Homecomings

I stumbled upon a word not too long ago that I didn't know. In reading the definition I found I had found the very word I required to use for something I have often experienced.

The word was Hiraeth: (hear-eth) n. (Welsh) It's definition:  A spiritual longing for a home that perhaps never was home, and an earnest desire for something past.  It is the echo of the lost places of our soul's past and our grief for them.  It is in the wind, and the rocks, and the waves.  It is nowhere and it is everywhere.    

While the word I stumbled upon was meant to describe the feelings of a Welshman for a time that no longer exists, it is not a feeling exclusive to the Welsh.  Several other countries including the Cornish, Bretons, Portuguese, Germans, Ethiopians, and Romanians also have similar words with exactly the same meaning.  It seems to be something in common with many people.

I've experienced this feeling of nostalgia for places that I miss with a deep homesickness that panged my heart. Places I have never known but read about in a book or experienced while watching a film. It's not just for places but for people from the past that I somehow feel I have experienced a real kinship with.  I think I enjoy genealogy so much because I get to know family members, become familiar with their neighborhoods, and neighbors, the boundaries of their land, their churches and activities and their families.  I have never known them but somehow, they are not strangers.  

This feeling can also be for things of the spirit.  For years, I experienced a love for the Jewish Candle lighting ceremony that ushered in the Sabbath.  I am not Jewish, nor was there any evidence of Jewish ancestry in my background, but each time I read of the opening Shabat evening ritual, or saw it portrayed in film, my heart yearned to be a part of it.  It was easy to embrace that ritual when we began to attend a Messianic synagogue.  That ritual satisfies something within me, often moving me to tears as we conducted it in our home.

I believe the word can also be applied to things we have known as well.  It's not an unsatisfied yearning but it's a nostalgia, a heartfelt feeling, for people and places, some of whom may be long gone.

In the book Gone with the Wind, Scarlett O'Hara feels a deep-seated love and respect for the land upon which she grew.   

I understood her feeling for the land very well indeed.  I felt it for the land my grandparents farmed from the 1940's.   It is the land I live upon now.  Have I ceased to feel a love for the land now that I live here?  Not really.  It's just that the longing has been satisfied.  There is nothing to long for...It's mine, ours, and it is my hopes that one day it will be a part of at least some of my children and grandchildren's lives.  

We were coming home the other day from running errands and John asked me, "When we come home from vacation this year, will you be sad as we come down this stretch of road?  Will you think, 'How boring.  It's just the same old thing.' " The idea I'd think that was completely alien to me.    "No!  This stretch of road has been like coming home my whole life long.  I never feel sad that I'm following this path.  My heart lightens and I look forward to what is ahead.  I love every bend and curve of this road because I've never associated it with anything but happy expectations."    

It's true.  I do feel my heart lighten when we are driving down the highway towards the entry road to our property.  I feel the same when we are miles away and top the hill above the Flint River Valley.  I look out across that stretch of wetlands and woods and know that just over there, on a road that winds gently northward is my home.

As a girl, riding with my grandparents, we'd often come to that hilltop just before the countryside dropped to the River Valley.  I always picture it in memory as being around sunset.  The views were breathtaking.  We could see for miles to the south, west and north.  That sunset with beautifully colored mounding clouds and the brilliant light of a setting sun was stunning.  I was convinced, absolutely convinced, that heaven lay just past the view, somewhere on the horizon towards the glorious sunset.  I knew it was a glimpse of God's homeland, and I longed for that as much as I looked forward to arriving at Granny's.  

I think of that often now, at that point in the road, even if it's not sunset.  I gaze out at the horizon beyond.  "There," something whispers in my soul, "is my other homeland..."    I never felt afraid to die when I saw that view.  I just knew that I had another home beyond that horizon.  And later in life, when I gave my life to Christ, I knew that homecoming was secured.

Again, that sense of Hiraeth comes.  I've never been to heaven.  I don't really know what it will look like when I arrive.  But I know it on a level beyond my mental ability to fathom it.  I know others have felt it. I feel it embodied by some of the old hymns; especially when I hear the opening words of "Beulah Land".  "I'm kind of homesick for a country...to which I've never been before."

Another moment of Hiraeth occurs when I slip in memory back to my childhood.  I recall the places that I can visit no longer.  The houses that my great grandmothers lived in come to mind.  Their homes are so familiar to me that I could step through the door to this day and make my way through each room. I can easily recall where each piece of furniture stood and just how the light shone through the windows, how the wood floors echoed underfoot.   

I think of family members I knew in childhood, now long dead.  I recall moments with each that stand out in my mind, that seals them in my memory.  And I recall the very old-fashioned church I attended as a child and the dear old souls that sat on the pews with us.  

They are all gone.  The houses, the people, the church long since remodeled and home to a new denomination.  Those places, people, and times are all gone. Yet somehow, they are strongly embedded within me, and while at times I long for them, they are never really dead to me.  They live on.  

Some evenings at home, when the sun the sun slants just so over this property and the shadows fall a certain way, I feel the ancient ones, the memories of people I never knew, who inhabited this land ages ago.  They gather close by me, and we stand together watching the sun sink down... I long to truly know them all, the ones who have come and gone long ago, who seem somehow to be standing with their arms linked in mine, whispering things I can't quite hear of times I somehow feel I know but can know no longer.  Perhaps they feel me, almost hear my whispers of a life to come...And perhaps at some point in time, my great grandchildren will feel my hand on their shoulder as they stand and watch the sun go down.    Perhaps they too will feel that sense of longing, that desire for a homecoming to a home they have never known.