Sighing for the Homeland
It’s still a desert.
All the beauty, even those sunrises, are faint echoes of our truest home — the home to which we’re headed but have not arrived, not yet.
Springtime reminds me of a line in my favorite novel, Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead,[1]
There are two occasions when the sacred beauty of Creation becomes dazzlingly apparent, and they occur together. One is when we feel our mortal insufficiency to the world, and the other is when we feel the world’s mortal insufficiency to us.
It’s the same sort of discovery stumbled upon by Augustine of Hippo back in the fourth century. I say “stumbled” upon, but it was a much more arduous discovery than that. Augustine was desperately searching. He was pining for the meaning of life after failed attempts of chasing down the rabbit hole of pleasure and power. I imagine he’d bop his head to Will Reagan’s new song, Round and Round,[2]
Gotta shake this thing off
Gotta open my mind
‘Cause my blood keeps on pumping
And I keep on lookingCause the beggars or the choosers
The winners or the losers
The simpletons and scarred
The hopefuls and fallenWe are coming to describe
Is there a rhythm to the noise?
Is life’s boast forever weakening?
Is there a meaning to return?We go round and round
And life keeps on spinning
We keep looking for answers
In the places they don’t come
In his latest book, On the Road with Saint Augustine: A Real-World Spiritually for Restless Hearts[3], James K. A. Smith draws a stack of lessons from Augustine’s search. The book isn’t a biography of Augustine, but it’s more like a book about life in our modern world with Augustine as our ancient guide. Smith writes,
Our restlessness is a reflection of what we try to “enjoy” as an end in itself—what we look to as a place to land. The heart’s hunger is infinite, which is why it will ultimately be disappointed with anything merely finite. Humans are those strange creatures who can never be fully satisfied by anything created—though that never stops us from trying. The irony, Augustine points out, is that we experience frustration and disappointment when we try to make the road a home rather than realizing it’s leading us home, when we try to tell ourselves “the road is life.” Then we foist infinite expectations upon the finite. But the finite is given as a gift to help us get elsewhere. …
There is joy in the journey precisely when we don’t try to make a home out of our car, so to speak. There is love on the road when we stop loving the road. There are myriad gifts along the way when we remember it’s a way. There is delight in the sojourn when we know where home is. …
The key is to know where we are, and whose we are, and where we’re headed, and not be surprised by the burdens on the road. [Augustine writes,] “Let all the faithful listen and mark this; let them realize where they are. They are in desert, sighing for their homeland.”
“They are in the desert, sighing for their homeland.”
Indeed we are.
“Come, Lord Jesus” (Revelation 22:20).
Gilead: A Novel, 245
Round and Round, first track, Vacancy
On the Road with Saint Augustine, 13, 17
