"Sometimes I Feel Like a Motherless Child"

September 13, 2023

Sometimes I Feel Like a Motherless Child

Homesickness and Belonging.

Old men (and women) ought to be explorers

Here and there it does not matter

We must be still and still moving

Into another intensity

For another union, a deeper communion

T.S. Eliot, “East Coker”

I think all of us spend our lives searching for home. I was lucky enough to live in one family for my childhood years. My mother, father and I lived in two different houses in Alexandria, Virginia. I spent most of my childhood in the second home from my early primary school years until I went off to college. But I came to learn that “home” does not exclusively mean where you live. “Home” is a place that you belong and where you live into your fullest self. Although I couldn’t put it into words, I learned this in the years after my mother’s death in 1971. From the age of thirteen onward, my childhood house did not seem like home. I often would hum the spiritual “Sometimes I Feel like a Motherless Child” to myself as I felt that sense of loneliness at home. Someone was missing. Then, during my sophomore year in college, my father sold our house.

When my father sold and moved from the Alexandria, Virginia house, I was away at college. I came home at spring break to a father who lived in three places— an apartment in a retirement community in Alexandria, a small house in Charlottesville, Virginia and a mountain cabin in the Blue Ridge Mountains. He would spend his days driving for one to another—never being at home anywhere. The furniture in my childhood home was distributed between these three places. I never really knew what to call home anymore.

Since my marriage to Bryan in 1981, we have lived in 12 houses or apartments, ranging from Charlottesville, Virginia to Hartford Connecticut to New York City and back to Alexandria, then to Richmond, Virginia, South Africa, Baltimore and now Cumberland. That’s a lot of moving. I often find myself envious of those who have stayed in one place for a substantial part of their lives or even their entire lives. Sone folks even grow up to live in their childhood home. I have wondered if we had stayed in one place after college, I wouldn’t have had the sense of restless homesickness for much of my life. I think I hoped that South Africa would be the home I had been yearning and searching for in my life. But the old homesickness returned there too.

For some, retiring from a full-time vocation of many years is hard because our vocation is a deep part of who we are, of where we belong. Our full-time work is a place we make our home in our working hours. At first, my call to seminary and ordination to the priesthood felt like finding home. After some years in a career (law) that wasn’t quite a match for me, I felt like I was falling back into a life that made sense to me on a deeper level. And I hoped that I was falling into a family (the church) where I would be always belong and where I could live into my fullest self. On some levels, for the thirty-plus years of full-time church work, this was true. But as I continued to move from parish to parish, and I experienced the initial, exciting pull of new belonging at a new call and then the restlessness of a call ending followed by the hard disengagement from a place I belonged and loved, I began to wonder where I truly belonged.

In the last decade, I have come to believe that one’s true home is never a house, or a parish community, or any kind of family. Of course, these are all important components of how we belong in the world as humans. But I believe that the hardest spiritual truth to accept that is that one’s home comes from within. One of my spiritual directors in South Africa, Father Andrew Norton of the Community of the Resurrection, once said to me: “I am at home wherever I am.” And Father Andrew had left his native England for South Africa and other Community of Resurrection houses many times over his eighty years. As I was pondering returning to the States at the time, I asked him: “How do you know when it’s time to leave?” He just pause, smiled at me and said, “As part of the Community of the Resurrection, I was given direction.” I was puzzled that he could practice that kind of obedience. I struggled with his words. Now, I am finally beginning to understanding Father Andrew’s wisdom….: If we live consciously in the present, in our daily life, we are drawn deeper into what it means to be “home”—regardless of whether we stay put for years or move every year.

Richard Rohr puts it this way: “The end (home) is already planted in us from the beginning, and it gnaws away at us until we get there freely or consciously. The most a bishop or a sacrament can do is to “fan (this awareness) into flame (2 Timothy 1:6) and sometimes it does. But sometimes great love and great suffering are even bigger fans for this much-needed flame. The good news is that there is a guide, a kind of medical advocate, an inner compass—and it resides in each of us….You will not be left orphaned” (John 14:18) without a mother or home,” (From his book Falling Upwards)

There is that inner voice within each of us that does not drive us, but gently leads us home—wherever we are. Father Andrew was right. And I believe that inner voice works with the created order—nature, animals, humans, communities—to help us recognize this, find our home, our souls space where we are right now.

One place that I find that soul space and home is on the screened porch at my house. Right now Kirby the Dog and I are sitting on the porch eyeing the greenness of the woods, hearing the birds chirping and our neighbor chainsawing his fallen tree, watching the deer walk up the hillside and being embraced by creation. In this moment, I find myself once again. Our daily spiritual work is to find that “soul space” where we can hear the voice of the genuine within. In the next weeks, I’ll be examining places that are my “soul space” in Cumberland and throughout my life. I hope you will join me on the journey and add your places where you recover yourself.

Pondering for the Week: Where is your “soul space” where you find the genuine in you once again? Where your empty spaces inside are soothed, healed and embraced?

Music Clip for the Week: The spiritual “Sometimes I Feel Like a Motherless Child” has always been with me. It is strangely comforting. I think it connects us with all who have experienced deep loss and somehow find hope in their souls to embrace life. There are LOTS of versions of this ranging from the greats Mahalia Jackson and Odetta. But I have picked three (!) versions: one by Jessye Norman and one by Louise Armstrong and Sy Oliver Choir and All Stars. Each version features musical dialogue between instrument and voice and combine a sense of great loss and great joy together. Then there is Van Morrison—with some new words of freedom. Enjoy!

Soul Space Meditation for September 18, 2023.doc

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