Dying of Homesickness

 In Tuesday's post, I shared a poem called "Homesick" by Carol Ann Duffy. While I love the entire poem and the mood it captures (even as it says that such a thing is uncapturable and all of our modes of expression are inadequate to the experience, and reality behind the experience), one of the lines from that poem has stayed with me as particularly moving and intriguing. Duffy writes:

Why is our love imperfect,

music only echo itself,

the light wrong?

We scratch in the dust with sticks,

dying of homesickness

for when, where, what.

It is the second stanza here that most caught my attention and stayed with me because it reminded me of the story in John 8, where Jesus, dealing with the all-too-human tendency to judge others and to execute those we judge, pauses to write with a finger in the dust before looking up again to find the woman (but not the man!) caught in adultery, now standing alone, her accusers having left, their stones uncast and dropped behind them. And I wondered about Jesus' "homesickness", his yearning to be reunited with the One he calls Abba, and our own as well, and the idea of Jesus both living and dying to bring us all home to God, or perhaps more accurately, living and dying to bring God to us so we might finally rest in Him for whom we are made and yearn.

Throughout the poem, every reference to human expression, lovemaking, homemaking, music-making, writing,  is of something that is profound, deeply creative, and simultaneously, profoundly inadequate, a mere echo of something we know deeply and cannot really articulate clearly. But as I reflected on the line I take to be a line about Jesus, I recognized that this deep Mystery is one he knows well, and articulates exhaustively in every moment and mood of his life. His pausing to write in the dust reflects his patience and mercy as he gives the judgmental people in the story time to consider his words, "Let him who is without sin, cast the first stone", and walk away from their chosen course. Jesus' tracing in the dust gives the woman a moment of relative privacy and the chance to imagine a life beyond her terror, and to hear the God of Jesus, revealed in the words, "then neither do I condemn you!" as well as the gift of a future at rest in the peace only this God can give, "Go and sin no more".

Dying of homesickness is a phenomenon we know very well, especially in today's culture and in the United States' political situation. It's a good way of describing the situation of sin. We yearn for something or someone, we do not know what or who, and we try to fill or assuage that yearning with something other than that for which we truly yearn, sometimes something unhealthy, even like power over others, where we exploit the yearning of others and deprive them in the name of our own hungers. We build lives and careers around this yearning as we search for a fulfilling love and a transcendent meaning we sense we are made for; in our insecurity and resulting voraciousness, we create worlds where others are deprived while we are momentarily satiated. At the same time, this "homesickness" is not merely the situation of sin, but a source and impetus of our greatest potential and creativity as well. We are rooted in some great Mystery we cannot articulate, and we reflect it in both our greatest and least acts of creativity. Because we know both "home" and "homesickness," we create art and music and life and order and religion. We create organizations dedicated to charity, science, art, and authentic humanity. In other words, we live our homesickness, both in great creativity and in great cruelty and destruction.

As I reflected on it during the last few days, I saw that homesickness is a terrifying form of suffering and at the heart of the Christian Faith. It is what caused Augustine to famously acknowledge, "Our hearts are restless until they rest in thee!" And of course, dying of and for homesickness is something Jesus does. It is how we know him best. He did it every day of a life lived for others and their deep homesickness in Galilee and beyond, and he knew it himself as he yearned to come home to the One he called Abba. He did it as he poured himself out for the poor and sick, the bereft and bereaved, or as he taught his disciples and the multitudes, or as he emptied his heart to God in prayer. He did it on the cross as he took on the agonizing homesickness of sin we laid across his shoulders. And he does it today as well as do his ministers and disciples (of every faith) as they creatively pour themselves out for others in the streets of Minneapolis, or Chicago, or Los Angeles,* or in any place the poor, the stranger, the hungry, et al are persecuted, deprived of any home at all, and as they seek to find (or others seek to provide) rest, nourishment, meaning, and love in human community. 

We are all called to live and die of and for homesickness because we are all called to live and die for the new creation, the new heaven and earth God has begun creating in Christ. It is that "Kindom" that will ease our universal "pining" for the "somewhen" that Carol Ann Duffy captures so well in her poem. 

Until then, until God is All in All and the new heaven and new earth are brought fully to be, writers will continue "scratching in the dust," --- though more often they use wordprocessors today --- homemakers will do their best to make a true home for those they love, philosophers and theologians will explore a different kind of life and light, and beauty of a different order. In contrast, composers of all sorts continue to write the magnificent music that is still merely an echo of a more profound music/Mystery we each know deep inside us. 

In this first week of Lent, because of Janet Morley's book and a wonderful poem of Carol Ann Duffy, I will take away something new, something I had not really named so clearly before. Specifically, that Jesus, in living and dying to reconcile the whole of creation to God, "dies of homesickness," both ours and his own. Lent thus becomes more clearly a season that calls me to get in touch with my own homesickness and prepares me (and others!) for the homecoming Jesus set in motion with his life, death, and resurrection, as well as with God's sending of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost.

* I shall have to add Tehran to this list since Donald Trump, in his own almost infinitely voracious homesickness, has taken the US into war against Iran on 28. February.2026.

A Contemplative Moment: Homesickness

As a way of continuing the theme of "living the questions we are," and entering more fully into this first week of Lent, I wanted to share a poem from the book I recommended in my last post. After all, in Lent we learn to pose the question we are more and more profoundly as we seek more consciously, and prepare ourselves to truly hearken (hear and respond) to the "answer" God is. That answer comes to us in fullness and is exhaustively revealed with Jesus' death and resurrection. For now, though, we continue to fast, pray, and find ways to give alms as we explore more and more deeply the "question" we are, and the really deep needs and seeking that drive us in this life. I hope this poem helps with that exploration.

Homesick

by

Carol Ann Duffy

When we love, when we tell ourselves we do,

we are pining for first love, somewhen,

before we thought of wanting it. When we rearrange

the rooms we end up living in, we are looking

for first light, the arrangement of light,

that time, before we knew to call it light.

Or talk of music, when we say we cannot talk of it, but play again

C major, A flat minor, we are straining 

for first sound, what we heard once,

then, in lost chords, wordless languages.

What country do we come from? This one?

The one where the sun burns

when we have night? The one

the moon chills; elsewhere, possible?

Why is our love imperfect,

music only echo itself,

the light wrong?

We scratch in the dust with sticks,

dying of homesickness

for when, where, what.

from the heart's time 

by Janet Morley

                                                                              

A Contemplative Moment: The Absence

The Absence

It is this great absence

that is like a presence, that compels

me to address it without hope

of a reply. It is a room I enter

from which someone has just

gone, the vestibule for the arrival

of one who has not yet come.

I modernise the anachronism

of my language, but he is no more here

than before. Genes and molecules

have no more power to call

him up than the incense of the Hebrews

at their altars. My equations fail

as my words do. What resource have I

other than the emptiness without him of my whole

being, a vacuum he may not abhor?

R.S. Thomas

How much do you long to experience God's Presence?

from Janet Morley's haphazard by starlight, 

A poem a day from Advent to Epiphany

 

Second Sunday of Advent

We all choose what is important for celebrating Advent well,--- what is necessary to prepare the way of the Lord, to make straight his paths, to ready ourselves to see (i.e., to receive, understand, and to be transformed and transfigured by) the salvation of our God in Christ. This year I am going back to focus once again on the Lord's Prayer as one key to this preparation. I am spending my mornings doing lectio, study, and writing on this prayer. It has always been an incredible source of life, insight, and strength for me; two of my favorite authors, Tom Wright and Gerhard Ebeling, write especially about this prayer in terms of Advent and waiting on the Lord.

 

One of Ebeling's most striking observations in his work, On Prayer, The Lord's Prayer in Today's World is an insight that transformed my own theology and understanding of prayer when I first read the book as an undergraduate @ 1973. Ebeling was writing about the petition, "Hallowed be Thy name," and said: [[. . .we ought not to tone down its amazing, and indeed offensive, aspect or reduce it to a mere act of reverent adoration before the glory of God. For this is the most necessary petition. In other words it is concerned with the greatest need, God's need. . . .we must pray to God on behalf of God: that he would take up his own cause, that he would assert himself as God, that he would come, that he would appear, that he would reveal himself, that he would arise as God, that he would in very truth become God. This is the deepest source of prayer: God himself compels us to this intercession for God, to this passionate longing, that God will become God.]] In this passage I think Ebeling captures two senses of the meaning of waiting on God: 1) looking forward to God's coming and to the fulfillment of God's purposes with anticipation, and 2) serving God and allowing our lives to be defined by this service.

 

I am reading or rereading two other books for Advent. The first is a collection of poetry that my former pastor recommended. (John is returning to it for Advent himself and has looked forward to doing so. Sounded excellent to me!) And so it is! This is Janet Morley's Haphazard by Starlight, A Poem a Day from Advent to Epiphany. Each day has a corresponding poem by a famous poet and then a reflection looking at the poem's content as it relates to themes of the season. Finally, there is a question directed to the reader. Yesterday's selection was a poem by Ruth Fainlight called "The Other" and the reflection explores the crucial importance of waiting, the theme of the poem. The question one is asked to sit with is, "What is your most important experience of patient (or impatient) waiting? 

While I didn't get the book until the 4th of December, I am definitely loving it and am looking forward to spending time with today's selection, "We grow accustomed to the Dark" by Emily Dickinson. The day's question is, "Have you ever experienced the sense of being totally in the dark, either in your prayer life or in life decisions generally? Was it possible for you to risk keeping going in that darkness?

That fits well with my reading of John of the Cross and my second book, Ruth Burrow's work on his spirituality, Ascent to Love, the Spiritual Teaching of John of the Cross --- something I am doing at the same time another hermit in the UK is reading it! (We did not plan this. It just happened that we were each reading the same book. We will discuss it at the end of the month during Christmas week and maybe beyond that.) Burrows' reading of John of the Cross is very honest and may surprise readers, especially if they do not understand that he is a sure guide for the "beginner" (spiritual "high flyers" need not apply!). So, that's part of what my Advent looks like. 

If you are looking for a way to spend Advent in terms of lectio divina and great prompts for prayer and journaling, I highly recommend Janet Morley's book, Haphazard. . . She has another one for the season of Lent to Easter called The Heart's Time.