Homesickness

“The Lord is my shepherd; I shall not want.

… I shall dwell in the house of the Lord forever.”

- Psalm 23: 1, 6

“Men are homesick in their homes.” – G.K. Chesterton

Last night we were driving home when the particular way a man got out of his pick-up truck made me think of Virginia. In the first eighteen months after our move, this kind of thing happened all the time. Some small, unexpected thing—the time of week we usually visited my mom’s house, something my old friend would have liked—would trigger thoughts of rolling green hills, how it felt to be around my friends, how I felt being there, with a kind of nostalgic longing that was difficult to define. Once, a raindrop fell on our windshield after a dry California summer, and it made me cry, and I realized I was missing thunderstorms.

Part of the reason this is hard to share is because I realize it’s ridiculous. I hated thunderstorms in Virginia; they always kept the kids up, and once the winds tore down a tree on our lawn. My mom’s house, and my friends, weren’t always a perfect as they are in my imagination. With those rolling green hills came mosquitos and mugginess so terrible we rarely went out of doors. And while I liked how unique I felt there, I also felt misunderstood and lonely in many ways.

It’s a strange thing, to find you’re feeling homesick for a home that doesn’t really exist. Our reading from Psalm 23 came to my mind and I thought for the first time: this is talking about home. A place with no more longing, no more missing something you can’t even put really into words. The first and last lines say it all: I will not want, I will be home forever.

C.S. Lewis writes a great piece about this in The Weight Of Glory:

“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; the secret also which pierces with such sweetness that when, in very intimate conversation, the mention of it becomes imminent, we grow awkward and affect to laugh at ourselves; the secret we cannot hide and cannot tell, though we desire to do both. We cannot tell it 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, and we betray ourselves like lovers at the mention of a name. Our commonest expedient is to call it beauty and behave as if that had settled the matter. Wordsworth’s expedient was to identify it with certain moments in his own past. But all this is a cheat. If Wordsworth had gone back to those moments in the past, he would not have found the thing itself, but only the reminder of it; what he remembered would turn out to be itself a remembering. 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 worshipers. 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.”