Building Towers

I don’t remember Heaven, not really… but it seems that part of me -perhaps a bigger part of me than I can grasp -suffers from severe homesickness. It’s an ironic sort of homesickness -the more I feed it, the more it grows.  And I realize that it isn’t actually a sickness at all but a HEALER in every way.

When I first sat down and really talked with Danny, it felt as if something deep within me was all at once excited and rested to be… could it be?… reunited.  I didn’t know Danny.  I had never met him.  It was simultaneously the weirdest and most natural feeling in the world.

The part of my brain that’s forgotten Heaven was confused and scared.  The part of my brain (? soul?) that remembers Heaven sort of exhaled, as if it had been anticipating my meeting Danny for years.  His voice was strange and familiar.  His hands were new and also home.  His hug was the hug of a newly-found friend and also the hug of someone I’d sung, “God Be With You ‘Til We Meet Again” to.

It felt good.

It felt scary.

It felt natural.

It made no sense and complete sense all at once.

A piece of homesickness was given remedy that day.  It was proof of Home.  I’d felt for some time that there was a Home for me out there.  Meeting and marrying Danny was a piece of my Home Puzzle… but there’s SO MUCH MORE.  I can feel it.

There’s a part of me that hungers -ever hungers -for something MORE.  I don’t mean materially, don’t mistake me.  I mean -emotionally?  Is it emotion?  Or is there something out there that is MORE, even, than emotion?

I’ve always had this hunger.

I’ve always been a deep-feeling, passionate person, and as such I’ve always felt a constant dissatisfaction with the world at hand.

That’s not to say that I’ve dismissed joyful moments or failed to live and bask in the present -though at times, many times, I have.  I’m only trying to say that I’ve got a hole in my heart.

I’ve heard some refer to it as a “God Hole” and while I believe that, I still feel like my hole is more aptly titled, “The Home Hole.”

I am not at home, no matter where I go.  I used to pity Christ when He spoke of having no place to lay his head, but pity isn’t what Christ sought at all… Christ simply spoke truth of how He felt about Earth.  It wasn’t His home, and He wasn’t at home in it at all.  Earth was where He went for a mission.

I’ve sought to fill my Home Hole in so many ways -SO many.  I’ve sought out intense emotions, trying desperately to reach a level of unearthly emotion, trying to feel ANYTHING strongly, powerfully.

I’ve sought for years for more and more proof of home, and in so doing I’ve developed My Vices.

My Vices, unlike my Home Sickness, are ACTUALLY sicknesses who also grow abominably the more they are fed.  They bring no healing.  They are malignant.  Instead of leading me to God, they tore Him from me… often going so far as to leave me wondering if there WAS a God, and if so: how could He ever stand the sight of me let alone take a chance on loving me?

The more I shop, the more I eat, the more I tear down others, the more movies I watch, the more I dive into the Earth and try and make it my home… the larger grows my Home Hole.

I think of the descendents of Noah, building a tower toward Heaven.  So often I was taught that the Tower of Babel was a symbol of wickedness.  But yesterday as I looked up in the darkness at the ceiling over my bed, I thought about those inherently GOOD people building what they felt was a needed and necessary building.

They sought to muscle their way back home. This I understand!

They gathered up their friends -they all spoke the same language and they all had the same hole in their heart, and they built a tower to home!  To Heaven!  But they forgot -again, let’s hold hands with irony -about God. They formed and fed vices with their tower. Their tower became their house of worship, but they had replaced God with their own selves and in so doing had built up A House of Vices.

But God didn’t forget about them, just as He’s never forgotten about Alicia.

God took from them their unity of voice which they were using for desecration, and He cursed them with the inability to understand one another, thereby saving them.

My Vices look like theirs, though their story is ancient and mine is circa 2010.  My search for home often (or eventually) lacked a God-center and by default was mortal-centered.

So often I’ve reached for food, for money, for beauty and validation -so that I might reach Heaven in some way.  I didn’t understand Heaven, really, and that’s why I did it.  My innate was crying out for home and I sought out home as best I could with where I was and what knowledge I had.

And God, in His familiar mercy, is saving me.  Though my saving doesn’t involve a curse, it does involve a lot of pain… and therein I can empathize with the descendents of Noah.

Glennon Melton has said:

“People think of us addicts as insensitive liars but we don’t start out that way. We start out as extremely sensitive truth tellers.”

I built my vices from a hungry place -I was starving for Home.  I sought it out in the wrong places, but I sought it out regardless.

I built my Babels and they all failed me.

I love C.S. Lewis’s thoughts in The Screwtape Letters.  He speaks at this point as a Devil:

Prosperity knits a man to the World.  He feels that he is “finding his place in it,” while really it is finding its place in him.  His increasing reputation, his widening circle of acquaintances, his sense of importance, the growing pressure of absorbing and agreeable work, build up in him a sense of being really at home in earth which is just what we want. … The truth is that the Enemy, having oddly destined these mere animals to life in His own eternal world, has guarded them pretty effectively from the danger of feeling at home anywhere else.

As I am facing my 30th birthday next month, I find that I’d much rather be 30 with the knowledge that has come with 30 than be 21, sitting in the dirt with my building blocks, trying to muscle my way back home.

It is a really yucky and hard place to be.

Ironically (yeah, we’re still there), the most rested place I’ve ever been is completely racked with homesickness.

Give me not of this world, God, but offer up pieces of Home on Earth that I might make myself Fat upon my Longing for Home.

Give me a rose, a breeze, a baby’s curl.  Give me a song filled with strains of Home, and a evening spent in the company of those who kept company with me at Home.

Give me meat and bread of body and soul.

Shower thy blessings upon me as I reach my hungry, childish arms up toward Thee.

I cry unto Thee for comfort, for love, for peace.

Give me no place on Earth to lay my head for therein lies risk of losing my peace-giving sense of Longing.

This is my Sabbath prayer,

Amen.

Comments

  1. Ditto.

  2. I was just talking to someone about how I don’t feel like I’ve “found home” yet, I don’t feel settled, and I’m not sure if I know what “home” feels like. Pretty much, this was a timely post. Also, I really love you, just so you know. :)

    • YES! Feeling unsettled is my biggest sign of needing to tap into a piece of Heaven on Earth. And you know I love you, lady :)

  3. You are such s talented writer. I love that you can not only recognize these thoughts and feelings, but also express them. I need to read this again when I’m less tired and figure out what it means to my perspective. Thanks for sharing!

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