Returning Home

Returning Home: Weekly Summary

Saturday, October 17, 2026

Sunday
We are both driven and called forward by a kind of deep homesickness, it seems. There is an inherent and desirous dissatisfaction that both sends and draws us forward, and it comes from our original and radical union with God.
—Richard Rohr

Monday
I think the best way to describe what’s coming next is not “I’m dying,” but “I’m finally going home.” I don’t know what it’s like yet, but in my older age I really trust that it is home.
—Richard Rohr

Tuesday
Spiritual homesickness has been a constant in my life. It was not an everyday experience, but a predictable and always reoccurring desperation to find a sense of sacredness within me, not outside of me: my soul, my home, God in me.
—Brené Brown

Wednesday
Now Odysseus can go home because he has, in fact, come home to his true and full self. He is free to stop his human doing and can at last enjoy his human being, at home in himself.
—Richard Rohr

Thursday
The stories of Jesus and Israel were so tightly woven into the stories my parents told of themselves … that it took me years to separate the biblical figures from extended family members, biblical sinners from the sinners all around us, and biblical places of pain from their places of pain. I was never able to separate biblical hopes from their real hopes.
—Willie Jennings

Friday
The overarching narrative of the Bible is that of humanity searching for home…. It is a powerful story, rich in literary ambiguity—the earth, us, home, and God are almost interchangeable characters in this ancient record of humankind’s aching search to dwell.
—Diana Butler Bass

Week Forty-One Practice

Our Heart’s Longing for Home

In an episode of the Everything Belongs podcast, James Finley reflects on homesickness as part of the spiritual landscape:

Imagine you’re driving home at the end of the day and the sun is setting. At first you don’t pay any attention to it, because the sun sets every night. But on this particular night, it’s particularly beautiful, and you’re prompted to pull over and get out of the car. You sit on the ground, giving yourself over to the beauty of the setting sun, giving itself over to you.

If we meditate on that moment, we notice that it’s a moment of heightened awareness. It’s not lethargic or dull, but it’s also true that in this moment you’re not thinking, or whatever thing you are thinking doesn’t measure up to the richness of the awareness.  

So one way to put it is: In this moment, the “thinking you” and all that it thinks is transcended…. In all the eons from the beginning of the universe till now, the sun has never set before tonight, ever. And for all the eons to come, it will never set again in this same way, so it’s virginal and new. So, the remembering self and all that it remembers is transcended; there’s just the newness of the eternality of now….

In that moment you experience a deep kind of homecoming, like you belong there, and there’s a resting in this. You’re also not in time, because it’s prolonged. When you get up to leave, you have to look at your watch to see how much time passed, because you weren’t in time.

So you get home and pull the car in the garage. You’re standing in the kitchen, going through the mail, and you remember the moment of the setting sun, and you ask yourself this question: “Why do I spend so many of my waking hours trapped on the outer circumference of the inner richness of my life? I know the inner richness is there, because I experienced it, but it’s like I’m not at home in my own home.”

What is the path through which I can become more deeply at home in God, resting in me, resting in God forever? It’s a foreshadowing of eternal life. That’s what I think of as homecoming, a longing to be at home….  All our ways of living have built right into them opportunities for that kind of homecoming. I think as we move along, a deeper insight is that this longing, this homesickness, is an echo of God’s longing for us. For in the reciprocity of the longing, the longing is consummated.