Longing For Home
Stop for a second. Take a deep breath and answer this question: What do I want the most? or, put another way, What do I long for?
If you really listen hard, the answer may surprise you.
I firmly believe that all of us, without exception, whether we realize it or not, are basically walking through this life with a tremendous longing gurgling deep within us, like an underground spring that cannot find a route to the surface, to the air and the wind and the light.
For some of us, this longing remains perpetually undefined, foreign even, and does not have a name. Oh, my friends, if only it had a name. If only we knew its name. If only, if only…
Truthfully I think some of us don’t want to know its name, because then we would have to decide: Do I embrace this longing, this deep desire, or do I ignore it?
Well, regardless of what we decide, that longing churns and burns and leaves us breathless in chasing every desire that we suppose is the real one. We can exhaust ourselves in the pursuit.
Each of us has deep longings, just as we each have a unique combination of experiences, personality traits and physical characteristics. These, taken together, make us who we are.
Yet at the same time it is also true that we have a common set of Longings, ones that all human beings share. It’s these Longings, these capital L Longings, that drive us, that keep us up at night, that make us do crazy things. Obviously food, shelter and water top this list. Yet there’s something even more primal, more fundamental.
I believe the deepest Longing of every human being is to be known, to be accepted and to be loved as we really are. FULL STOP.
Honestly, this is a tough thing for me to write about. You see, my mom was the daughter of a woman (my grandmother) who could not love well (it was a generational family thing I think). And since my mom didn’t have the modeling or a vocabulary to talk about her Longing, she struggled with showing or verbalizing affection. Consequently, I was 27 years old before my mom told me that she loved me.
Whenever I told her I loved her, she would nod in assent but wouldn’t really respond. I know now that she couldn’t. She was paralyzed by her own pain. I left home at 17 to go to college, but her pain had become mine. And so began my search for a greater love, one that would actually satisfy the Longing.
So I get the problem we’re carrying around. It’s really hard to get what we really need. Fortunately, there is another way, if we’re willing to open our hearts to it. It’s not an easy journey though; it’s one that requires us to go where we’d rather not go, and to see in ourselves what we’d rather not see.
Which reminds me of a quote from The Lord of The Rings:
“It's a dangerous business, Frodo, going out your door. You step onto the road, and if you don't keep your feet, there's no knowing where you might be swept off to.”
Yet this journey, though scary sometimes, is so very worth it, for us and for everyone we care about.
(Cue pondering…)
OK, hold on — we’ve waded through a lot of deep water here. Thanks for hanging in there with me.
Let me leave you with one more food-for-thought quote to go with your Tolkien one. This quote is lifted from a recent devotional I wrote:
“Let’s face it, in some way we are all just longing for our real home, and we have a job to do on the road there. We have a mission to accomplish”.
Do you think this is true? Let me know your thoughts.
‘Til next time