Where's Your Home

“We shall not cease from exploration, and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time.” T. S. Eliot

Tomorrow, we are heading back to our other home in Parkhill, Ontario.  I am not sure whether my home is in Parkhill or here at our cottage in Prince Edward Island.  It does seem that I do have a home in both places; a foot or a heart in both camps.  This has its advantages and its disadvantages of course.  To reflect on the statement by Eliot, it does give me a great deal in my ongoing exploration of myself and my discovering who God’s created me to be which will enable me to know the place where I started. 

Whenever I think of “home” I am reminded of my visit to L’Arche Daybreak in Newmarket one reading week while I was studying theology at Huron University College.  One of the residents met me and asked the question that, as I later found out, he asks everyone he meets, “where’s your home.”   This made me stop in my tracks, figuratively and literally.  Of course, asking someone where they are from or where they live is a common why of making conversation when you meet someone.  However, “where’s your home” is an entirely different matter. 

So where is my home?  My answer to this question contains a rather big dose of irony.  Perhaps that is to be expected because questions like this and others dealing with the soul seem to always have irony in the soul.  It seems that finding that place where we started, as Eliot proposes, is really the answer to where your true home is.  You started at your true home and your exploration will involve finding out where that place is.  Therefore, you will not know where your true home is until you reach it at the end of your journey.  You have to make that exploration and after all that, you discover that it was where you left.  Your true home is with God, or the divine, or whatever name you want to give it.

Looking at my exploration so far, it did not often seem that I was travelling on a journey of exploration that would lead to my true home.  There were times when it seemed that perhaps I was on a path that would lead me there.  However, other times I seemed to be completely lost and had no idea what my destination was or even that there was one.  It had more of a feeling of a maze with many dead ends and wrong turns than a labyrinth that had a definite path to follow.  Admittedly, walking the labyrinth seems to take you away from the centre just as you approach it.  But you always know where the centre is. 

Ironically, looking back I can see a definite path my life has taken although it has been anything but a straight and narrow journey.  I do seem to be getting closer to the place where I started and can see glimpses of my true home.  I am also beginning to know in my heart that I will see it again for the first time.  That is what sustains me in those days when it does seem as if the destination or my home is receding into the distance as it does on the labyrinth walk when you approach the centre and then turn a very sharp corner and travel away from it.  However, I am beginning to realize that this too is part of the exploration. 

Blessings on your journey,

Greg