All Sickness Is Homesickness

Epiphany 4B Healing

“All sickness is homesickness,” writes Dianne Connelly in her book of the same name. All healing, then, is homecoming: coming home to a place where one can simply Be one’s true self. Where Being, not wanting, having and doing, is the essence of a spiritual life.

 

Jesus showed his power, his care and his love by healing people of all ages and stations of life from physical, mental, and spiritual ailments. He crossed all social divisions to bring them home to God, to others and to themselves. In Mark 1:21-28, we witness the first episode of Jesus healing someone, this time in a synagogue in Capernaum, which sits above and nearby the Sea of Galilee. We are told that Jesus is teaching “as one who has authority, and not as the scribes.” The scribes are those who spend their lives with the texts inscribing Torah scrolls, thus considered authorities on the texts. Jesus demonstrates even more authority when suddenly, a man with an ‘unclean spirit’ appears.  The unclean spirit recognizes exactly who Jesus is: the Holy One of God. This strikes us as odd. Yet, repeatedly throughout the Gospel of Mark, demons and unclean spirits recognize Jesus while his closest companions constantly are asking, “Who is this guy?”

 

Jesus silences the unclean spirit, the man convulses, and the unclean spirit leaves. People are amazed and Jesus’s reputation spreads. If all sickness is homesickness, then we can say that Jesus brought the man in the synagogue home – home to his real and authentic self.

 

Later Pharisees, also scholars of the texts, and willing to offer broad and even liberal interpretations of the texts and believed in the resurrection of the dead, will challenge Jesus’s authority over and over again. Also the Sadducees and Priests in Jerusalem, who were the conservative aristocracy who controlled the religious, political and economic life of the Temple, and did not believe in the resurrection of the dead – which is why they were sad, you see. There were Essenes who were into ultra-purification and fasting as a way to usher in the Messiah to rid Israel of the Roman Occupation, and Zealots, country militias, who resorted to insurgent military attacks to drive the dominant Romans out of the Land of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. Lastly, the largest class of people were the am ha’aretz, “the people of the land: tenant farmers, fishermen, servants and slaves, as well as people with mental, physical and spiritual ailments which prevented them from full participation in the social and religious life of their people – rendering many to be homeless beggars outside the gates of cities and towns. Such individuals were said to be “bound,” and were waiting to be freed or “loosed.” All these social divisions existed under a brutal military occupation which made Israel no longer feel like home.

 

One might say the fundamental illness throughout Israel at the time of Jesus was dislocation: God’s people were no longer at home. In the past they had been slaves in Egypt and in Exile in Babylon and were literally not at home. But now Rome, like all totalitarian empires, had transformed their home to be no longer recognizable. There was a sickness in the land.

 

We tend to lose sight of what lies at the heart of physical, mental, spiritual dis-ease, and all social division. In Advent, 1936, the British scholar of Christian Spirituality, Evelyn Underhill offered this insight: “We mostly spend [our] lives conjugating three verbs: to Want, to Have, to Do. Craving, Clutching and fussing, on the material, political, social, emotional, intellectual - even on the religious – plane, we are kept in perpetual unrest: forgetting that none of these verbs have any ultimate significance, except so far as they are transcended by, and included in, the fundamental verb, to Be: and that Being, not wanting, having and doing, is the essence of a spiritual life.” [The Spiritual Life, Harper&Row; 1936 – p. 20]

 

My mentor and friend, N. Gordon Cosby of the Church of the Saviour in in Washington, DC, would often remind us, “Being must always precede doing.” That is, we must be at home with ourselves, our true authentic selves God creates us to Be before taking action. As Underhill recognized, there is much to distract us from Being our true self. The German philosopher, Martin Heidegger often referred to the proliferation of television antennas on the rooftops of his hometown as inviting strangers into our living rooms so that home was no longer home. Today, the Tech-Revolution has many of us carrying around mini pocket computers with which we communicate, watch movies, listen to music, get alerts of breaking news (a curious phrase - news that often breaks our hearts and grieves our souls). We allow our minds to be filled with all manner of, yes, information, but also yes, all kinds of false narratives, misinformation and propaganda while the devices track our every move, every keystroke, and provide a sort of commercial bio-feedback consisting of a tsunami of the product offerings literally of our dreams and aspirations. We are no longer at home. We are kept in perpetual unrest. We are exhausted, which itself is a kind of dis-ease. We can no longer find the time and space to simply Be. Yet, Being, not doing and not going down the rabbit hole of tech-civilization, is the essence of the Spiritual Life, which in the end is Real Life, Authentic Life. My Life and Your Life.

 

The African Bishop, Augustine of Hippo, who had led a rather self-absorbed and dissolute younger life, in his Confessions writes, “You have made us for yourself, O Lord, and our hearts are restless until they rest in You.” This is where Underhill, Cosby, Dianne Connelly, Augustine, and yes, Jesus, know is where our true home lies: Resting, abiding, in the arms of God’s Eternal and boundless Love. “God is merciful and gracious, and abounding in steadfast love,” insist the texts of the Old Testament Hebrew scriptures from beginning to end!

 

Dianne Connelly writes, “Home is the place from which I have come and to which I return. Home is where I always am…All sickness is home sickness. All healing is homecoming … Homesickness is a yearning to be home in one’s self. It is not a private matter. One’s self includes others. The work…of any healing art, is to open a conversation for being well, that is, being at home. Healing, wholing, transformation is a public matter.” [ Dianne Connelly, All Sickness is Home Sickness, pp 25&49] This is the very conversation Jesus conducts in the very public setting of a synagogue service: You, unclean spirit, come out of him. You, beloved of God, come home, back where you belong. You are free, no longer bound. Come home.

 

The man is now able once again to participate in synagogue life, in home life, in community life, and leave the dislocation that has caused him to be alienated and alone. We all want to come home again. As the Gospels bear witness, this homecoming is different for every one Jesus heals, for every one of us. Jesus calls across all lines of social division to come home to God, to be at home with others, and most of all, to Be at home with and in one’s self. That is what these healing stories are all about – homecoming. The Holy Spirit awaits with arms wide open to welcome us back to our true selves so that we can live with other true selves, escape the restlessness of all unclean spirits, and to be free from all that binds us, free to come home once again and just Be. This is the essence of the Spiritual Life. This is the healing we all need after a year-long pandemic and decades of social division throughout the land. Amen. It is so. It is truth.