On a recent trip the in-flight magazine had one of those Great-Places-You’ve-Never-Heard-of-But-Should-Know-About-in-Case-You-Want-to-Live-There-Forever articles… the kind of piece I seem to read compulsively these days. The author spoke about her own sense of home in Vermont, after years of living in various nice locations. As she put it, “They were great places to live… but they were not home.”

It strikes me that a place we truly feel at home is a matter of the soul, and not subject to persuasion or rationality. There are places we connect with on some deep level, and other places that, well, are adequate but leave us hungry, or lonely, or somehow dissatisfied. This is not the stuff of explanation, but mystery. Why are we claimed by some places, and do we ignore those claims at our peril? I once heard our favorite geography described as “the place where your inner compass point was first set.” I love that. For me, it’s true: I grew up around water (yes, it was Manhattan, but hey, that’s still an island). I get frantic in the Midwest - where’s the ocean? Even if I rarely make it to the beach, I need to know it’s there. 

Where was your inner compass point first set? Where is your “true north?”

The concept of true home applies to many things: work, relationships, church even, and maybe especially. There are people and settings where we can breathe, drop down, and simply be who we are. And then there are those places where our guard must be up, the people around whom, as writer Anne Lamott puts it, we must “hold our breath.” I do believe Marble is a church where we can be truly at home, accepted and welcomed as we are.

As a church community, we can look to the Bible for help around the longing for home, and what we find often gives me pause. Pilgrimages are everywhere; people are always having to set out, leave home one way or another, go without knowing. I tend to cling to the old and resist the new. And yet, at this midlife time I look back on the places where I have been profoundly at home and find they are… various. A certain house, a certain town; the convent retreat center where my husband and I spend just a few days each year - it is at the center of what I think of as the mosaic I call home. I am comforted by the realization that home can be made up of many places over a lifetime.

Are you spending enough time in places and with people where you are truly at home? Are you in a place, literal or metaphoric, that used to be home, and you have outgrown? As St. Augustine so memorably reminds, “Our hearts are restless until they rest in thee, O God.” Yes, that is perhaps the last word on the longing for home.