Tuesday of the Seventh Week of Ordinary Time, May 21, 2024
(click here to listen to or read today’s scriptures)
Nostos-algia
Beloved: where do the wars and conflicts among you come from? God bestows a greater grace and the spirit says, “Resist the proud, give grace to the humble.
For centuries homesickness was considered a physical problem. It debilitated many and killed some. The word “nostalgia” was coined by a Swiss medical student from the Greek words nostos (homecoming) and alga (pain). Then, at least in America, in the last century or so our adopted values began to preclude us admitting our homesickness, as we sped around the country on journeys of questionable worth paid for by companies who wanted us to be independent, ambitious and optimistic.
Submit yourselves to God.
In her foreword to Richard Rohr’s Falling Upward: A Spirituality for the Two Halves of Life, Brene Brown remembers her own homesickness.
I lived for the hot summer weeks of my childhood with my grandmother in San Antonio. Yet every year I got desperately homesick after four or five days. I came to know and hate that feeling. I could sense it coming on – creeping into my mind and sliding across my shoulders and down my arms until the sorrow reached my hands, and I grasped at something that was completely out of reach.
Nost-algia isn’t always about people and place. It can also be about time – another time – one that is past. I am 74, and for awhile now I’ve lived in liminal space, between what was and what will be. I am not very good at this. My emotions are sometimes unmanageable, as the still mind and deep breathing I crave seem to have left the room. Here’s how Brene Brown puts it:
Spiritual homesickness has been a constant in my life. It was not an everyday experience, but a predictable and always reoccurring desperation to find a sense of sacredness within me, not outside of me: my soul, my home, God in me. It was homesickness for a place that exists only inside me. Lately, this has become an almost daily dulling grief – not depression or exhaustion, but an uncomfortable knowing that I’m coming to the end of one thing and the beginning of the next.
And so, for me and for Ms. Brown and perhaps you too, coming home to the place inside me where God dwells is no longer just a quick in and out before returning to the world of getting stuff done.
Today, I can barely be dragged out of the house. Based on this book, I think Fr. Richard might tell me that I’m experiencing the death of visiting God and the birth of living with God and through God.
Brene Brown, as she says, “has the first-half-of-life hustle down, along with the markers for success I’ve established for my life.” But she never MISSES that “first half.”
Finishing her Foreword, before she gives Fr. Richard back his book, after she thanks him for his graceful love in her life, Brene wonders, almost aloud:
Maybe I’m not homesick for the first half of life because it’s really never been my true home.
Ah. Yes.
Draw near to God, and he will draw near to you.
 (James 4, Psalm 55, Galatians 6, Mark 9)
(posted at www.davesandel.net)
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