Returning Home

As green fields stream past dotted with stone structures, sheep, and the occasional grazing, brilliantly white horse, I feel the strangest sense about returning to this land, stronger than I’ve ever felt here before. Home. The word seems to ring in my brain. I have actually missed this place, with its little quirks and characteristic oddities. How even exasperated words are said with a somewhat polite tenor. The perpetual greenness of the landscape. The comfortably muted atmosphere in Dublin or Cork or Galway, never intoxicating enough to allow you to mistake it for one of the world’s great metropolises, but oddly cathartic and familiar.

I think a new place must not feel like home until you’ve left it once. Perhaps it was partially because Jacqueline, living outside California for the first time, had many times articulated her profound homesickness to me during this past year that the golden beaches and brilliant California sun had achieved a lofty, prolifically romantic estimation in my oft-forgetful heart. Returning to California, though wonderful in many ways, shattered my ideal. Where Ireland had become associated in my mind with pandemic, California took a step further, with mandatory mask-wearing in or outdoors and increased public unrest and polarization. I love the oceanside trails of my hometown and the relatively steep Bay Area trails I’d run up and down over the past ten years, but just as I missed them while running in Galway this past year, I often found myself, these past two months while in California, longing for early morning runs through Barna Woods, where the light reflects mysteriously through the deep green foliage, out to Silverstrand Beach along the Salthill Promenade to the Claddaugh and up beside the Corrib River and its many canals. And as smoke from several California wildfires choked the air, making even running those trails from my childhood through the smog less and less possible, I had longed for a breath of the cool, fresh, wet Galway air.

It is easy to grow pessimistic with regard to our homes in this world. There will always be something to dislike about any given place. In California it may be fire season and the current political climate. In Galway it might be the intense humidity and bitter wind, especially during the winter months. In Ningbo, China it was the pollution and the fact that I stood out so much from everyone else, among other things. Some places are too populous, others not enough. Some are beautiful but droopy and sad, while others are aesthetically ugly but filled with exciting colors and technology and activity that exudes joy and life. But it is not the objective, worldly characteristics that make a place feel like home to me. It is the way a place works into my heart, activating an awareness of something objectively true, but in a way uniquely designed for me. It is why a boy may arrive in a new house and see so many things that upset him and make him want to return to his prior home, while the same boy, arriving in that same house a little older, cannot contain his sense of joy and rightness.

This is how I feel right now. I feel a leap of joy when we zoom past a flock of lambs at pasture, running around each other with healthy, watered grass aplenty, that I would have never felt before. I feel an expectant joy at the thought of cracking an Irish egg tomorrow morning, its yolk so much more intensely yellow than any egg yolk back in California that it’s almost orange. We pull up to a train station midway along our journey from Dublin to Galway; we do not get off because this is not our stop, but I marvel at the beautiful, distinctly Irish cobblestone architecture of the little station as if seeing it for the first time. There’s not much architecture like this in California, or anywhere else I’ve been for that matter. But here, it’s everywhere.

There is nothing wrong with missing home. I think it is one of the most natural emotions a human can feel when venturing out from the place he or she has known for a long time. Last year I missed California quite a lot. But contentment seems to be found somewhere in the intersection of relishing joy and relinquishing fear. It seems to me that the only way I will ever find contentment in a sense of home in this life—of which this little shock of flavor I am currently experiencing on the train to Galway is merely the smallest taste—is if I simultaneously bask in the multifaceted joys made available to me by God himself, and hold it all with a loose grip so that the sorrows of this life and the brokenness of each of my earthly homes will not drag me into despair. I thank God that he is going to redeem all my homes; I do not know when that will be, but I know it’s coming, and until then I will enjoy the good things God has given me in the here and now. Because he has given me very good things. The bad things, the sorrows, are only from him in that he uses them as compost to grow better things. More joy—in fact, the joy that all these joys point to—awaits up the waterfall. But right now I can be content because I know this joy—just a foretaste—is from him.

Returning to Ireland makes me feel many things, not the least of which is an unexpected sense of relief. Everything is smaller, more manageable, than it is in the States right now. It seems easier to handle, like God can use our time here to focus in on certain areas of growth that the busyness and bustle and excitement of life in California would never permit. Perhaps that is part of the reason why, at this moment, this is our home.