Homesick for what exactly ... liminality?

Now the euphoria of yesterday's rugby has passed, it did by bedtime by the way, I got to feeling nostalgic for 'the old country.' The Celtic gloaming is never far away ...

It never helps in times like this to listen to Van Morrison but I go there all the same and join him on a journey back ... i let the melancholia jazz soak in:

When I was a young boy

Back in Orangefield

I used to gaze out

My classroom window and dream

And then go home and listen to Ray sing

I believe to my soul after school,

Oh that love that was within me

You know it carried me through

Well it lifted me up and it filled me

Meditation contemplation too

Chorus:Oh we've got to go back

Got to go back

Got to go back

Got to go back

For the healing

go on with the dreaming.

Well there's people in the street

And the summer's almost here

We've got to go outside in the fresh air

And breathe while it's still clear

Breathe it in all the way down

To your stomach too

And breathe it out with a radiance

into the nightime air

We've got to go back etc. etc...

Got my ticket at the airport

Well I guess I've been marking time

I've been living in another country

That operates along entirely different lines

Keep me away from porter or whiskey

Don't play anything sentimental it'll make me cry

I've got to go back my friend

Is there really any need to ask why

Well, yes Van, there is a reason to ask why ... for me at least, because I never lived in that 'old' place of Gaelic charm or suffering. I was never truly Irish. The middle class Protestant (Northern) Ireland of my youth wasn't the sort of thing to get overly reflective about, neither was the 'schizophrenic' feelings of being British and Irish at the same time, but knowing that neither Britain or Ireland count you as being wholly theirs ( even when you own two passports!)

So even though the rugby pulled from either side of the border it was hardly at the heart of Gaelic identity. At the time of the Anglo Irish Agreement I remember the reaction to a Protestant like me going to play in Irish Youth Orchestra based in Dublin. 'Why would you want to play in and for a foreign country?, I was asked, a less than slightly well veiled threat shimmering beneath the Loyalist question. Cross the border and it changed to 'Do you not have a British Orchestra to be playing in?

This was my induction into liminal living ... exilic living if you like

learning to be homesick for a place you've never really been to

and yet there is that unmistakable longing for somewhere else ...

It is not bad preparation for Christian discipleship.

I often speak of church 'as a colony of heaven on the earth' ... a good translation I think of Phil 3:20 We inhabit this world and live in it fully ... but we live be other rules ... our citizenship is elsewhere ... we are 'resident aliens'

The Powers that Be are not our masters

We belong to a kingdom of heaven which we have seen glimpses of ... but in many ways we've never fully belonged ... our membership has always been in part compromised ... even if we have been always truly welcomed and though our identity is rooted there and our inheritance there is assured.

I'm reminded of CS Lewis' words:

'The books or the music in which we thought the beauty was located will betray us if we trust to them; it was not in them, it only came through them, and what came through them was longing ... if they are mistaken for the thing itself, they turn into dumb idols, breaking the hearts of their worshippers. For they are not the thing itself; they are only the scent of a flower we have not found, the echo of a tune we have not heard, news from a country we have never yet visited … Heaven is, by definition, outside our experience, but all intelligible descriptions must be of things within our experience.

This is at the heart of Christian discipleship for me

All I need to do now is 'stay away from the porter and strong whiskey!