Why feeling homesick for heaven isn't a sign of madness

Sometimes I feel lost. Not so much waking up on the wrong side of the bed, but on the wrong side of eternity. I feel, to borrow from John Moreland, “homesick for a home I’ve never had”.

The Welsh have a word for that. Of course they do – they’re the only people who can make a shopping list sound like a hymn, lifting the most mundane mix of words into melodies that attract cherubim. I think the muses were born from the springs of Welsh valleys. 

Anyway, the word is hiraeth. It means ‘homesickness’, but it’s more than that. It speaks to an ache for something both familiar and estranged – something, someone or someplace that perhaps never even existed. You know exactly what I mean.

Sometimes I feel like that.

It’s worth remembering, on those Tuesday mornings when dread shows up in your cereal, that God “has put eternity in [our] hearts”, as the beat poet of Ecclesiastes once said (3:11, NKJV). That’s both good and terrible news.

The good news? You’re not mad. And you’re not just made of matter. You have an appetite that would remain unfulfilled even if you lived as long as my nana, who made it to 104 years old. No one says it better than CS Lewis: “If we find ourselves with a desire that nothing in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that we were made for another world.”

Maybe I’m no different from the guy in my local park who cries out with all kinds of claims and hallucinations. But I’m convinced that the gnawing and nagging of a soul made with eternity in mind – wrapped in a body that grows weaker every day – is something worth considering.

Perhaps that’s part of the work we’re here to do: pulling memories of our eternal home into this wilderness of exile. Perhaps we should try, as my friend Jon White says, to “remember the future”. 

Maybe we should plant gardens in Babylon until the streets start to remind us of the Eden we’ve heard about in scripture and in lore. Perhaps beauty really can save the world.

Perhaps longing is what leads us to live more fully – because with every passing day, our appetite grows. Every good thing – the arms of your beloved, the ramen broth, the gassy smile from your baby, the hard work that pays off – it’s all a foretaste, a reminder of home.

Sometimes I feel lost, but that doesn’t mean that I am lost.

And I think the same is true of you.