Homesick

 

 

The theologian Richard Rohr has described spiritual longing as a kind of “homesickness”.  It is a strange way to describe the stirrings of the soul.  I have felt homesickness as a longing for a place where I could be known and comforted, safe and beloved, cared for and sheltered.  It came when I felt myself a stranger in a place outside the bounds of family, community, security.  My grandfather Nunzio left his home in Sicily when he was only 20 to escape imprisonment by the fascist forces taking over his country.  He traveled in Europe for several years finding work and shelter where he could.  A few times his mother sent him packages of the sweet tart Sicilian lemons from the family orchard something he told me about sixty years later with reverence and gratitude for the sweetness and love in the giving, for the fragrance of the lemons that transported him back home. He made his way to New Orleans as a stowaway in the bottom of a steamer eventually settling in Boston.  He never saw his mother again.  In the 1950s, when he was able to visit Italy after the war she had already died.  For his long life he held a homesickness in his heart for his mother, his homeland, those sweet tart Sicilian lemons. 

 

Even if we stay in one place our entire lives, everything we adhere to eventually shifts and changes and we will inevitably find ourselves like immigrants or refugees in a strange land away from the shelter of belovedness and home.  We will yearn for what has been lost to us, for the time when everything felt in its right place.  On the spiritual path, we learn how drawing inward especially during periods of loss which offers a pathway into an inner belonging which can help us to to hold the aching tenderness of the grief with more spaciousness.  In this tender awareness the scent of pine after a summer’s rain, the fog covering the lake’s surface, the trill of the thrush in the evening wood offer up comfort like a mother’s gift of sweet and tart Sicilian lemons from the family orchard.