I’ve been thoroughly neglectful. Two months since my last “real” blog? Geesh. Armed with new inspiration, we’ll set out with high hopes tempered by realistic expectations.
Sharpie markers and Ziploc bags.
Ziplocs.
I’ve been living in Uganda for 9ish months now and the other day I realized I’m still living out of Ziploc bags. Yes, rather sheepishly, I admit that large plastic, satisfyingly zipper-able bags are still home to my socks, underwear, scarves, hats, etc. It made me feel nostalgically rootless, transient.
A person who is home has his spaces; her places where things belong. I call Uganda my home right now, but little reminders like these make me feel the pull of a different home. Is it the US I’m missing? Possibly, but even there, while the memories of home, family and comfort are strong, I no longer have a place called mine. Still…this want to no longer be in transition, to be settled, to be home.
C.S. Lewis talks of “spiritual homesickness” in his sermon “The Weight of Glory:”
“Our commonest expedient is to call it beauty and behave as if that had settled the matter. Wordworth’s expedient was to identify it with certain moments in his own past. But all this is a cheat. If Wordsworth had gone back to those moments in the past, he would not have found the thing itself, but only the reminder of it; what he remembered would turn out to be itself a remembering. The books or the music in which we thought the beauty was located will betray us if we trust to them; it was not in them, it only came through them, and what came through them was longing. These things – the beauty, the memory of our own past – are good images of what we really desire; but if they are mistaken for the thing itself they turn into dumb idols, breaking the hearts of their worshippers. For they are not the thing itself…Now we wake to find…[w]e have been mere spectators. Beauty has smiled, but not to welcome us; her face was turned in our direction, but not to see us. We have not been accepted, welcomed, or taken in…
Our life-long nostalgia, our longing to be reunited with something in the universe from which we feel cut off, to be on the inside of some door which we have always seen from the outside is no mere neurotic fancy, but the truest index of our real situation.”
Last week I visited a family of one of our Hope Alive! kids, one of our smaller girls, still in grade school. We sat and talked with her mother, “Mama Gloria,” inside their shanty one-room house. Mama Gloria is a single mother of two children and she lives in a rented house with her family. The barrack-like buildings in her neighborhood all look the same – run-down cement block-housing divided into one-room residences that were built in the 1940’s by the British. Now, the Ugandan government has sent out an eviction notice to the thousands of people living in this area – they must be out in 6 months, uncompensated. An up-scale housing project is planned for the place Mama Gloria currently calls home.
Mama Gloria’s English is excellent and her speech is very succinct. Her determination to care for her family is fierce. She has tried, in the past, to complete catering school, she took a tailoring course, and she is currently enrolled in a nursing research course. Each the time money runs out before completion. She is currently jobless but gets odd jobs, like doing laundry for a nearby school, to provide food for her family. While we talk she makes a medicinal herbal tea for one of her children because she can’t afford medicine from the pharmacy. She smiles and seems to come alive though when she tells us about her love for singing and her long history of singing in the church choir. She glows with pride as she tells us that her children follow in her musical footsteps – her daughter loves to sing and her son is talented at the drums.
When we ask to pray for her, her request is simple: that God would help them find a place since they are being “chased” from their home.
This ache for permanence resonates in so many stories I hear about Africa and its people. Last night I watched a documentary film called “War Dance,” which chronicles the heartbreaking stories of several children of the Northern Uganda Acholi tribe, which was painfully displaced by rebel war in their own country. Their hurt is layered so deep I cannot understand it. As one young teen-aged girl in the film told her story, her words about home grabbed me – she was homesick for the time when her village homeland was beautiful, when her family was still alive and lived in normalcy.
I’ve watched many documentaries before, but it was so different to see these stark images and hear these shattered stories because now I live in their country and their people are my friends. The film was made only 5 years ago and at that time thousands of people lived in crowded huts of IDP (Internally Displaced Person) camps – a space which traditionally would be the land for just 5 families. A couple of the children in the film had the chance to visit the places that used to be home; but their visit was only met with grief because their once happy past had been torn in a way that would not be mended.
We all feel this, I think, probably much less tragically than these smallest victims of war, but it’s common to humanity – this longing for what cannot be again, your once-upon-a-time home…..Because in the time you were away you changed, and home can never be the same again because you are not the same.
But it continues to disturb us, nag at us, sometimes even rage…this longing for permanence.
Sharpies.
I love writing with sharpie markers. There is something so satisfying about making a bold mark that can’t be erased. It’s like saying, “There! Try to forget that now!” There is nothing shy or dithering about a sharpie marker.
So within me is this undeniable purposeful longing for home matched with a seeming impossibility that I will ever find that essence I seek. As if I’m marked and made for it.
"Behold, the days are coming, declares the LORD, when I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel and the house of Judah, not like the covenant that I made with their fathers on the day when I took them by the hand to bring them out of the land of Egypt, my covenant that they broke, though I was their husband, declares the LORD. But this is the covenant that I will make with the house of Israel after those days, declares the LORD: I will put my law within them, and I will write it on their hearts. And I will be their God, and they shall be my people. And no longer shall each one teach his neighbor and each his brother, saying, 'Know the LORD, for they shall all know me, from the least of them to the greatest, declares the LORD. For I will forgive their iniquity, and I will remember their sin no more." Jeremiah 31:31-34
“Can a woman forget her nursing child, and not have compassion on the son of her womb? Surely they may forget, yet I will not forget you. See, I have inscribed you on the palms of my hands.” Isaiah 49:16
“For this is the covenant that I will make with the house of Israel after those days, says the Lord: I will put My laws in their mind and write them on their hearts; and I will be their God, and they shall be My people.” Hebrews 8:10
“All these people were still living by faith when they died. They did not receive the things promised; they only saw them and welcomed them from a distance. And they admitted that they were aliens and strangers on earth. People who say such things show that they are looking for a country of their own. If they had been thinking of the country they had left, they would have had opportunity to return. Instead, they were longing for a better country—a heavenly one. Therefore God is not ashamed to be called their God, for he has prepared a city for them.” Hebrews 11:13-17
Indelibly, ineradicably, enduringly marked on my heart by my Creator for a home to come. A seal so permanent that I would never be able to erase it, to pencil-in an earthly address. So as I desperately try to fill this vacancy with people, experiences, things, and emotions, it will never satisfy as home and is just about as sustainable as living permanently out of Ziploc bags.
"This constant struggle, The pulling, pushing, paining, longing; For a homeland that will comfort, For a body that will run, For arms that will faithfully hold, me, my heart, its desires and fearful tears.
This struggle you entered, The fray of human life, pushed, pulled To the breaking of a thread. For a homeland you promised, For a body reclaimed, For arms covenanted to redeem, You, Your heart, finished my emptiness, Wiped away my last battle."
Link to the film "War Dance" on iTunes:
http://itunes.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewMovie?id=279374554&s=143441
