searching for home

When people talk to me about home it makes me happy. I love hearing of a place filled with nostalgia that no matter how far you travel you long to return. Whether it is the people or the place itself, something draws you in. People light up when they talk about home. It is the place they belong and though it is not the place that they currently live--and in some places it is not the place where they want to permanently live--it is the place that they call their own.

I have never had such a place. I have a longing to return to London because the place itself drew me in, but I know returning will not sate my desire for a "permanent" place. I love to roam. I love to travel. I love adventure, and I have yet to live in a place that made me feel any sort of contentment. Things change. People leave. No place has a hold on me. I imagined for some time that having a family of my own would create that feeling, and while I do not doubt that should I ever marry and have a family some semblance of home will drift into my heart, but even then I will be longing for something more. Something greater because I am very hardwired to long for a place outside of this world. In reading, Till We Have Faces by C.S. Lewis, I was struck by the beautiful way in which Psyche described leaving the only home she knew to live on the mountain that she had longed for her entire life.

“The sweetest thing in all my life has been the longing — to reach the Mountain, to find the place where all the beauty came from — my country, the place where I ought to have been born. Do you think it all meant nothing, all the longing? The longing for home? For indeed it now feels not like going, but like going back."

Though she could very well have been going to her death, she had a hope inside of her that she was finally returning home. I view heaven in a similar fashion--and this was clearly what Lewis was alluding to here. When I am finally taken up to be with my savior, all of that longing will be satisfied. My longing for home for a place to belong, for love and wisdom. All of it will be fulfilled there because that is where I am meant to be. 

"If I find in myself a desire which no experience in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that I was made for another world. If none of my earthly pleasures satisfy it, that does not prove that the universe is a fraud. Probably earthly pleasures were never meant to satisfy it, but only to arouse it, to suggest the real thing. If that is so, I must take care, on the one hand, never to despise, or be unthankful for, these earthly blessings, and on the other, never to mistake them for the something else of which they are only a kind of copy, or echo, or mirage. I must keep in myself the desire for my true country, which I shall not find till after death; I must never let it get snowed under or turned aside; I must make it the main object of life to press on to that other country and to help others do the same."

-C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity