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Editors’ note: 

Join us next summer for our 2018 National Women’s Conference, June 14 to 16 in Indianapolis, and hear Jen speak on “There’s No Place Like Home.” Browse dozens of speakers and topics, and register soon!

In an interview with The Atlantic, Tiffany Watt Smith—author of The Book of Human Emotions—described her research on the role that language plays in our emotional lives. As Smith argues, words not only describe how we feel, they also distinctly shape how we understand our feelings. As complex emotional beings, we need nomenclature for fear and self-doubt, longing and desire. In short, we must be taught to explain ourselves to ourselves as well as to others.

“One of the emotions I became really interested in when researching the book was homesickness,” Smith explained in the interview. In the mid- to late-18th century, homesickness was considered a credible source of physical ailment and even a possible cause of death.

According to medical records, homesick patients experienced the expected symptoms of depression and fatigue, but they also suffered surprising physical ones, such as sores, pustules, and fevers. In severe cases, sufferers refused to eat, growing so weak as to eventually die. Their doctors labeled their deaths severe cases of nostalgia—from nostos, “homecoming,” and algia, “pain.” (The last mention of “nostalgia” on a death certificate was in 1918.)

Our Oldest Desire

Nostalgia may have disappeared from our medical dictionaries, but we haven’t cured the ache for home. To be human is to know the grief of some paradise lost. Each of us—however happily settled—suffers a foreboding sense of rupture, as if we’ve been cut off from some hidden source of happiness.

We’re not unlike Lot, the nephew of Abraham, who parts from his uncle upon arriving in Canaan. When given first pick of the land, without any living memory of Eden, Lot scans the horizon and settles in the well-watered Jordan Valley because it bears resemblance to “the garden of the Lord” (Gen 13:10). Lot suffered nostalgia­­—or, as the French would say, maladie du pays: sickness of [a lost] country.

Home represents humanity’s most visceral ache—and our oldest desire.

Biblical words related to home can denote physical dwelling, family household, material possessions, and geographical and social connections. But these words only hint at the emotional dimensions of the English word home and its cousins in German, Danish, Swedish, Icelandic, and Dutch. In these languages home connotes much more than geography and material reality; it also describes an emotional state of being. For the linguistic ancestors of the Old Norse, home, heima, means more than bricks and mortar. In part, its walls are safety, its windows, welcome. Provided there’s intimacy and a sense of belonging, a home can be made in almost any place.

Home represents humanity’s most visceral ache—and our oldest desire.

Witness of Literature

Instinctive to the witness of Western literature is the longing for home. Odysseus spent 10 years fighting at Troy and another decade getting home. His son Telemachus, awaiting his father, defends his mother from the string of suitors wishing against Odysseus’s safe return. He laments his father’s exile: “How I wish I could have been rather son to some fortunate man, whom old age overtook among his possessions.” Telemachus senses the privilege of belonging to a place that serves as witness to our birth and spectator to our death, and understands that home is the place for being recognized, received, remembered.

Missed.

In the face of death, home, as perceived stability, is one hedge against the terror of the réveil mortel—the wake-up call to mortality.

We’re hardwired for place and for permanence, for rest and refuge, for presence and protection. We long for home because welcome was our first gift of grace and it will be our last.

As writer Julian Barnes put it in his novel Nothing to Be Frightened Of, we live with “the vicious awareness that this is a rented world.” The grass withers, and the flowers fade: Ours is an impermanent life. At the very least, home is a steadying consolation when the lights go out.

The novel is a powerful literary witness to human nostalgia: as philosopher and literary critic George Lukacs has written, the novel is the great form of “transcendental homelessness.” This is to say that from Don Quixote to Don DeLillo, the world’s greatest writers are giving voice to our inexorable grief at lostness and our irrepressible joy at being found.

Homelessness—whether physical or spiritual—is the terror of the elements and the threat of an angry sky. Home is the dry place we’re all searching for. Humans need home. In a very real sense, then, homesickness is health.

Old, Old Story of Home

The biblical narrative begins and ends at home. From the garden of Eden to the New Jerusalem, we’re hardwired for place and for permanence, for rest and refuge, for presence and protection. We long for home because welcome was our first gift of grace, and it will be our last. The setting of our first home and our last home testify to the nature of the embodied story God is writing in human history.

Because God’s story begins in a garden and ends in a city, place isn’t incidental to Christian hope, just as bodies aren’t incidental to salvation. God will resurrect our bodies, and he will—finally—bring us home. As Craig Bartholomew concludes in Where Mortals Dwell, “One of the glories of being human and creaturely is to be implaced.” The “fortune” of home, as Homer puts it, is the witness of Genesis and of Revelation. In Christ, God will never leave any of his children to homelessness.


Editors’ note: This article is adapted from Jen Pollock Michel’s new book, Keeping Place: Reflections on the Meaning of Home (IVP, 2017).

Previously:

Is there enough evidence for us to believe the Gospels?

In an age of faith deconstruction and skepticism about the Bible’s authority, it’s common to hear claims that the Gospels are unreliable propaganda. And if the Gospels are shown to be historically unreliable, the whole foundation of Christianity begins to crumble.
But the Gospels are historically reliable. And the evidence for this is vast.
To learn about the evidence for the historical reliability of the four Gospels, click below to access a FREE eBook of Can We Trust the Gospels? written by New Testament scholar Peter J. Williams.

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