Being at home in Sehnsucht...

When we were young, we lived in the mountains and had no neighbors across the street. It was just a swamp that led to a forested hill. Every year at Christmas, we'd grab a saw and head up into the woods across the street and cut down the biggest tree we could find. Totally barbaric in hindsight, but being that we were little, the biggest one was probably not all that big... Well, except the time we needed a sixteen foot ladder to put the star on top...

But I digress.

Christmases were always filled with anticipation. We always got crap gifts and had a crap time, but every year, it was the same: we expected a "Griswold Family Christmas", even though, not only was our family way too bitter, judgmental and greedy to ever actually be a postcard family, but the postcard we were wishing for was equally dysfunctional.

Anyway, that feeling we anticipated that never came was home. Our family was such a mess and somehow, I guess the three of us just expected everything to stop for that one day so we could just be that kind of family that sits beside the fire and eats Christmas desserts and laughs about memories. Instead, it would end up in fearful slavery, trying to put our best fake family face on in hopes we wouldn't set off my dad's temper later. Instead of having the family Christmas, we had to work like crazy to give off the illusion of having one.

But every year, as Christmas got closer, my brothers and I would find ourselves hoping for the same thing again.

And no, Christmas wasn't about Jesus. We didn't believe in God, so Christmas was just about this one thing, this feeling of home thing.

Page 92 of Tim Keller's "The Prodigal God" describes exactly that:

The memory of home seems to be evoked by certain sights, sounds and even smells. But they can only arouse a desire they can't fulfill. Many of the people in my church have shared with me how disappointing Christmas and Thanksgiving are to them. They prepare for holidays hoping that, finally, this year, the gathering of family at that important place will deliver the experience of warmth, joy, comfort, and love that they want from it. But these events almost always fail, crushed under the weight of our impossible expectations.

There is a German word that gets at this concept- the word Sehnsucht. Dictionaries will tell you that there is no simple English synonym. It denotes profound homesickness or longing, but with transcendent overtones.

(I hope I don't get into trouble for such a long quote... You should read the book. It's little and full of awesome, so there's no excuse not to... Just sayin'.)

He goes on to quote C.S. Lewis who says that this homesickness is "no mere neurotic fancy, but the truest index of our real situation."

Tim Keller then asks, "Why would 'home' be so powerful and yet so elusive for us?"

Biblically, our home was the Garden of Eden. We were meant to be home with God. We were meant to live with Him. But we chose independence over God and somehow find ourselves coincidentally with this constant longing for home.

You grow up in a house and sometimes you get whiffs of home but as you grow older and experience the world more, the strongest memories of home can never be met in the present. You can go back to that childhood dwelling, but somehow, it's different. Somehow, it really doesn't live up to your expectations.

The town I grew up in was a resort town, and within five years of us moving out of there and into the city, the town boomed. Three shopping malls sprouted and endless condo developments scattered the once forested landscape. A few years ago, I brought my ex there to show him where I grew up and after taking the road I'd biked my entire childhood, everything had become so different that I thought I'd taken a wrong turn. Housing developments were everywhere. When I was young, there were a few houses here and there, and the rest of the road was lined with trees, but this road was the opposite. I felt like I had never been there before.

The house my parents built is now a different color. They replaced the wooden exterior with vinyl siding. They rearranged the landscaping that my dad had done by hand. To flatten out the lawn, he used to make us sit on a metal ladder and drag the ladder across the lawn like a workhorse. It was the best ride ever. :D Now, it's a massive, paved driveway.

But no matter how clear the memories are, that home is unattainable. And in the moment, those moments I now look upon with a nostalgic feeling of home, it wasn't actually there either.

Every time I went to Banff, it was the closest I'd ever come to feeling at home in the present. The moon bluing the snow on the mountains. The overwhelming wildlife. The turquoise lakes. Nature at its most awesome. That felt like home to me.

Why is that home and the place where I grew up not?

If Tim Keller and C.S. Lewis are right, and God is our home, then it makes sense that wherever we're closest to the infinite and closest to real unconditional love and closest to a united soul, we will be closest to home. In the awe of nature, the love of family and the bonding that we expect to occur at Christmas, we are as close to home as we can get here on earth. But we just can't get there entirely.

I find it funny that after all these years of feeling this longing of home at Christmas, never once did it occur to me that maybe there was a deeper reason for it. Maybe our soul feels something around Christmas time that we feel the need to explain away in human terms. Maybe our soul knows something we don't. Maybe our soul is trying to say something.

And maybe if we start to listen, we might feel closer to home a little more often.