Home

“It’s tough when you go home because if you‘ve lived all those other places, 

and had all those different experiences, it’s hard to relate to the people you 

grew up with…You can’t unsee what you have seen, unlearn what you have 

learned. The only way to live entirely at ease with one’s hometown is never

to have left”  (The Little Way of Ruthie Leming). 

My husband and I recently took a road trip back to the town of Peekskill in the Hudson River Valley region of upstate New York where my grandparents had lived. I spent almost every summer there growing up and moved back with my family when I entered high school. The visit was a bittersweet experience.

Trying to recapture what I felt at seventeen is not possible. You can have those experiences and those memories for the first time only once. I had been seduced by my own yearning to return to a sense of roots and connection with my family and my home. It was not possible. Not only was I not that person anymore, my home was not the same either. We had both changed and become something different.

Is this why Thomas Wolf said, “You can’t go home again”? Borrowing from his stream of thought on the subject I would say:

I can’t go back home to my family, back home to my childhood, back home to summers and the illusion that the sun is standing still and the future is keeping its distance, back home to evenings of three generations on the front porch glider listening to crickets chirping, back home to one's youthful idea of falling in love, to adolescent moments of pure groupness, those rare, but exquisite times when it feels like everyone is equal and respected and liked, back home to a time when I fit perfectly in my little piece of the world, back home to a young girls dreams of a life of purpose and meaning, to becoming a nurse and to that being enough, back home to belief in forever after.

Nostalgia is defined as pleasure and sadness that is caused by remembering something from the past and wishing that you could experience it again. That seems to describe in part what I was feeling on this visit.

C.S. Lewis reminds us that this longing inside us that pierces the heart with such exquisite pain- what we call Nostalgia and Romanticism and Adolescence - are all only cheats. He says in the Weight of Glory, “These things that have captured our hearts have done so because the Romance was calling to us through them; but if they are mistaken for the thing itself they turn into dumb idols, breaking the hearts of their worshippers. For they are not the thing itself; they are only the scent of a flower we have not found, the echo of a tune we have not heard, news from a country we have never yet visited. It was not in them, it only came through them, and what came through them was longing.”

What was it that I was longing for? What was stirred in me by this visit home? It had to have been more than just a desire to recapture experiences from my past. Some of those memories I had romanticized. In my mind I made them better and more appealing than they really had been. Even so, they still had the power to stir something in me. As I think about it now, those poignant memories were in reality pointing to something else. Something I could not even name, much less describe. It was like trying to describe the face of God.

Again, I turn to C.S. Lewis for his take on this. He says, “Apparently our lifelong nostalgia, our longing to be united with something in the universe from which we now feel cut off, to be on the inside of some door which we have always seen from the outside, is no mere neurotic fancy, but the truest index of our real situation. And to be summoned inside would be both glory and honor beyond our merits and also the healing of that old ache.”

Here then perhaps is an understanding of what I have been feeling about my visit home. It’s not just that I wanted to recapture something special from another time, even if that were possible, but that the image in my mind of home awakened in me a longing for something much deeper.

I’ve heard Christians say we want to merge with the Other; to be one with God. ‘Christ in me the hope of glory.’ These all sound so mystical, but I think they touch on something about this deeper longing.

Standing on the corner of Orchard Street and North Division in front of my old house, I realized I didn’t belong there anymore. Now I understand it was not just because I had changed and my home was not the same, but because it never was what I was longing for in the first place- just a whisper of it.