MARGINALIA

BEFRIENDING
THE HOMEBODY WITHIN

Valerie Weaver-Zercher

“Like Magellan, let us find our islands / To die in, far from home, from anywhere / Familiar. Let us risk the wildest places, / Lest we go down in comfort, and despair.” —Mary Oliver, “Magellan”

A winter storm is blowing in from the south this Saturday morning; five to eight inches of snow are predicted for our river valley before evening. So rather than risk getting stranded, my husband and I have scuttled weekend plans to drive three hours to a cabin with friends. We’re hunkering down at home instead, watching and waiting for the seed of the storm to break apart in the sky above us.

Which suits me better, actually. In recent years I’ve been discovering what a homebody I am, content in the evenings to read and knit and go to bed early. My homebody-ness reveals itself especially during the winter, when the days are short and going out after dark seems against all instinct.

The ironic thing is that I’m also a frequent victim of Wanderlust, that restlessness that roils up inside me now and then and makes any place on earth look more attractive than Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. I remember explaining it in this way to a friend, the summer after I graduated from college, right before I moved to Germany for a year: “My eyes just feel like they want to see new landscape—so much so that they almost hurt.”

So I followed my smarting eyes and the Wandering Me, moved to Germany, then promptly became the most homesick I’ve ever been. Harvesting apples in an orchard, I had fantasies of falling off of the apple-picking slide and breaking my leg, so I had to be flown home. Not bad enough to be permanently afflicted with a weak knee or storm-sensing stiffness, of course—just bad enough to provide me with a dignity-salvaging, one-way ticket home.

When I recalled the pain of a broken arm during my third-grade year, however, my fantasy morphed into this: admitting to the exchange program organizers that I was a seven-year-old masquerading as a young adult, so couldn’t someone please call my mother to pick me up from this nightmarishly long international slumber party.

Thankfully, by November or so, the Wanderer in me must have slugged or drugged or otherwise incapacitated the Homebody. In fact, I became so enamored of German farm life and my host families and hopping on and off trains to neighboring countries that my fantasies sometimes actually turned to staying in Europe for longer than my allotted year.

Granted, this shift makes me sound rather schizophrenic, but I imagine it will sound familiar to anyone else whose insides have become the battleground for the Wanderer and Homebody. Neither likes to be bested, and they both refuse to leave, so they usually end up just taking turns on who gets to be King of the Mountain.

So today, when Homebody smirks from the top of the heap and transforms staying-home-in-a-snowstorm into a grand emblematic gesture, Mary Oliver’s poem irks me. Why must the familiar signify complacency, even death? Who says Magellan’s journeying was more noble than his wife’s (if he had one) staying home to take care of the kids? Does travel—whether by sea or by soul—always lead to growth and comfort to despair?

I’m reminded of a recent conversation with a friend. She shared her anxiety about her pastor’s recurrent sermon themes of spiritual growth as linear journey and striving for God’s will as the primary purpose of the Christian. “I feel guilty about feeling content with the amount of God I have in my life,” my friend said. “Maybe I should want more.”

I found myself getting frustrated with her pastor. He’s not saying anything radical, certainly; the image of faith as journey appears in everything from Exodus to Jesus’ words to Pilgrim’s Progress to J. R. R. Tolkien’s trilogy. And who would deny the importance of discipline and challenge and forward movement? If I didn’t shove myself into new, uncomfortable situations every couple of years, be they physical or spiritual risks, I’m not sure I’d like who I would become. The Wanderer within remains alive and well.

The pure spirituality-as-journey motif, however, risks turning faith into one more thing I need to achieve, one more goal for which I must strive. For us North Americans who have imbibed a strong cocktail of pioneering and Protestant work ethic, that certainly makes sense. Travel one more day, reach the river; work a couple more overtime hours, get out of debt; pray a little longer, feel God’s presence; love your neighbor a little more, reach heaven.

When the spiritual journey relies on method, willpower, and a drive for success, it becomes addiction, psychiatrist and spiritual director Gerald May points out in The Awakened Heart. He writes of the ten years he spent “trying . . . desperately to create my own experience of God.” Eventually May learned the truth of the words of Brother Lawrence in the sixteenth century, who wrote, “Having found different methods and practices to attain the spiritual life in several books, I decided that they would serve more to hinder than to help me in what I was seeking.”

So having learned that “resolutions and grasping are not good ways to go about receiving a gift,” May began to view the spiritual life as a series of “homecomings”—to the present moment, to one’s desire for love, and ultimately, to God. Rather than chiding ourselves for not covering miles on our spiritual paths, May encourages us to celebrate the short and often infrequent times during the day when we are aware of God’s presence with us: “Each noticing points us homeward,” he writes simply.

In May’s framework, spiritual journey becomes following my desires for love and safety and comfort rather than exercising an Olympian will. Spirituality means letting myself feel the intensity of my homesickness, much as I did in that German apple orchard, and allowing those desires for love and security lead me straight to the heart of God. Right now, the good news for me is that faith is a homecoming as much as a sallying-forth, a burrowing-in as much as a venturing-out. The good news, as May writes, is that “God, who is our true home, knows right where we are.”

It’s in the spirit of this homecoming that Mary Oliver writes her poem “Wild Geese.” After the harsh challenge of “Magellan,” I am especially grateful for her words, which echo the comfort of Jesus’ words about an easy yoke and light burden. “You do not have to walk on your knees / for a hundred miles through the desert,” Oliver writes. “You only have to let the soft animal of your body / love what it loves.”

So here I sit at dusk, watching the snow slant across the yellow globe of the street light. It is true: At times my body loves most the wandering, the journey, the icy risk of the unknown. Not tonight. Tonight I will stay home.

—Valerie Weaver-Zercher, Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, is the mother of an infant son as well as assistant editor and columnist for DreamSeeker Magazine.