Josh Groban sings “mi mancherai” and the richness of this language, my adopted language floats around me like a piece of fine silk. Light and gentle it touches me and yet I feel it deep within me. “mi mancherai” – I miss you Italia.
Idelette has written about “home” where she was born and where she is visiting yet it isn’t home at all now. Anj talks about coming home to freedom.
I was born is a small town in eastern Canada. The place I spent the first 14 years of my life. I remember; there are happy memories and deeply painful ones, but it isn’t home.
Home for the next 28 years was in a city close to the Rocky Mountains. A place of cold winters, incredibly sunny skies, and the most sunshine hours anywhere in Canada. Family are still there and I need to go and visit them again. The etchings on my soul have left wonderful memories and some deep gouges. My Divine Maestro and I are working on those memories and deep gouges to release and redeem them. That place isn’t home.
There was 6 months living in Britain, working in a fishing village on the North Sea. I would never choose to live there because it never wedged it’s way into my heart. There were long vacations in Australia and New Zealand and I wondered if I was destined to live there but it wasn’t so.
Then I went to Italy and she holds a huge part of my heart, but it isn’t home. Jen has a photo on her blog today that so describes how my heart felt in that country of colour, of flavours, of passion and richness and how she seduced me. She speaks a language of love but she also speaks of harshness. Traditions are rich yet at the same time hold freedom hostage. I saw women broken by the men who rigidly hold to those traditions. Yet in that environment I felt freer than I ever had in my life. The woman in me was alive and enjoyed simply “being”. For the first time I let myself “be” who was hidden inside and delighted in the chance to breath so freely. When asked what I was doing I replied, “I am on a sabbatical”! How else can you find a socially acceptable way to say “I am being” to a church culture, and an employment culture that is so highly performance oriented? Never before had watching the world go by held such fascination, or been so energizing! Never before had the colours of life seemed so vibrant, or the music of daily living seemed so unpredictable and so enchanting. Never before had savouring new tastes and textures, along with well known ones been such a sweet occupation. And the language – oh this deeply romantic passionate language has indeed captured me and refuses to leave me. Wild winter storms that destroyed the coastline, where the wind and rain penetrated through my wooden shutters and old window casings. Hot summer days and sultry summer evenings where the dinner began after 10PM were decadent. Where going slow was how one sauntered along with the crowd on clear summer evenings and streets were filled with music, laughter and the ever-present Vespa. She continues to call to my heart, but she, Italia, isn’t home.
Home must be that place where one lives generously (Matthew 5), lives out your God-created identity, where there is no pretending, you live in pure grace and from the center of who you are in Christ (Romans 12), and where placing your life before God as an offering isn’t about losing life – it is about receiving it and the One who gifts it to us.(all quoted from The Message) Home can be anywhere if I know “how” to live. I think my heart is standing at the front gate of home and Abba is waiting for me to walk on in.
As I write that last line I am laughing – I hope He has a great kitchen in this heart home! My heart dances in the kitchen.
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