloved cities but no place that he thinks of as his hometown. My own upbringing, by contrast, was geographically stable. There is a town where I grew up, and some of my own family still lives there.
Yet, I can never recall feeling a deep sense of rootedness in a place. I never had any expectations, within myself or from my parents, that I would live near them in adulthood. When I was younger and imagining my future, I thought of getting married and going away Somewhere Else, like my own parents had done. My husband and I always expected to choose where we would live based, ultimately, on employment.
My own family moved from the east coast to the midwest when I was small because my father got a new job. To hear my extended family members tell it, they were nearly heartbroken to see me and my siblings- adored grandchildren, nieces and nephews - moved a thousand miles away. We settled well enough into our new home, and made frequent road trips back east; my father was successful in his work and we made friends. But throughout the years I was growing up, we never had family living nearby and we never had a sense of history in our home or our community. My parents didn’t have a memory of the place that extended back any farther than my own. I’ve never seen my parents’ childhood schools, or my great-grandparents’ graves.
I didn’t think about this as a lack at the time, but I think about it now, living as I currently do in a small town with a large farming community. Our church is filled with multi-generational families and someone asked me once with curiosity what it’s like, not to know you’ll live in one place for the rest of your life (or even next year)? I didn't have a good answer- What is it like to know you will live in one place for the rest of your life? The farming families around here are often living on the same land their parents farmed before them, sometimes even living in the houses in which they grew up.
In comparison, I feel untethered. My parents downsized to a smaller house a couple of years ago, and I have been surprised by my sadness that they no longer live in a house in which I have lived. I was married with children and hadn’t lived at home in years when they made this change, and I wouldn’t have said I was particularly attached to the house they left. But the ache for a familiar place, a place to come back to, twinged somewhere deep in my heart.
As I read Wendell Berry’s novel Hannah Coulter last year, I felt that Hannah’s musings on place and community were deeply familiar because I saw them reflected in the people I know here; and I felt, too, how I do not have a place myself, and how I have grieved that lack without even having words for what I was missing.
The longing for a place where we belong is woven into the fabric of human existence. Adam and Eve were created into a place of their own, a place to care for and to commune with one another and with God. One of the first consequences for sin was the expulsion of our first parents from this home. At the same time work, which had been a joyful tending of their own place, became a struggle against hostile elements. In the next chapter of the story Cain reacts with terror and dismay when he is sentenced to be “a restless wanderer on the earth.” The story of the children of Israel is one of a long and fervent desire to come home to a place that belonged to them.
In America today, only farmers seem to retain a strong sense of belonging to a place as much as the place belongs to them. The rest of us don’t live our lives and choose our futures based on the land, but on the workplace (or rather, the rest of us have developed a distinction between the land and the workplace). And it is a good thing, holy in its own way, to choose work that one loves; but a job can never be woven into our earliest memories or passed on to our own children. Even a deeply fulfilling job is not entirely a substitute for a place.
I know that my longings for home are at their core a longing for heaven. “You will call your walls salvation and your gates praise,” Isaiah prophesies of the New Jerusalem. Heaven is perfect belonging- fitting into the heart of God, finding exactly where you were made to be for eternity.
Here and now, in our domestic church, I have a foretaste of this homecoming. I am not raising my children, at least not yet, with a place of their own. But although no place feels quite like home, I know that our family is a home and that we experience belonging, however imperfectly, when we are with one another. Our shared practice of faith, our favorite books and games and inside jokes- these create a sense of place that we carry with us wherever we go.
Sometimes it feels like just enough to sustain me, and just enough to keep me longing for something more.
"farm scene" by Christian Collins is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0.
