Going Home is a seminal spiritual goal and idea. I think it’s the centerpiece of my spiritual life.

Some people feel going home is heaven, some find it in love, and some find it in a place, space, family, or work of art.

Going home is a lifelong search and journey for meaning for me and many others.

I’ve tried it out in a dozen different ways and other places. There are always parts of me that veer off and wander into confusion or fear or get lost in delusional fantasies or angry memories or yearning dreams. I want home to be a place where I belong.

My nightmares, night dreams, daydreams, and contemplations often remind me of being lost. For so much of my life,  I was lost in a desert of my own making.

More than anything, I have felt this feeling of lostness, like a rudderless ship drifting out to sea without a destination.

For most of my life, going home meant going anywhere but what I was.

From early childhood, I was always looking for a home to which I could go home. I kept on searching when I grew older.

Was home being a father? A lover? An author? A success?  Having money?

What is spirituality if not about seeking a meaningful connection with someone or something outside of yourself?

In our society, people are always trying to label others and define them. For me, spirituality is very much about defining yourself -accepting who you are and coming to terms with it.

Does it mean being peaceful and fulfilled or finally finding love and happiness? No one is happy all the time. That is not a spiritual life; it’s a delusion. Sometimes I learn much more from failure and disappointment.

In the Wizard Of Oz, Dorothy finds she was always home. She didn’t have to go anywhere; she didn’t know it.

I can relate to that.

Nouwen says we are home when we start on the way. I think a lot of going home relates to confronting temperament and despair. I have had problems with both.

In the early prophets writing, there was the belief that the desert, where God’s people were made to wander, was home. The Desert Fathers, wrote Thomas Merton, believed that the desert wilderness was the purest and holiest place on earth because it had no value to humans.

There was nothing to distract them, conquer, or lust over. There was nothing at all. But this bothered me. If there was nothing, there was nothing to want or aspire to. I was already there; I didn’t need a journey.

The Chosen People, said the bible, had wandered in the desert for forty years. But they could have reached home, their Promised Land, in a few months if they had traveled directly to it.

The desert, said the prophets,  was the perfect home for the men and women who sought to be nothing but themselves.

The pious may have been wandering, but spiritually, they were home.

I took for this that home is carried inside us, not outside.

This idea made more and more sense to me as I got older; I had tried out so many homes and failed but worked harder to find the right one as I got closer to the end of my journey in this world.

I wanted a lot of things.

But I felt as if I wandered that I was mired in a desert of the soul; I didn’t know where I was going or what I wanted. I never liked where I was.

“The desert is the home of despair,” wrote Merton, “and despair, now, is everywhere.” He noted that there is no going home if our interior solitude consists of the acceptance of defeat or emptiness. If I wanted to love and connect with others, I had to go and leave my desert and wander to find it.

This, then, wrote Merton, was my way out of my desert – to live facing despair but not consent to it. To find my way out of it, discovering who I was and what I wanted my life to be. My year in solitude when I ran to the mountain helped me see it for the first time.

This was the first time I was truly free to think.

I knew I was beginning the journey to go home.

That, I believe, is what going home is about for me. I had to work on my temperament. Temperament does not, I believe, predestine one to sanctity and another to hell. All of our characteristics are sacred gifts and can be put to good use and bad.

I read and re-read St. Thomas, who wrote that a man is good when his will takes joy in what is good and evil when his will brings joy in what is wrong. That became the focal point of my decisions.

In a way, that became what home was. I could be that man.

Soon after, I met Maria, and my idea of home changed, I think, for good. Home is where she is. Home is where I feel loved, known and where I belong.

Home is where our life is together. Home is our shared love of nature and animals. Home is our shared passion for creativity, change, and growth. Home is where we helped one another tear away from the things, people, and demons that had haunted us for so long and kept us from living fully. Just shut them down in your head, said the therapist.

I was no longer in any desert. I was in a fertile, rich, loving, and meaningful place inside and out of my interior life. Doing good gave me purpose and meaning. This, I think, was my equivalent of heaven. This was why I wandered in my desert for so long.

I began to understand how to use my temperament for good. If I made good use of the gifts I have been blessed to have, I could do better, no longer a man who merely serves and reacts to his temperament instead of making it help him and others.

A temperamentally angry man is more inclined to anger than others. But as long as I remained sane – another struggle on the journey home – my inclination to anger was simply a force in my character which could be turned into good or evil. I decided on good.

The trip home continues; it is long and sometimes complicated.

I remember reading a quote from Jesus, who I have long followed but don’t worship. He spoke to his disciplines about growing up and facing reality:

“Be perfect as your God is perfect. Be compassionate as your God is compassionate. Welcome home, my lost brothers and sisters, on their long journey.” They are, he said,  your brothers and sisters.

Pierre Teilhard de Chardin says we are not human beings having a spiritual experience. We are spiritual beings having a human experience.

This is the goal, not the end. I’m not all the way home; I probably won’t ever be.

But I think I’m closer to home now than ever. Maria and I both see spirituality as about living the life you wish to lead and were meant to show.

We do not have or wish for a perfect life, but we are close to living the lives we want, and that is no small thing in either of our lives.

Our lives on this earth are short and often insignificant in the scheme of themes. It is a sacrilege to waste them on despair, ambition, money, and anger.

I don’t want or need anything I don’t have—my desert is all around me; it is lush, green, peaceful, beautiful, and full of love and good.

I’m going home.