Our Earthly Tents

Since leaving my parent’s home at the age of 21, I estimate that I have lived in over 15 houses in the past 34 years. To describe my existence as peripatetic is an understatement. In the monastic world I would probably be classified as a gyrovague, who St Benedict classified in his Holy Rule among the most detestable of all monks. As monks, gyrovagues spend their entire lives drifting from region to region, monastery to monastery, always on the move, never settling down, and are slaves to their own wills and gross appetites. Benedict thought it was better to keep silent about them rather than to speak of their disgraceful way of life. And yet he could not help himself and wrote about them in his Rule anyway! I will let others be the judge whether I ought to be considered a gyrovague, but it is nonetheless true that I have been on the move for much of my life and found it difficult to settle down into one place.

This made me think about what it means to have home in one’s life, as I have claimed over the years many places as my home. Certainly, to have a home is not just to have a house. A home is a place where we feel we belong; a place where we offer hospitality, and share our love with one another. But in spite of all the buildings we put up and roots we put down, it is true to say that here on earth we really do not have a permanent and lasting home. Therefore, in some sense, perhaps we could all be labelled gyrovagues. All we have in reality, as St Paul says, is a kind of tent (2 Corinthians 5:1). And when it is our time to depart this world, that tent will be folded up!

In John’s Gospel, during the Last Supper, Jesus began to talk to his apostles about the fact that he was leaving them. On hearing this, they were plunged into sorrow. But he consoled them with these words, which are probably some of the most beautiful in the Gospels, and are often used at Christian Funeral Services for obvious reasons:

Do not let your hearts be troubled. Believe in God: believe also in me. In my Father’s house there are many dwelling-places.  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, so that where I am, there you may be also’ (14:1-3).

This is certainly good news, because when it is time to fold up our earthly tents, we have an eternal home to go to, namely, the Father’s house.

Sister Joan Chittister, OSB, reflects in her writings that: ‘The search for God is a very intimate enterprise. It is at the core of every longing in the human heart. It is the search for ultimate love, for total belonging, for the meaningful life.’  We spend our whole lives searching for God, for that is our Christian journey and calling. And yet to die is, in the end, to find God, to meet God, and to see God.