Home(sick)

Despite the wonderful experiences here, one theme of life these past couple of months has been homesickness. I passed the 3-month mark of living in a foreign country, which is my longest stint thus far. And 3 major holidays have recently passed. Thanksgiving, Christmas, and New Years were all celebrated away from home for the first time. I truly missed them. The season brought many remembrances of home and traditions that I would not be keeping this year. (Did I mention I ate a McDonald’s-like cheeseburger on Thanksgiving, Mexican on Christmas Eve, and Popcorn Christmas day? Ha!)

Yet beyond simply being gone for holidays, I’ve experienced boredom, loneliness, longing – often feeling the dull drone and ache of life. I’m forced to recognize that simply being “home” would not satisfy those desires. I’d find the dull drone and ache there also. Perhaps it’d be more easily staunched, cauterized by familiarity and materialism. But it would still leak out at times.

C.S. Lewis writes, “If I find within myself a desire which no experience in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that I was made for another world.” In his address “The Weight of Glory,” Lewis expounds. The appeal of a gold, pearly, shiny eternity is, admittedly, not very appealing to our senses. But have you ever felt a deep, sad, beautiful, paradoxical longing after listening to beautiful but ethereal piece of music? Or a thick nostalgia after digging through old photos? Even the happy or bittersweet endings of movies—from romantic comedies to epic hero tales—that leave you with this twinge of desire or longing?

These things that we name nostalgia, romanticism, or adolescence with its passions and dreams, are really a stirring in our heart for something more fulfilling than any of those things themselves can ever be. Lewis writes,

“If we are made for heaven, the desire for our proper place will be already in us, but not yet attached to the true object, and will even appear as the rival of that object. …In speaking of this desire for our own far-off country, which we find in ourselves even now, I feel a certain shyness. I am almost committing an indecency. I am trying to rip open the inconsolable secret in each one of you—the secret which hurts so much that you take your revenge on it by calling it names like Nostalgia and Romanticism and Adolescence. …We cannot tell [this secret] because it is a desire for something that has never actually appeared in our experience. We cannot hide it because our experience is constantly suggesting it

…Our commonest expedient is to call it beauty and behave as if that had settled the matter. …But all this is a cheat. …The books or the music in which we thought the beauty was located will betray us if we trust to them; it was not in them, it only came through them, and what came through them was longing. These things—the beauty, the memory of our own past—are good images of what we really desire; but if they are mistaken for the thing itself, they turn into dumb idols, breaking the hearts of their worshippers. For they are not the thing itself; they are only the scent of a flower we have not found, the echo of a tune we have not heard, news from a country we have never yet visited.

Do you think I am trying to weave a spell? Perhaps I am; but remember your fairy tales. Spells are used for breaking enchantments as well as for inducing them. And you and I have need of the strongest spell that can be found to wake us from the evil enchantment of worldliness which has been laid upon us for nearly a hundred years.”

I’ve been experiencing a homesickness for true home. If I take away from this year a recognition that this world is not truly home and a hunger and restlessness for my real home, it should make the difficulties of the process worth it. I’m also encouraged that the Son himself probably experienced many of these same aches throughout His time on earth, and it is just one aspect of what makes him a perfect intercessor, familiar with our weaknesses.