Homesick People

Today’s guest post is from poet, songwriter, storyteller, and author Joshua Luke Smith. His new book, This is the Main Event is an invitation to encounter God in our everyday, and practice extraordinary presence in an ordinary life. He also writes on Substack, here.

Sometimes I feel lost. Not so much waking up on the wrong side of the bed but on the wrong side of eternity. I feel, to borrow from the Oklahoman John Moreland, “homesick for a home I’ve never had.”1 The Welsh have a word for that. Of course they do—they’re the only people who can make a shopping list sound like a hymn, lifting the most mundane mix of words into melodies that attract angels; I think the muses were born from the springs of Welsh valleys.

The word is hiraeth. It means homesickness, but it’s more than that. It speaks to an ache for something both familiar and estranged—something, someone, or someplace that perhaps never even existed. Yeah, sometimes I feel like that.

It’s Lewis, more than anyone, who has touched the pulse of this experience in his writing. Before naming it the “inconsolable secret”2 or the “old ache”3 he imagined a queen who was haunted by this longing, this sense of forgetting something once intimately known. In his wonderful poem “The Queen of Drum,” the kingdom has drifted into a dull slumber; the people wake each morning and engage in their ordinary lives, yet beneath the rhythm of their days lies a mysterious exhaustion: It’s as if they have stumbled into a spiritual sleep, an unending yawn and weariness of heart. It’s only the Queen who refuses to settle, roused by a dream in which she has seen a country beyond the boundaries of her land and every morning, upon waking, feels the longing for that place. She alone remembers, if only dimly, that this world is not all there is. The rest of the poem is in many ways the story of what the Queen does with that memory and Lewis, in his poetic brilliance, extends the question to us all: What do we do with our longing?

I find myself resonating with the Queen’s unrest. Hers is a journey, like many of ours, of learning to distinguish between the gift of enchantment and the greater gift of Presence. We were made to be enchanted, to awaken, bleary-eyed from cynicism and indifference, and we ache for those moments that interrupt the ordinary, that pull us from the monotonous and the mundane, reminding us we are more than matter, more than the sum of our parts, and in that sense, enchantment is a grace, like the Queen’s dream, stirring us to believe that the world is charged with mystery. And yet, as the story of the Queen will gradually reveal, enchantment is not our home, it is not the chief end of our desire, and our longing for it can gradually become a hurried appetite for euphoria and experience, a futile pursuit for the next event that will lift us beyond ourselves and suspend the weight of our lives, leaving us floating, believing, if only for a moment, we are free. We begin to pursue interruptions to ordinary life, rather than allowing our ordinary lives to become interrupted and transformed by God’s presence; we call it enchantment but in practice it’s just escape.

Presence asks something different of us: to pursue fulfillment in abiding, in the practice of an ordinary devotion that stays within the confines of our actual life, until, by grace, those same mundane days begin to glimmer with eternity. This is the slow, miraculous work of Presence; stones becoming altars, water becoming wine, desolate, dusty road becoming the meeting place of mankind and the divine, and ultimately the mystery of the incarnation, where God steps into our story, eternity wrapped in time, enchanting the world not through creating the means to escape it but in extending the invitation to enter in more fully. So we must pay close attention to the ache, for it is the longing that keeps us awake, not only to anticipate what is to come but to engage more fully in what is. I’ve sometimes wondered, and perhaps you can relate, why the sweetest moments in our lives are so often tinged with sadness. I’ll usually find myself in an experience of great joy—playing with my children or sitting around a dining table with friends, passing plates laden with good food and raising our glasses in raucous toasts—only to feel what I can best describe as a passing wave of grief. It rises above and overwhelms me, and although it soon passes and I’m quickly distracted, I can’t deny it’s there or that it happened. It’s as if I am momentarily heartbroken by the temporal nature of my existence. To experience these moments is to experience the best of what life offers and, simultaneously, the most tragic. We all know that, in one way or another, this is all going to end; we will have to say goodbye, and sadly, in some cases, we won’t even be able to do that. Endings are baked into our being here, and they feel bloody unfair most of the time, which is why I have found it immensely comforting in Lewis’s writing that he engages with this experience not as a defect or mindset to be cured but as an apologetic of sorts, recognizing that our longing for these simple and seemingly ordinary moments to last forever is the evidence of true hiraeth.

“. . . the scent of a flower we have not found, the echo of a tune we have not heard, news from a country we have never yet visited.”4

This is the quest of the Queen: how to steward her longing, how to live in the tension of knowing there is more without escaping what actually is. We are homesick people, and it is the ache, like a worn and weathered signpost hanging on a country lane, that directs our attention to a land beyond these plains, it is a pulsing reminder that the transcendent is revealed in the temporal and that the life we long for is hidden in the life we have.

For a modern poet’s take on longing’s place in our spiritual journey, enjoy Joshua Luke Smith’s poem—Save Me From the Shallows.

Save Me From the Shallows