I'm depressed as I write this, and that is good, because often it is when I am down that things seem most clear. I am looking at my life right now through one of my very own distorted and cracked lenses. I call it homelessness, or rootlessness, or misplacement. It is so grubby and cracked that it needs more than one name.
yes, looking through this murky lens seems to make things clearer for me. my whole life has been one long search for home, for a place where I belong. various external events have contributed to the shape of my life, and recalling these may help.
my family, mom, dad, and me, left one home in ireland to find another in canada. looking back, I'm not sure how successful we were. sure, there were days that we'd all three chorus "home again!" as our volkswagen rolled into the driveway, but it was the driveway of someone else's house, someone else's home, where we lived in the basement, underground like miners or moles. then we moved into our own apartment, our third floor mansion, which we watched decay almost as fast as our family, and with even less power to stop it. mom was never happy in canada, and half my chromosomes agreed with her. the other half mocked me when I traveled to ireland a few years ago and thought of moving back someday. "you don't talk like these people, your religion is even different now. you don't fit anymore." it's true, and yet…
mom and dad split like my chromosomes, and when mom died, half of me felt dead, too. maybe more than half. dad kind of died, too, and the other half of me feels pretty lifeless sometimes. we never made a home here.
I messed things up further by listening when God called. abandoning whatever roots I had in the catholic church, I went protestant. in groping for what I thought might be my real home, I unplaced myself again. I'm not happy calling myself a protestant now, or a catholic. they both miss, just in their own special ways. but somewhere in there, I can feel Christ telling me—I go to prepare a place for you, and I will come again and take you to myself.
my politics are all wrong, too. my conservative friends call me a liberal, but I've never felt all that comfortable with too many liberals around. no home there, either.
then there's that old mind and heart thing. I don't want to live in either all of the time. but the more I think, the more I feel, the more I don't know what I think or feel.
love. that sounds like some kind of homey word. that's got to have a lot to do with it. except that it seems so close to home itself that I can't find it. I know God is there, wherever home is, and love, and maybe mom (of course mom, how could love be there without her?). but here and there are very far apart, and the way is not so clear or easy.
it must have something to do with people, with people as a people, and not just as individuals, since all of my own individuality has got me next to no place. I thought church must be a shadowy kind of model home, but I don't feel very comfortable there some of the time. I can't get into an "us against them" mind set at all, because I know that we're all really looking for the same thing, and I've found friends outside the church with more faith than many people inside. and it's sad, because their faith has been twisted and misdirected because the church hasn't felt like home for them either. I think that some of my friends and I make a better church than the church we belong to. and yet it's not enough for me. I feel alone in groups, too.
it scares me to read about the prophets, because they were just as misplaced as I am, and love seemed to have ignored them completely. God, I hope I'm not a prophet. I seem to be inbetween all the time, desperately trying to pull things together: mom and dad, ireland and canada, catholic and protestant, liberal and conservative, mind and heart, church and world. seems like a prophet's job, not mine. I can't resign myself to a prophet's kind of life, a life necessarily spent alone, cut off from the very people you are called to serve, misunderstood, ignored, hated even. I'm too emotionally needy, not strong enough at all. my eyes are strained from searching faces for clues, my back is bent from carrying more than my share of the world around, my ears have been reaching for that voice in the silence for so long, I can't possibly do this forever. weakness and failure have been my companions, and I've never been able to trust them.
so what is the home I'm wandering in search of? what can possibly attract me about a place I've never seen? I think it has something to do with integrity. I think that there, I'll finally feel as if I belong. I won't have to strain to bring worlds together, it will have been done for me. and I will not be alone, I will be a part of the people. a special people, like me and yet all individuals. and love will be what holds it all together, the worlds, the people; love will be the bricks of the house, the house that my God has built.
how do I know any of this? I'm not really sure, but I do know. I see it and hear it and feel it and just know it everywhere. after something good, when I feel closer to it, and after something bad, when I feel further away from it, I know it is there. and I also know that I know next to nothing about it, but that this is enough for now.
on the good days, I can see my life's little paradoxes in a different light. I am no longer neither…nor, but I am both…and. I think that this must be part of what home is all about. maybe one day, I can rest in the fact that I am both father's and mother's, irish and canadian, catholic and protestant, mind and heart, liberal and conservative, citizen of earth and of heaven. on those days, I feel closer to home than ever. and on the bad days? well, someday, I'll know fully, even as I am fully known. now, I see in this glass darkly, but then I'll see face to face.