I’m nearing the last days of my trip to Belgium and Ireland. It’s been a fabulous trip in so many ways. I’ve had the privilege of teaching a bright, energetic group of students who are great people to hang out with as well as to teach. I’ve seen the pretty cities of Belgium, with their Medieval centers and cosmopolitan flair, taken train detours through the Flemish countryside, and enjoyed some wonderful Belgian restaurants, Trappist beers, and chocolates. During a lovely visit from my lovely wife, I imbibed Dublin, with its curious mix of the old, new, fresh and gritty, walked the paths of 9th Century monks at Glendalough, breathed the green air of the Wicklow mountains, stuck my head out over the edge of an ancient Celtic fort on the Aran Islands, and heard traditional jigs and slides played on the accordian, tin whistle and ulliean pipes among the locals at Taffee’s pub in Galway. I fly fished in the old “lough” style on a lake with twenty mile an hour winds and three-foot waves. I toured the Burren, driving through sandstone-strewn mountains pocked with emerald meadows, standing alone in a Celtic ring fort and listening to the cattle bellow outside, much as the fort’s inhabitant’s must have done fifteen hundred years ago. I played some amazing golf courses carved from Irish stone and turf, drove through country lanes while shifting with my left hand, rooted for Cork in the hurling matches, and made new friends among faculty colleagues from the U.S., Ireland, and Belgium. I’m so glad I took this trip. And yet, I can’t wait to get home.
Late this afternoon, while munching a local goat-meat burger and sipping through the creamy head of a pint of Guiness in a pub sitting in an empty valley in the Burren, my eye was drawn to the line of an old stone wall extending from the valley over the peak of the hillside and into the misty distance. That fence somehow struck me as a metaphor for Ireland, history and life. It appeared at rest, yet worn from years of battles with wind and rain. Probably it had seen harder times — the potato famines, Ireland’s struggle for Independence — and now it enjoyed some peace during this period of prosperity. At the hilltop, it disappeared into what seemed, from my vantage point, to be an impossibly distant future.
So here I am, like that stone wall, in something of a restful valley for a few more days. But at the same time I long to get up over the hillside. I’ve missed my children so much during this month I’ve been away that I could cry just thinking about them. I can’t wait to scoop them up in my arms, kiss their cheeks, smell their hair, be their dad again. I can’t wait to sit on the deck with my wife during the langorous New Jersey summer nights. Here in Ireland, I have arrived at a place where I belong for a time, but I have yet to arrive home.
And this in turn is a metaphor for the spiritual life. Here and now there are things to experience and enjoy, work to do, crosses to carry, places to belong. But “home” is yet to come. The touch of His hand, the warmth of His breath, the joy of His embrace await another day. I’m there, but not there yet.