This summer has been a little bit like a scene from Dante’s walk through the Inferno. In excruciating pain at 3 a.m. in the emergency room, I could feel those words as the poet enters the netherworld: “Abandon hope all ye who enter here.” I’ve never felt that much pain, and I’ve been in bad car accidents and suffered a pretty severe football injury many, many years ago. But this injury to my back took the cake.
Thankfully, after injections and mounds of painkillers, I finally made it to the surgeon to clean up the aftermath of what was a herniated disc. Back surgery encourages the virtue of patience, of which I have little – but I’m working on it.
Though the good deacon from my parish and my nephew, an extraordinary minister of Holy Communion at his parish, both brought me Communion (for which I am exceedingly grateful), I didn’t hear a holy Mass for over a month. I lost 20 pounds in the process and became, as a friend at work says, “weak as branch water.”
Stuck at home trying to wean myself from the opiods, I started re-reading Hilaire Belloc’s wonderful book about a personal pilgrimage called “The Path to Rome.” In the introduction, written by the great Catholic author and editor Joseph Pearce, Pearce says the pilgrimage was “a voyage of discovery in which Home and Exile are interwoven in a mystical dance of contemplation.” I thought that was quite a phrase. It made me think of just what is home to us and what is exile.
Surely grief and depression exile us. Most great spiritual leaders and thinkers have spoken of a “spiritual dryness” that inevitably comes to one seeking God. It is an exile of sorts actually brought on by one’s personal pilgrimage to the Lord. And perhaps one of the most heart-wrenching scenes in the Psalms is the Jewish people in exile upon the river banks:
By the rivers of Babylon
there we sat weeping
when we remembered Zion.
On the poplars in its midst
we hung up our harps.
For there our captors asked us
for the words of a song;
Our tormentors, for joy:
“Sing for us a song of Zion!”
But how could we sing a song of the Lord
in a foreign land?
Love itself can be a kind of exile in that when we truly love, we want what is best for another and when they do not have that, we suffer. And the suffering is an exile. The thirst for Christ can lead us to exile, as we encounter evil along the journey. We all have gardens where agony awaits – illness, injury or pain being good examples.
I have felt that exile the past several weeks: away from my church and my work, from people I’m used to seeing, from activities I’m accustomed to, and living without the physical mobility that many of us often take for granted.
But in the midst of my exile, my foreign land where I could not sing a song of the Lord, the glaring fact of my wife’s undying and utterly kind attention, and the prayers and good wishes from so many friends and family that lifted my spirits, reestablished a home in my heart. Exile and home were woven together, and something special has come from it. I don’t know if they were ever in a “mystical dance of contemplation,” but they have sure flirted with each other, and I have thought much more about what exiles me or takes me away from my trust in God and what brings me back home to His loving arms. Sometimes the two movements are going on at the same time!
Perhaps my greatest lesson in this time of physical disability, along with the absolute need to cultivate the virtue of patience, is coming to an understanding of how a state of exile and homecoming are both common to my existence and how they both make up the pilgrimage I’m on – my own personal path to Rome. And, of course, if there weren’t exile I wouldn’t know home when I arrived.
Finally, now that it’s football season (one of my weaknesses), I’m reminded of the comedian who compared football to baseball, centering on the militarism of football and the more spiritual aspects of baseball. He said in football, the combatants line up in a wall of defense to try to hold off the onrush of those seeking to take over territory by crashing through the line and throwing bombs. The object of the game is to break the opponents down and take over their territory. If there is a tie, the teams go to a “sudden death” situation. On the other hand, the comedian said, if it’s a tie game in baseball the teams just keep on playing – and they may end up playing all night. The object of baseball? Why, of course, it’s simply to go home.
So here’s to baseball and making it home, to exiting the Inferno, to my beloved wife, to the Jews who hung their harps, to a slow and sacred recuperation, to the Blessed Sacrament for which I have so hungered, and of course to the “voyage of discovery in which Home and Exile are interwoven in a mystical dance of contemplation.”
Fred Gallagher is an author and editor-in-chief with Gastonia-based Good Will Publishers Inc.