The Displaced Pilgrim: Yearning for Home
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by Jaclyn Hoselton
I held a one-way ticket to Rome.
I was 20 and looking for an adventure when I set out to study abroad in Perugia, Italy. It would be a semester of intensive language class, Italian literature, Italian history, and creative writing. I wanted the quintessential European experience: cobblestone streets, pastries, espresso, accordion street performers, and large cathedrals. I wanted to become bilingual. I wanted a life-changing journey. I set out full of vigor and enthusiasm.
Until I got to the airport.
I had never flown before and the airport was a maze, but I eventually managed to find my gate. As I boarded, the act of leaving everything I’d ever known hit me. My heart raced and my legs felt weak. I hobbled to my seat and thought about home. A nun wearing her religious habit sat next to me. She had similar concerns. On her lap was a Bible and entwined between her fingers was a rosary.
Leaving home was not easy. Living abroad was not much easier. Though I managed to obtain the typical backpacking through Europe experience by traveling to five countries, sleeping in trains and hostels, and getting around by public transportation, I did not learn Italian fluently and gain deep cultural insights. I did not write the next great American novel. Much like Bilbo Baggins, the discomforts of the journey provoked me, and I withdrew towards homely comforts more often than I would like to admit. I’d turn to my English-speaking roommates to binge American sitcoms, or even (gasp!) visit Starbucks. Setting out on a journey is thrilling, but the discomforts of it can cause our longings to fly toward the comforts of home and routine.
Despite this, studying abroad was a powerful experience. Without it, I wouldn’t be living the life I am now.
It was not five years later that I found myself on yet another European journey. I left the diverse beauty of the Golden State for a land strewn with quiet medieval villages, lush forests, and castle ruins. My husband and I moved to Germany with plans to stay for two years max. Yet somehow, over ten years later, we find ourselves raising three bilingual children and renovating a German house.
I am out of place again, and this time, an unintentional immigrant struggling to fit in a culture not my own.
Living cross-culturally changes a person. It touches nearly every aspect of life. Routine chores become a foreign activity to navigate. Cross-cultural living causes a person to make personal adjustments, and eventually these adjustments take root and reshape the person. It’s not smooth sailing, however. Now, when I travel back to the United States, I forget to make eye contact with the person walking opposite me on the sidewalk. I can’t even throw away trash without noticing how much my everyday habits and instincts have changed. Over time, German cultural acclimation has nuanced my understanding of the world and transformed my relationship to what used to be my home.
Yet, no matter how hard I work, I will never be entirely at home in Germany either. People often ask me if I am fluent in German. “Define fluent,” I respond. I’ve done the German language intensive classes. Mastering a language isn’t enough—one must also adapt to foreign social cues, humor, values, and ways of life. I anticipate the German holidays and cultural traditions. I do my best to integrate. But as I work toward cultural acclimation, something feels amiss. This culture is simply not my own. Some instincts are still American, and I struggle with expressing my innermost thoughts in a foreign tongue. This leaves me despairing. I make friends, but I feel a painful gap between souls when I cannot express myself on a deeper level. Time and again I’m reminded: This is not my home.
For as long as I can remember, books about strapping on a backpack and leaving home for a quest have drawn me in, especially J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit. Last year I revisited a few of Tolkien’s stories and was struck by how often his characters reflect on home.
Bilbo was more unhappy even than when the troll had picked him up by his toes. He wished again and again for his nice bright hobbit-hole. Not for the last time.
We are introduced to both Bilbo and his home in the first sentence: “In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit.” By the end of the first paragraph we find the only description of his home we really need: “it was a hobbit-hole, and that means comfort.” Though the story is about a journey, Bilbo’s thoughts constantly return home, as he yearns to leave the discomforts of the quest for the comforting rhythms and routine of Bag End. In fact, Bag End is just about as present as any character in the book.
Far, far away in the West, where things were blue and faint, Bilbo knew there lay his own country of safe and comfortable things, and his little hobbit-hole. He shivered. It was getting bitter cold up here, and the wind came shrill among the rocks.
Bilbo’s displacement and discomfort turns his mind homeward. It is the memory of tea, a fire, and a cozy armchair that follows Bilbo into that dragon cave and back to Bag End.
My own life away from “home” caused me to read these stories with a new perspective. Reading about Bilbo overcoming obstacles while longing for home gives me courage to keep striving in my own state of perpetual foreignness and discomfort. It has taught me to embrace the journey and continue pressing on, even when it’s uncomfortable. Dranbleiben, as the Germans say. We must stick with it. There would be no journey without home. There would be no “there” without the “back again.” If there was no hope of home as an ultimate destination, there would never be a true journey or pilgrimage, but merely an endless wandering. Modern despair is incompatible with the idea of a pilgrimage. Books like The Road by Cormac McCarthy and Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel are journey stories with no fixed home as a destination. But if there is no home at the end of the journey, what is the purpose? For the Christian, journey and home are intertwined. On the pathway, home is the slant of light we walk toward.
I find hope through journey stories that give voice to the sehnsucht heightened by my displacement. In her lecture “Keepers of Lost Moments and Places: Living Homeward in Time,” Amy Baik Lee defines the emotion of sehnsucht as a yearning “for a place we cannot get to, perhaps even a place we’ve never been, which nonetheless pulls at us, like the call of a much loved, long-desired home.” This yearning that both Tolkein and C. S. Lewis’s characters have for home beyond the sea embodies the yearnings felt by the expatriate, sojourner, exile, and refugee, whose longing for home can never be satisfied in this world. In Lewis’s The Last Battle, Jewel the unicorn expresses the final fulfillment of this burning desire. “He stamped his right fore-hoof on the ground and neighed, and then cried: ‘I have come home at last! This is my real country! I belong here. This is the land I have been looking for all my life, though I never knew it till now.” Sehnsucht encapsulates not only the painful yearning, but also the bright hope of this pilgrim journey.
Every time I return to California, I’m welcomed back with the fattened calf.
Cars litter the lawn, a jigsaw puzzle on and off the driveway. I open the door to find enchiladas sizzling in the oven and spice in the air. We feast, gathered around a table that won’t hold everyone, so we spill out onto La-Z-Boys and garden chairs. I’ve returned to one of my homes, where parents, brother, sister-in-law, uncles, aunts, grandparents (now long passed), cousins, nephews, and nieces pause their busy lives to have a meal together. Despite our disconnected lives, we gather because “she’s home, she’s back.”
Is this the difference between home and a hometown? Despite the glowing welcome, I grow restless. My body is used to more movement than the American lifestyle requires. I cannot tolerate certain foods as I used to. My rhythms are off, not in sync with hometown habits. Even here, I feel like a square peg in a round hole. The dissonance is painful. I long to be at home, but I have changed.
The expat experience reflects the Mearcstapa or border-walker life that Makoto Fujimura emphasizes in his book Culture Care. Much like the Mearcstapas who lived in the tribal borderlands, trading news from various tribes, so flies the expat in and out of countries, code-switching and offering cultural knowledge. “Mearcstapa is not a comfortable role,” as Fujimura says. Yet, the discomfort points to the fact that things were not supposed to be fractured. Home on earth is a fragile thing. It is where moth and rust can destroy and thieves can steal. But home can also be fragile due to the human tendency to change from life experiences. Home on earth is a mere shadow; it’s a glimpse through the veil and into glory, as we wait for Christ “the ultimate Mearcstapa” to bring “the light of the good news from the new tribe that is already here and yet to come.”
Living between worlds means that I’m never truly at home in either country. This rootlessness points to a deeper reality about my own Christian identity. The discomfort of feeling out of place in both lands evokes an ineffable longing for a lasting home. In 2 Corinthians, the Apostle Paul (a sojourner himself) describes the Christian’s home on earth as a mere tent—but we have a Home prepared for us.
For we know that if the tent that is our earthly home is destroyed, we have a building from God, a house not made with hands, eternal in the heavens. For in this tent we groan, longing to put on our heavenly dwelling. (2 Cor. 5:1-5 [ESV])
Sehnsucht belongs to the human experience. The pain and hope of the emotion was designed as a compass. As Lewis famously wrote in Mere Christianity, “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.” Sehnsucht proves that we are not wandering aimlessly, but we were created for an Eternal Home. We can expect this restlessness to remain until we are reunited with our Creator, as Augustine of Hippo wrote in his Confessions: “you made us for yourself and our hearts find no peace until they rest in you.”
Together with the first Adam, we were exiled from the garden. But the second Adam journeyed from his home to restore lost sinners to our true Dwelling Place. He said,
In my Father’s house are many rooms. If it were not so, would I have told you that I go to prepare a place for you? And if I go and prepare a place for you, I will come again and will take you to myself, that where I am you may be also. (John 14:2-3)
One day, my own fragmented expat longings will find fulfillment as Christ ushers me to the New Creation and I cry, “This is the land I have been looking for all my life!”
Jaclyn Rios Hoselton is a writer and American expat living in Germany. She has an MA in English literature from Universität Heidelberg. She is a mom of three and serves alongside her husband as members of a local church. She alternates between writing, reading, and bursting outside to run, bike, or garden. You can follow her on Instagram @jaclynsbooks or on Substack at A Sojurner’s Garden.
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Photo by Jordan Madrid on Unsplash
This is a beautiful labour of love Jaclyn. Thank you.
Beautifully written and heart-regenerative piece. You have picked the ripe fruit from many trees and delivered a delectable charcuterie that reminds us of the fantastic feast to come. Thank you!