Richard Rohr names some obstacles that keep us from our true spiritual home:
We are created with an inner drive and necessity that sends all of us looking for our True Self, our true home, whether we know it or not. This journey is a spiral and never a straight line. There is a God-size hole in all of us, waiting to be filled. God creates the very dissatisfaction that only grace and finally divine love can satisfy.
We dare not try to fill our souls and minds with numbing addictions, diversionary tactics, or mindless distractions. The disguise of evil is much more superficiality and willful ignorance than the usually listed “hot sins.” God hides, and is found, precisely in the depths of everything, even and maybe especially in the deep fathoming of our fallings and failures. Sin is to stay on the surface of even holy things, like the Bible, sacraments, or church.
If we go to the depths of anything, we’ll begin to knock upon something substantial, “real,” and with a timeless quality. We’ll move from the starter kit of “belief” to an actual inner knowing. This is most especially true if we have ever (1) loved deeply, (2) accompanied someone through the mystery of dying, or (3) stood in genuine life-changing awe before mystery, time, or beauty. This “something real” is what all the world religions were pointing to when they spoke of heaven, home, nirvana, bliss, or enlightenment. They were not wrong at all; their only mistake was that they pushed it off into the next world. If heaven is later, it is because it is first of all now.
These experiences of homecoming and depth become the pledge, guarantee, hint, and promise of an eternal something. Once we touch upon the Real, there is an inner insistence that the Real, if it is the Real, has to be forever. We could call it wishful thinking, but this insistence has been a constant intuition since the beginnings of humanity. Jesus made it into a promise, as when he tells the Samaritan woman that the spring within her “will well up unto eternal life” (John 4:14). In other words, heaven/union/love/home now emerge from within us, much more than from a mere belief system or any belonging system, which largely remain on the outside of the self.
Like Odysseus, we leave from Ithaca and we come back to Ithaca, but now it is fully home because all is included and nothing wasted or hated: even the dark parts are used in our favor. All is forgiven. What else could homecoming be?
Poet C. P. Cavafy (1863–1933) expressed this understanding most beautifully in his famous poem “Ithaca”:
Ithaca has now given you the beautiful voyage.
Without her, you would never have taken the road.
With the great wisdom you have gained on your voyage,
with so much of your own experience now,
you must finally know what Ithaca really means. [1]
References:
[1] See C. P. Cavafy, “Ithaca,” in The Complete Poems of Cavafy, trans. Rae Dalven (New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1961), 36–37. Paraphrased by Richard Rohr.
Adapted from Richard Rohr, Falling Upward: A Spirituality for the Two Halves of Life, rev. ed. (Hoboken, NJ: Jossey-Bass, 2024), 59–60.
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:
I was inspired by the reflection on the statue of St. Francis gazing down at the earth from the meditation on April 14. It reminded me of a profound experience I had years ago. One day while riding the subway home, I suddenly became fully present. I was standing by one of the doors and looked down the length of the car. I saw everyone clearly. They were so beautiful! There was so much love emanating from each of them. I looked across the aisle to the door opposite me and I saw the dirt that had accumulated there. In that moment, I understood that the dirt contained the universe. We were all in that dirt. I understood how everything is one thing and how that one thing is Love. —Ed G.
