WHAT IT FEELS LIKE TO COME HOME

'What was his homecoming like for Andy? It was like being naked and cold and then getting into his clothes.'

Wendell Berry, Marce Catlett, p.106.

THE IMPORTANCE OF PLACE

'...he had misplaced himself...'
Wendell Berry, Marce Catlett, p.103.

HOMESICK FOR THE FUTURE

'Nowhere was my sense of belonging as complete or unambiguous as it was in my childhood home, but if I saw that sense of belonging as something exclusive to the ironstone house, then I would never really leave, never grow up, never look for my place in the world. Somehow I had to turn my nostalgia inside-out, so that my love for the house, for the sense of belonging I experienced there, instilled not a constant desire to go back but a desire to find that sense of belonging, that security and happiness, in some other place, with some other person, or in some other mode of being. The yearning had to be forward-looking. You had to be homesick for somewhere you had not yet seen, nostalgic for things that had not yet happened.' 

William Fiennes, The Snow Geese, p.203. 

PSALM 23

'...only a few months before I had copied the last verse of the psalm into a notebook: 'But thy loving-kindness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life: and I will dwell in the house of the Lord for ever.' It had occurred to me how often the the authors of scripture depict God as a house or shelter in which one might dwell, as if faith were itself a home, affording all the protection, comfort, stediness and sense of belonging that home implies - as if the need for God were homesickness in paraphrase.' 

William Fiennes, The Snow Geese, p.104. 

BEAUTIFUL PLACES

'Some of our most wonderful memories are beautiful places where we felt immediately at home.'
John O'Donohue in David Brooks, The Second Mountain, p.96. 

A CHRISTIAN'S HOME IS NOT THEIR CASTLE

'Our homes are not our castles. Indeed, they are not even ours.'
Rosaria Butterfield, The Gospel Comes with a House Key, p.100. 

THE DANGER OF NOSTALGIA

'If we allow ourselves to luxuriate in nostalgia, the myth of a beautiful, long-gone past will solidify, and it will weigh us down. Much as we must fight the idea that we would be happier somewhere else, in another marriage, in a bigger house, we must fight the idea that we were once at home but we never will be again.' 

Jo Swinney, Home, p.225. 

MARRIAGE

'...home must be more than marriage. If we expect our need for belonging, stability, safety, comfort, continuity, acceptance - all those things that together make a person feel at home - to be met in just one relationship, we will make ourselves more vulnerable to homelessness than anyone ought to be.' 

Jo Swinney, Home: The Quest to Belong, p.141. 

HOME

'"Do you think it could be a general rule," Berry asked Synder towards the end of 1979, "that the only place one is urgently needed is at home?" I think it could be. I think it is.'

Wendell Berry in Paul Kingsnorth, Confessions of a Recovering Environmentalist, p.106. 

OUR DESIRES LEAD US HOME

'Sometimes, I suspect, the search for home is related also to the longing of the flesh, to the way in which, both when you are young and for long afterward, the sight of beauty can you set you longing with a keenness and poignance and passion, with a kind of breathless awe even, which suggest that beneath the longing to possess and be possessed by the beauty of another sexually - to know in the biblical idiom - there lies the longing to know and be known by another fully and humanly, and that beneath that there lies a longing, closer to the heart of the matter still, which is the longing to be at last where you fully belong. "If ever beauty I did see, / Which I desir'd and got, 'twas but a dream of thee," John Donne wrote to his mistress ("The Good Morrow"), and when I think of all the beautiful ones whom I have seen for maybe no more than a passing moment and have helplessly, overwhelmingly desired, I wonder if an the innermost heart of my desiring there wasn't, of all things, homesickness.'  

Frederick Buechner, Longing for Home, p.23. 

HOME

'What the word home brings to mind before anything else, I believe, is  a place, and, and in its fullest sense not just the place where you happen to be living at the time, but a very special place with very special attributes which make it clearly distinguishable from all other places. The word home summons up a place - more specifically a house within that place - which you have a rich and complex feelings about, a place where you feel, or did feel once, uniquely at home, which is to say a place where you feel that all is somehow ultimately well even if things aren't going all that well at any given moment.' 

Frederick Buechner, Longing for Home: Recollections and Reflections, p.7. 

CREATION & RECREATION

'The first home foreshadows the final home, and the final home hallows and fulfills what was most precious in the first.' 

Fredrick Buechner in John Inge, A Christian Theology of Place, p.140. 

OUR ARCHITECTURE SPEAKS

'The skyscrapers, airports, freeways and other stereotypical components of modern landscapes - are they not the sacred symbols of a civilization that has deified reach and derided home?' 

Anne Buttimer in John Inge, A Christian Theology of Place, p.17. 

HOMES NOT HOUSES

'An essential ingredient in the redemption of our towns, cities and countryside is a proliferation of houses that are in fact homes.' 

Craig G Bartholomew, Where Mortals Dwell, p.284. 

PROGRESS

',...one of the characteristic diseases of the twentieth century was making its way: the suspicion that they would be greatly improved if they were somewhere else.'

Wendell Berry, 'Pray Without Ceasing' in That Distant Land, p.49.

HUMANKIND

'God is our homeland. And the homing instinct of the human being is homed on God.' 

Martin Laird, Into the Silent Land,: The Practice of Contemplation, p.2. 

THE IMPORTANCE OF HOME

'We live in a time and place in which we are conditioned to leave our hometowns. Our schools tell our young people to follow their professional bliss, wherever it takes them. Our economy rewards companies and people who have no loyalty to place. The stories that shape the moral imagination of our young, chiefly by film and television, are told by outsiders who are dissatisfied and lit out for elsewhere to find happiness and good fortune. 

During the decade leading up to Ruthie's death, I had spent my professional life writing newspaper columns, blog posts, and even a book, lamenting the loss of community and traditions in American life. I have a reputation as a pop theoretician of cultural decline, but in the truth I was long on words, short on deeds. I did not like the fact that I saw my Louisiana family only three times a year, for a week at a time, if we were lucky. But that was the way of the world, right? Almost everyone I knew was in the same position. My friends and I talked a lot about the fragmentation of the modern family, about the deracinating effects of late capitalism, about mass media and erosion of localist consciousness, about the consumerization of religion and the leviathan state and every other thing under the sun that undermines our sense of home and permanence. 

The one thing none of us did was what Ruthie did: Stay. 

Contemporary culture encourages us to make islands of ourselves for the sake of self-fulfillment, of career advancement, of entertainment, of diversion, and all the demands of the sovereign self. When suffering and death come for you - and it will - you will want to be in a place where you know, and are known. You want - no, you need - to be able to say, as Mike did, "We're leaning, but we're leaning on each other."' 

Rod Dreher, The Little Way of Ruthie Leming, p.209. 

HOME

'Well, where is home? he said. It isn't where your family comes from, and it isn't where you were born, unless you have been lucky enough to live in one place all your life. Home is where you hang your hat. (He had never owned a hat). Or home is where you spent your childhood, the good years when waking every morning was an excitement, when the round of the day could always produce something to fill your mind, tear your emotions, excite your wonder or awe or delight. Is home that, or is it the place where the people you love live, or the place where you have buried your dead, or the place where you want to be buried yourself?'

Wallace Stegner, The Big Rock Candy Mountain, p.459.  

HOME

'Home is a notion that only nations of the homeless fully appreciate and only the uprooted comprehend. What else would one plant in a wildernerss or on a frontier?'

Wallace Stegner, Angle of Respose, p.159.

LONELINESS

'No man can stay alive when nobody is waiting for him. Everyone who returns from a long and difficult trip is looking for someone waiting for him at the station or the airport. Everyone wants to tell his story and share his moments of pain and exhiliration with someone who stayed home, waiting for him to come back.'

Henri JM Nouwen, The Wonded Healer, p.66.