The Island We Cannot Go Back To

The parcel went in a probate that took nine years and involved eleven people, four of whom he has never met, and at the end of it a company from somewhere else owns the ground his great grandmother is buried near.

He was not the one who sold it. That is important and it is also useless. There was no moment where anybody in his family sat down and decided. There was a tax bill, and a lawyer, and a cousin who needed the money and was entitled to it, and a process that ground for the better part of a decade, and then a letter.

He lives about two thousand miles from there now. He has lived there for eleven years, in a two bedroom apartment, and his kids have accents he does not have.

And here is the thing that happens, and it has happened perhaps forty times.

Somebody at work or at church, meaning it kindly, hears the story and says: home is where the heart is. Or: you carry it with you. Or, the one that undoes him for reasons he cannot explain, that his real inheritance is his family and not a piece of dirt.

Every one of those is designed to make the ground optional.

And the ground is not optional. That is the entire problem. His great grandmother is buried near that ground. He learned to fish off that ground. There is a specific rock that his father used to sit on that he could find in the dark.

And there is no version of this where his kids stand on it.

He has stopped telling people, mostly. When it comes up he says it is complicated and changes the subject, and then he goes home and sits in the kitchen and does not turn the light on for a while.

If that is a kitchen anybody is sitting in, stay right here. There is a psalm written by people in exactly this position and it asks a question nobody has ever answered.

How shall we sing in a strange land

Here it is. It is a question, and Scripture leaves it as one.

How shall we sing the LORD's song in a strange land?Psalm 137:4

That is a whole community, sitting by a river, a long way from ground they cannot get back to, being asked cheerfully by the people around them for a song from home.

And they hang the instruments in the trees.

That psalm is in the songbook. It is not a psalm about faithlessness. It is a psalm about what happens to a people whose place has been taken, and it is preserved with the question wide open, and God never answers it in the text.

You are inside a grief Scripture has a whole psalm for, and you were never sentimental for grieving ground. Psalm 137:4 is the written word taking a lost place seriously enough to build a song around it, and the Holy Spirit is the one who kept that question in the book without answering it.

And notice what is missing from that psalm, because it is the thing everybody at work keeps handing you. Nobody in Psalm 137 says home is where the heart is. Nobody says they carry it with them. Nobody suggests that the real Jerusalem is a spiritual condition available anywhere.

They say: if I forget thee, let my right hand forget her cunning. Which is the opposite. It is a vow to keep remembering a place.

You have Scripture's own permission to keep the ground in your mouth, and you were never obliged to convert a place into a feeling. Psalm 137:5 has a man swearing an oath to remember a location, and the Spirit of God does not require a man to spiritualize dirt in order to be comforted.

Why people want the ground to be optional

Now let me protect those forty people, because they meant it and you will meet them again on Monday.

Home is where the heart is is a phrase that works for a certain kind of loss and does not work for this one. It works when somebody has moved and is homesick and is going to be fine. It is a phrase for a temporary condition.

And when a person hears about a permanent one, they reach for the nearest phrase they own, and this is the one that comes.

There is something else underneath it too, and it is worth naming without accusing anybody. Most people have never had a place taken from them, so they have no category for it, and what they can hear in your story is only the sentiment and not the theft. So they respond to the sentiment.

They are not diminishing you. They are answering the only part of it they can see.

Right now, as you read this, you are heard by one who sees the whole of it, and you were never talking to somebody with no category for what happened. Psalm 137 is a whole psalm about ground rather than about a feeling, and His Spirit has been in that kitchen on every night you have not turned the light on.

What comfort has to be able to do here

Here is the center of it, and it is the reason this site exists.

The land is not coming back. Not through a court and not through a company and not through a generation. There is no version of it, and everybody offering you a phrase is quietly hoping the phrase will do the work that a return would have done.

So the comfort has to be able to arrive here, in a two bedroom apartment two thousand miles away, and be worth something without the ground.

And what Scripture offers is not a substitute place. It is a Person who moves.

That is the pattern from the beginning. He goes down into Egypt with a family. He goes into exile with a people and speaks to them there through Ezekiel, by a river, a long way from the temple. When the building itself is gone, He does not stop being available; He turns up in Babylon.

He does not require you to be standing anywhere in particular.

You are met where you actually live, and you were never made unreachable by two thousand miles. Ezekiel 1:1 has the heavens opened by a river in a foreign country while the temple stood empty, and the Holy Spirit does not need a man to be on the right ground to be beside him.