Letting go into God is coming home to our true selves.
—Ilia Delio, Oneing, Fall 2023
Richard Rohr considers how the spiritual journey of “homecoming” requires holding the tension between the past and future:
The archetypal idea of ‘‘home’’ points in two directions at once. It points backward toward an original hint and taste for union, starting in our mother’s body. We all came from some kind of home—at times, bad ones—that always plants the foundational seed of a possible and ideal paradise. It also points forward, urging us toward the realization that this hint and taste of union might actually be true. It guides us like an inner compass or a homing device. In Homer’s Odyssey, it’s the same home, the island Ithaca, that is both the beginning and the end of the journey. Carl Jung offered this concise, momentous insight: “Life, so-called, is a short episode between two great mysteries, which yet are one.” [1]
Somehow, the end is in the beginning, and the beginning points toward the end. We are told that even children with sad or abusive childhoods still long for ‘‘home’’ or ‘‘mother’’ in some idealized form and still yearn to return to it somehow, maybe just to do it right this time. What is going on there? I believe the One Great Mystery is revealed at the beginning and forever beckons us forward toward its full realization. Most of us cannot let go of this implanted promise. Some would call this homing device their soul, some would call it the indwelling Holy Spirit, and some might just call it nostalgia or dreamtime. All I know is that it will not be ignored. It calls us both backward and forward, to our foundation and our future, at the same time. It also feels like grace from within us and, at the same time, beyond us. The soul lives in such eternally deep time. Wouldn’t it make sense that God would plant in us a desire for what God already wants to give us? I am sure of it.
To understand better, let’s look at the telling word homesick. This usually connotes something sad or nostalgic, an emptiness that looks either backward or forward for satisfaction. I am going to use it in an entirely different way. I want to propose that we are both sent and drawn by the same force, which is precisely what Christians mean when they say the Cosmic Christ is both alpha and omega. We are both driven and called forward by a kind of deep homesickness, it seems. There is an inherent and desirous dissatisfaction that both sends and draws us forward, and it comes from our original and radical union with God. What appears to be past and future is in fact the same home, the same call, and the same God, for whom ‘‘a thousand years are like a single day’’ (Psalm 90:4) and a single day like a thousand years.
References:
[1] C. G. Jung, Selected Letters, 1909–1961, ed. Gerhard Adler (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1984), 77.
Adapted from Richard Rohr, Falling Upward: A Spirituality for the Two Halves of Life, rev. ed. (Hoboken, NJ: Jossey-Bass, 2024), 55–56.
Image credit and inspiration: Esther Avdokhina, Untitled (detail), Russia, 2020, photo, used with permission. Click here to enlarge image. Each of us has the capacity to create home within and for ourselves.
Story from Our Community:
One morning as I sat in my quiet time, the word, “home” came to me for deeper consideration. I thought of my parents’ house where I grew up and then of my grandparents’ house where I spent so much nurturing and learning time. I then brought to my mind and heart the current house where I’ve lived by myself for sixteen years. All these structures were transient buildings that held warm and fond memories, but I slowly came to realize that my home is in God. As I acknowledged this, a warmth and peace rested within me. I knew I was being hugged.
—David D.
