Sehnsucht: Longing for Home
It was one of these mysterious fairy calls from out of the void that suddenly reached Mole in the darkness, making him tingle through and through with its very familiar appeal, even while yet he could not clearly remember what it was. He stopped dead in his tracks, his nose searching hither and thither in its efforts to recapture the fine filament, the telegraphic current that had so strongly moved him. A moment; and he had caught it again, and with this time came recollection in fullest flood.
Home! That was what they meant, those caressing appeals, those soft touches wafted through the air, those invisible little hands pulling and tugging all one way.
-The Wind in the Willows, Kenneth Grahame
On a quiet, country road in the Shenandoah Valley, my husband and I built a house and raised our 4 kids there. It was a lovely house with gorgeous mountain views and the added benefit of having family next door. But after my husband's father passed away in the fall of 2019, we agreed that it was time to move. The upkeep and the isolation were becoming oppressive.
Our realtor showed us dozens of houses that we tried unsuccessfully to imagine ourselves living in. But I will never forget the day I felt the “invisible little hands pulling and tugging” me irresistibly. I had never heard of the Forest Hills neighborhood, even though it was in the area where I wanted to live. It’s just tucked enough away that you have to know it’s there to find it. I took a right off of a very familiar road and slipped into the neighborhood for the arranged meeting with our realtor. I left the bustling streets of the small city and felt transported into an enchanted wood— a cozy neighborhood of mid-century houses nestled beneath stately trees. They were not grand homes, but they were charming and well-loved. The willow oaks, great whites, and maples canopied the hilltop, while dogwoods, redbuds, and magnolias softened its contours. Charles Dickensian lampposts lined the street and signaled the entrance into an adjacent arboretum.
I stopped my car, wide-eyed, in the middle of the road. Tears welled. I hadn’t even seen the house that was for sale yet, but I found myself saying out loud to God, “You wouldn’t let me live HERE, would you? It’s too wonderful!” Three months later, in a whirlwind of unexpected surprises, God showed us very clearly that he had prepared this house for us as a precious gift. We named it “Mole End” after the beloved hovel from Kenneth Grahame’s The Wind in the Willows. Just as Mole felt, “it was good to think he had this to come back to, this place which was all his own, these things which were so glad to see him again and could always be counted upon for the same simple welcome,” we too had found a worthy home.
One of my favorite ways to help friends is to help them figure out how to turn their house into a home. Sometimes they love their house but don’t feel comfortable in it and don’t know why. I never pursued a career in interior design however because I thought it was overly materialistic and consumeristic. To make money, I reasoned, I would have to help rich people figure out how to spend money on themselves. I could not jive this conception with my desire to spend my life being about Kingdom work. I’ve since come to understand that the artist’s vocation of creating beauty has immense spiritual value and think interior design can be a deeply worthy and fulfilling calling for a Christian. But what I most enjoyed was helping those without much money figure out how to turn what they already had into something cozy, warm, and inviting. I wasn’t going to be able to make a living doing that.
What makes a house a home can be tricky to figure out. Sometimes the issue is too much clutter, bad traffic flow, or poor furniture arrangement. Some houses just lack soul, so to speak, and can’t be brought to life. I have never really been able to put my finger on it, but some places seem to have real personality and warmth apart from any furnishings or decor we bring into it. My current house is one of these. Usually, they are old houses. There are stories in the walls.
Then there’s the people connection. Sure functionality is crucial, but most people just want their space to feel “like them.” They want to feel like their home reflects who they are and that they belong there. The best homes reflect the owners’ creative personality and spirit and thus become almost another character in the scene. When visitors come, they will instantly feel at home there too because everything is in its rightful place and there is a restfulness about it. We might have a perfectly interior-designed home or the most expensive house in the neighborhood, but if it does not feel like a home in this sense, no one wants to stay in it for very long.
The longing for home isn’t always about a house. So many kids choose their college after visiting them rather than by reading statistics and testimonials. How do they choose? Often they choose the one that “feels like home”—not their family home, but home to them. Maybe they see a coffee shop that they can imagine themselves studying in. Or they meet a tour guide they connected with. Isn’t that also often how we choose our churches? Our friends? Our spouses? We want to feel “at home.” We can’t always put our finger on what it is, but we know it when we feel it. Something relaxes in us when we enter it.
What is home? I think in the deepest sense, it is where we can truly rest and be our truest selves. It is a place where we know we belong. It is one of our deepest longings. Rarely do we find it. But we are always looking for it nonetheless. We get glimpses of it and sometimes feel fully immersed in the joy of it. But in my experience at least, there is something about it that is always just out of grasp. An unfulfilled longing.
C.S. Lewis wrote extensively about a longing that haunted his early life. He called it Sehnsucht and attributed the occasional “stabs of Joy” that he experienced to glimpses of a deeper spiritual reality—something that his soul felt even if his mind couldn’t comprehend it. For Lewis, this came when he heard beautiful music, read a beautiful story, looked at far-off hills, or when he delighted in a little garden that his brother made in the lid of a tin (Surprised by Joy, 7). He described it as,
. . . an unsatisfied desire which is itself more desirable than any other satisfaction. I call it JOY, which is here a technical term and must be sharply distinguished both from Happiness and from Pleasure… It might almost equally well be called a particular kind of unhappiness or grief. But then it is a kind we want. I doubt whether anyone who has tasted it would ever if both were in his power, exchange it for all the pleasures in the world. But then JOY is never in our power and pleasure often is. (Surprised by Joy, 16)
That is how I feel every time I return home from being away for extended periods. Sometimes I feel it when I haven’t gone anywhere. The mountains. The trees. The people! The joy is there, alongside a kind of inexplicable grief. Why is that?
Lewis believed that the very existence of his Sehnsucht was evidence that our souls were made for something more than the mere material world. He did not write as much about Sehnsucht after his conversion but did portray the Christian journey creatively in his Narnian chronicle, The Voyage of the Dawn Treader. Reepicheep, the valiant mouse, was compelled by an insatiable longing to endure any hardship and trial to reach his heart’s desire—Aslan’s country. Like mole in the Kenneth Grahame story, he was pulled by a strong, “telegraphic current.”
What if all the longings—for home, for purpose, for beauty, for love—are ultimately pointing us always to our truest home? Even if I sometimes remember to delight in the gifts of a home I love, doing what I’m made to do, with a family I love, surrounded by all the beauty and nature that makes my heart sing when I look out my window, my heart just keeps longing. I have not fully arrived. I am both completely satisfied and achingly discontent. I don’t usually realize that the ache is even there, much less what it signifies. But sometimes it overwhelms me. Augustine famously said, “Thou hast made us for thyself, O Lord, and our heart is restless until it finds its rest in thee.” Maybe that ache is another home calling.
God is a lover who woos. He wants to entice us and invite us to know him and to love him as he loves us. He gives us gifts all the time that we can choose to see or ignore. He delights in seeing the joy on our faces when we recognize the gift for what it is and return like the healed leper to give him thanks! Sometimes his gifts look like pain, and only in retrospect can we see how healing comes through the surgeon's knife. Sometimes the gifts seem so ordinary that unless we are really quiet and still for just a few minutes, we miss them altogether. Sometimes they make us stop in our tracks, mouth agape, and just say, “Wow!” Sometimes, for me especially, when I return from a trip away, my heart overflows with joy at the gift of home.
But the gifts are not the end. They are only part of the invitation. The lover brings us flowers because he wants to delight us, but the real delight is in being with the Lover Himself. The flowers fade to insignificance by comparison. The Lover’s wooing voice sometimes sounds a bit like a fairy call, drawing us irresistibly forward into a new adventure with Him that only we, in our uniqueness, can enjoy. But He’s the true Lover of our soul. And He knows us perfectly. I feel quite sure that Lewis was really onto something when he thought that those moments when we feel that “stab of joy”—that Sehnsucht—we are longing for something that we were made for and that nothing on earth can fully satisfy.
If home is where the heart is, and our heart only finds its rest in God, then we can rest assured that God, our true home, is inviting us to enjoy in Him all that our longings suggest.
