Monday, May 19, 2008

Don't It Make You Want to Go Home?

Our lifelong nostalgia, our longing to be reunited with something in the universe from which we now 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.
~ C.S. Lewis ~

I'm not from around here.

I don't mean Phoenix where I am visiting. I don't even mean the swatch of geography on Blue Planet that I call my home most of the rest of the time.

I am talking about the whole of this orb.

Have you ever felt that way? Apparently, C.S. Lewis did and he got it. This is not who we are.

And here's the part I love about this quote: The longing that I feel is "no mere neurotic fancy." No pathology. The longing is a recognition that we are on the outside of...something.

I want to belong. We all do. It is our nature.

But the fact that I don't feel I belong here isn't just that I don't fit the fads and the fashions and that I don't understand the cultural phenomena of making people "not one of us." It is that I don't belong here.

It is okay that I am here. I can live here and get along, but it is not all there is and my soul knows it. My wanting to go home is not a neurotic notion, but a true longing of my soul.

Thank you, C.S. Somehow, knowing that someone else gets it makes me feel not so alone...not so "other."

See you on the other side of that door, C.S. (By the way, how is it?)

Wanda

[I subscribe to a daily inspiration called Verse and Voice from Sojourners. The opening statement is their quote for today.]

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