The Appeal of Home

Wanderlust is an infectious and many splendored thing. I say infectious. There's a good chance it's genetic, though that's hard to confirm. I am mostly Irish after all. If it is viral, then I am certainly surrounded by enough friends who are ridden with it. In short, I am doomed to a life of restlessness whoever may be at fault.

It's funny that this be the case, seeing that most of my adult life has been spent confined to a starkly narrow range of geography. Sure, I've managed brief excursions into isolated world corners at church expense. Yet, these never managed to constitute the prolonged and generally aimless straying that persistently haunts the recesses of my consciousness. If God made any mistake, it was making our world so miserably small as to only award Magellan and Marco Polo the privilege of discovering it anew. I've got talent. My friends have more. Lord knows we could have discovered the world with a hell of a lot more style than the European lot that preceded us.

I tried for a while to be of the rugged sort who could live in the wilderness with a rope, a tarp, and a blanket. I failed quite miserably. I require more comforts in traveling, and comforts are generally costly. As I have managed to stay broke for the last decade, I have failed to rediscover the New World, Old World, Far East, or any other great frontier one might propose.

Necessarily, this repressed desire has found a multitude of ways to resurface. If this sounds unfounded, allow me to remind you that I am working on my third degree (one of which was in missions), I tenaciously attempt in vain to find authentic foreign experiences here in my hometown, and threaten weekly to learn another language. I've also noticed a strong tendency to value ideas that seem to wander into my world from afar. Foreign religions. European theology. Etc, etc. I'm sure the need to fulfill my desire of getting away has plenty to do with the appeal of such things. Hopefully this does not lead to indictment for cheap New Age consumerism . . . that's not what I'm getting at.



I was reading A'Kempis the other day. . like you do. . . I found the spirituality it offered to be predictable, yet perplexingly appealing. This is to say that it certainly wasn't a profound new insight that struck me, but rather a new perspective on a relic of theology:

"In the holy Scriptures, truth is to be looked for rather than fair phrases. . . In them, therefore, we should seek food for our souls rather than subtleties of speech, and we should as readily read simple and devout books as those that are lofty and profound. . . If you desire to profit, read with humility, simplicity, and faith, and have no concern to appear learned. Ask questions freely, and listen in silence to the words of the Saints. . ."

For quite some time words like these would have struck me as horribly routine. I likely would have cast them aside as irrelevant, but something in them struck me. It was a familiarity not redundant, but comforting. Something that reminded me of a home I've fled for too long. Formerly, I would have read such a passage and assumed my only options were blind ingestion of a whole ideology, or a critical dissection of it that leaves no room for life. At least this appears to me to be the shape our the divide in our world: those with faith don't question and those who question have no faith. I have long chosen the latter for disgust of the former, and for the illusion that such questioning was the defining mark of freedom.

I've questioned myself into a nomadism, and lately I've been homesick. A wandering spirit may stumble upon experiences untold, but the rest is never as good as it was at journey's start.

There's always a new perspective to be gained, and when we have gained it, we can easily look upon our past with new critique. We may always challenge the scope of what we previously knew, but we should never deny that this knowledge is what has brought us to the moment we inhabit. For much too long I have hated Scripture and the Saints for their narrowness, for their flaws, for their mundane ubiquity. I've fled them, and now i'm tired.


Don't proclaim me a prodigal; I have no desire to be typecast as such. I am merely accepting that I am a new branch, reaching for light where I find it, and reaching away from the twisted mess behind me. Such is our history: that which fixes us in place against our will, and thus holds us up to find what we seek.