Blessed by our homeland roots

Ronald Rolheiser
SEVERAL years ago, when I still taught on a college staff, I had a colleague, a priest, who used to travel nearly 200 miles regularly to visit his invalid mother.
She was 90 years old, almost totally incapacitated, couldn't recognise her son, couldn't speak to him, or make any form of rational contact. Yet her son would regularly visit her, just to sit quietly at her bedside. For him, there was no rational contact, but there was tremendously meaningful contact: "I go and sit by my mother's bed and it steadies me, it centres me in some deep inchoate way. always leave after a visit with a much surer sense of who I am and what I believe in. After sitting with my mother, for a while at least I know who I arnr I experienced something quite similar recently when our extended family gathered for a reunion. On my father's side, we are an extremely large dun and, when we gather for a full reunion every ten years, almost 300 people turn up. But it isn't the chance to see long-lost relatives that makes this a special gathering. For most of us, the place is as important We meet for a weekend at our old parish grounds in a very remote farming region where our grandfather and grandmother and some of our friends and relatives came and homesteaded nearly 100 years ago and where most of us grew up.
Our grandparents were the first persons ever to break the sail there, to build houses there, to raise families there and to build a church there. That church still stands, a very humble stone and cement building, alone among some very lonely hills. It's still worshipped in by the local parish which is made up mainly of relatives. My parents are buried in the church cemetery.
Something happens when we gather there that goes far beyond the simple nostalgia of seeing the old place, reminiscing with relatives you haven't seen for ten years, and visiting your parents' graves. There is a deep experience of coming home, of sitting by the bedside of a silent mother who, while she cannot talk to you, can steady you and help you sort out who you are.
To truly touch your roots is to be nurtured by them, to drink strength from them, and be Oven solid direction from the trunk that they have produced. Like my priest friend's experience with his aged mother, there isn't rational communication, but there is a mystical touch, a dusting off and a branding of what lies deepest in the mind and heart. We know most truly who we are when we are at home.
Anthropologists today tell us that home is as much about a plate as it is about kinship, blood relationship, and family or psychological bonding. To be at home, one needs a place, a homeland (as the Germans say),
Sadly, today, for many of us, there is no longer any sense of home as place, no homeland. In a world of transience, of future shock when organisations, people, knowledge, things, and places, move through our lives at an ever increasing rate where perhaps we have never been able to sink meaningful roots in any one place, it is no arddent that more and more of us find ourselves anything but steady.
Instability, confusion and a deep moral loneliness are born of transience, Where we've not a place to truly identify with, no roots to drink from.
It is no accident that we can sincerely wonder who we really are. From lack of home, we suffer schizophrenia, dislocation, and much loneliness both psychologically and morally. And part of that lack of home has to do with place. Place is also a home, a mother, we need to go back to occasionally.
It is no accident that land can be considered holy and that so many wars have been fought over the Holy Land, that our aboriginal peoples feel so utterly dislocated once they have lost their lands. These things have to do with the loss of home. And home, in this me, means place.
Our old church back home stands on a hill, itself surrounded by miles and miles of desolate prairie hills. Those lonely hills are silent. They don't speak. I looked at them long and hard a few weeks ago standing with some of my family by the graves of my parents. We said some prayers and we felt, from our deceased parents and those silent hills, a strength, a joy, and a steadiness that, for that time at least, took away a lot of moral loneliness.