Homesickness for Alien Places
The Welsh have a word, hiraeth, to denote a homesickness for a place perhaps never was.
There are times when, after coming back from a sojourn overseas, we start pining for it. Sometimes, this pining can be the afterglow of a holiday destination after having to face the imminent return to the office.
At other times, however, this pining stems from something more than a mere reluctance to go back to the drudgery of work. This variant of the experience of mourning for foreign places often takes the form of a kind of homesickness. This experience can be particularly visceral when one has lived in that foreign land, but they even come with respect to places that the person has not even visited.
Regardless of context, these alien lands often stir our hearts, and we may often find ourselves whispering to ourselves that one’s home was not where you are now, but in these foreign lands. For those that go through such an experience, it becomes particularly poignant when that tug of the heart only gets stronger with each passing season.
The experience of homesickness for places other than one’s own can be a theologically rich moment of reflection. At one level, Christians would have to carry this cross of hiraeth. This experience of nostalgia for places we have never been to can be an analogue of a much deeper longing within us, for a native land that is unvisited by us, and even transcends any place we can go to. The Christian’s hiraeth can be a reminder in the Letter to the Hebrews that we “are seeking the city that is to come” (13:14), and that until then, our hearts remain restless until we are restored to that place we have never been to, to borrow the beginning of Augustine’s Confessions. In other words, our experience of longing is but an analogue of a God given-impulse to seek a more heavenly destination.
At the same time, however, precisely because this experience is only an analogy, there can also be a danger that our longing for other places can become an occasion for the operation of vice, particularly of the vice of acedia. As RJ Snell wrote in his Acedia and Its Discontents, this longing for another place can be a vice-ridden restlessness when it becomes a longing for a utopia, and a neglect of where we are now. Those who have lived in the place that they long for may protest that the longing is anything but utopic, but as Michel de Certeau reminds us in his Practice of Everyday Life, our worlds always shift to such an extent that the place we thought was there never really remains. Thus, even when we have had a real contact with that other place, that longing can nonetheless still be the result of the vice of acedia, whispering to us to abandon all we have and where we are, to a place that no longer is.
It may seem that those who harbour these longings are doomed to spend their lives with their dreams never coming true and always at risk of predisposing themselves to vice, and in many respects, that is true. We are however, also given in the Eucharistic Liturgy, a forum with which to reflect upon this longing. We are, in the Eucharistic Liturgy, not only abstractly engaging in a form of prayer, but also gathering a people who are acting upon their longing for a place we have never been – the eschaton. Yet, the vice of acedia is resisted precisely because of the incarnate nature of the Eucharistic Lord, the Body of Christ compels us never to abandon our posts here on earth.
Support Awkward Asian Theologian on Patreon, and help make a change to the theological web.
