Unhomeness

Nostos (νόστος), aka the journey home.

We are all on a journey, and that journey is a going-home. The question is where is home? What is home? How will you know when you get there?

We're all on a journey home because we all leave, or better yet, we all have left, and we keep on leaving. Even if we don't go anywhere.

Today, and throughout 2024, I'm going to be writing these posts interacting with, and riffing off, James KA Smith's book On the Road with Saint Augustine: A Real-World Spirituality for Restless Hearts. These are kind of review posts, kind of dialogues with a book. And in his opening chapter, Smith explores the idea of the road and home, or Unheimlich ("not-at-home-ness", or unhomeness if you prefer). And here's the pitch for Auggie - he too has travelled the road, knows all its spots, and knows the way home.

We leave because we’re looking. For something. For someone. We leave because we long for something else, something more. (p.4)

Of the big three epics of antiquity, two are about journeys home. Homer's Odyssey is about Ulysses long voyage home, and when he arrives, it's not the place he left. Whenever you get home, it's never the place you left because you've changed and its changed. Vergil's Aeneid, which itself is structured like a half-Odyssey, half-Iliad, is also a journey home. But it's the journey of Aeneas whose home is destroyed, and who sets out to make a new home, to found Rome.

Augustine, too, left home looking for home. He left home to go to Carthage, left Carthage to go to Rome, left Rome to go to Milan. Each time upgrading, the perfect picture of the upwardly mobile young man, making a career for himself.

Milan for Augustine is our Manhattan or London or, well, Milan—a metropolis made of money and power. (p.7)

But Milan disappoints, just like every destination disappoints. We "arrive", we get the place, the house, the job, the promotion, the contract, the relationship, the wedding, the child, the prize, we get the X we think is the one thing that will finally satisfy. To say to ourselves "I've arrived". But it never does, it never lasts.

Smith's Augustine comes to interpret his life through a different story, that of the prodigal son. Then it becomes not a journey to but a journey back. (Perhaps a journey there and back again?) In fact, human existence is just such a journey, because we are given life as a gift by the Creator, a gift we have no say in, the gift of natality, born into a world of mortality, and we go out wandering...

For Augustine, all of us find our story in the prodigal son. Some of us never left home except existentially. The Father goes out every day to keep watch for the returning younger son. But the Father also goes out to look for the older son too.

One’s own heart can be foreign territory, a terra incognita, and this lack of at-home-ness with oneself generates our propensity to run. We still can’t find what we’re looking for because we don’t know what we want. If we never seem to arrive, growing tired of every place that promised to be the end of the road, it’s because the terrain of our interior life is a wilderness of wants. When we leave home looking for happiness, we’re in search of the self we never knew. (pp. 11-12).

"Home Is where the heart is," they say. Augustine says, "But our hearts are restless until they find our home in you."

The heart is infinitely hungry, infinitely restless. It will eat everything and anything, hoping that it finds the one thing that will sate the insatiable desire. It's infinite hunger leads only to infinite disappoint with finite things. Only an infinite god can satisfy the heart made for infinity.

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. (p.13)

Conversion isn't the solution to all your problems in this life, it's the beginning of realising that you know where home is, and the longing to get there. Augustine doesn't write "from home", as someone who has arrived, but as someone who is still on the road, but knows where home is and longs to get there. Conversion is knowing home, not getting home. Which is what makes this life a life of longing.