Sometimes information, events, busy-ness and a vague Something Else conspire to displace me, even when I sit, as I do, in my own familiar, lovely world.
I have been haunted, all day, by a sense of displacement, and this despite the fact that I only left my property twice in the van today: taking Everett to and from his tae kwan do lesson. I otherwise enjoyed my day homeschooling, monitoring Emma Grace’s progress on her bicyle, doing simple laundry chores, making dinner, hanging (for the first time in years, perhaps) some very romantic curtains around our canopy bed. So very domestic of me, yes? How is it, one wonders, that one can feel so very Not at home when one is home?
But it isn’t always or only a sense of place, either. In class last night, my professor pointed out passages in Thomas Mann’s Buddenbrooks in which the main characters– bourgeois merchants fixated with their family’s status in society– must confront the slow and insistent decay of their corporal selves. No one can avoid it: we grow old, we die, regardless of how we feel about it. Recognition of this reality is, to be sure, unsettling at times. We are not quite at home, are we, in these bodies to which we are so attached?
Maybe I think too much, but days like these elicit metaphysical questioning of the most basic nature. Where is He? and, dare I say it here: Is He?
And then I read my friend C.S. Lewis’s words in The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, the subtext of which belies at the very least a familiarity with these basic wonderings of mine. Appropriately, Lewis’s characters are on a journey. They are not at home. They are, in fact, in a world that is not their own, and one of them has only just very recently been transformed back into himself from a dragon.
But he is not quite himself after this. He is Changed.
And he has been changed, to his relief and gratitude, by the Lion. He says to Edmund, “But who is Aslan? Do you know him?”
Oh, thank you, Mr. Lewis, for your honesty, for the understanding that comes in Edmund’s answer. We will, indeed, from time to time, be lost in this dying world; but in our confusion, we are not abandoned.
Edmund says: “Well– he knows me.”
And on days like today, that has to be enough.
