This piece was originally featured in Cogitare’s 2023 Print Edition.
Last spring, I came home – after being away almost a year at school – to a summer that was mostly just me, my youngest brother, and our parents. I had lived that school year in a different place with different people thinking about very specific and community-influenced issues. I had missed many funny moments and formative conversations that my family had had at home. My head was full of ideals about family and community from reading Wendell Berry. What I didn’t understand was that I had to take time to know my family again. In my arrogance, I assumed that nothing important had happened at home during my absence.
My family were happy that I was home, but my return disrupted the life they had without me. I had deserted home but thought I could just walk back in and it would be the same. My mom questioned my grand ideas about family and community when I didn’t take time to understand what had been going on at home. She challenged me to try to explain what I had been thinking about all that time at school and to stop using the excuse that I couldn’t explain it because she hadn’t been there.
She wasn’t there, but because I wanted her to understand and valued my relationship with her, I needed to take the time to share my concerns and listen to hers.
At school I face the contradiction of wanting to keep up with my family while knowing I cannot really do so without being with them. College, like marriage or moving, tears families apart, but in this particular case you don’t live in one place long-term but jump back and forth. Everything is temporary. College makes family relationships difficult because you live and breathe with at least two different groups of people – those at school and at home – constantly switching back and forth between the two. It is impossible to quickly explain all the things you thought and processed over the whole time you were away to either of the groups. You have lived and grown in one place, influenced by specific people and events only to be uprooted to quite different soil where you have to explain the new branches and leaves that your family sees and does not understand.
It is hard to describe these things to family members who were not there. But you have to. You have to intentionally share with them and also let them share with you, otherwise you will lose even more of your relationship. I should have come home last summer to listen to their thoughts and to tell my own.
I want to blame this struggle on college, to say it is horrible, that everyone should avoid it and stay at home, but that just reveals my own inconsistency. College seems to be tearing my family apart, but I owe so much of my thinking on this very subject to required reading, class discussions, meals with friends and lectures – all of which happened at college. I am also tempted to pounce on all the problems of college because I am reluctant to leave it, and I want to feel like I won’t really be missing out. I tell myself I will be doing better things, while right now I am holding on to every moment here.
Knowing specific individuals is important and I treasure the specific people that I know at college. I do not want to give any of them up. We have lived together, created traditions, told stories and known so many common things. We have a knowledge that I will never be able to have with other friends. I am tied to my college friends by memories and the common love and knowledge of a specific place.
It is easy to be happy while spending time with friends at college and forgetting other places, but I am convicted every time I remember that I haven’t talked to my family or written to my grandmother or called my other friends. I am haunted by a dream to collect all these people into one place. What if they were all together and I could build and strengthen relationships with all of them, face to face, at the same time?
I think it is the New Jerusalem I long for and I want it now. The fact that leaving a beloved place and its people is painful is a sign of my belonging here. It is a sign that I have lived well and fully here. Maybe that should be comforting. But it seems like going home and focusing on relationships with other people means giving up on the relationships I have here.
Is there an acceptable way of living in the present? Is it wrong to prioritize the company of the people I can physically be with? I think there is a good way to live in the present, but the challenge comes when you have to switch places while you are full of the place you just left. Should your attention and energy immediately focus on the new group of people you are with?
Anne Elliot speaks of this in Jane Austen’s Persuasion. Anne goes from being at home, involved with all the concerns of her family’s departure, to the completely different concerns of the village where her sister lives. Austen writes this about Anne’s situation,
Anne had not wanted this visit to Uppercross, to learn that a removal from one set of people to another, though at a distance of only three miles, will often include a total change of conversation, opinion, and idea…for certainly, coming as she did, with a heart full of the subject [her family’s move] which had been completely occupying both houses in Kellynch for many weeks, she had expected rather more curiosity and sympathy than she found…She acknowledged it to be very fitting, that every little social commonwealth should dictate its own matters of discourse; and hoped, ere long, to become a not unworthy member of the one she was now transplanted into. With the prospect of spending at least two months at Uppercross, it was highly incumbent on her to clothe her imagination, her memory, and all her ideas in as much of Uppercross as possible.
Though Anne’s example differs because of her rather selfish family, this example gives an interesting insight into the inevitability of changing concerns as one changes places.
Going home last summer, I did not do what Anne does. I tried to keep alive another place at home instead of focusing on where I was. It is not that the concerns of another place are not good or that they should be instantly banished when we move. They simply need to bow down in importance to those of the place we have come to.
One of Wendell Berry’s Sabbath poems speaks well to these questions of regret, of the desire to go back, and of belonging to those who we have known.
No, no, there is no going back.
Less and less you are
that possibility you were.
More and more you have become
those lives and deaths
that have belonged to you.
You have become a sort of grave
containing much that was
and is no more in time, beloved
then, now, and always.
And so you have become a sort of tree
standing over a grave.
Now more than ever you can be
generous toward each day
that comes, young, to disappear
forever, and yet remain
unaging in the mind.
Every day you have less reason
not to give yourself away.
(1993 I)
One of the many ideas in this poem is the belonging that is part of community. Our communities belong to us and we to them, and this belonging cannot be severed by distance or time apart. It is a part of who we are. Being apart from my college friends, we cannot have anything like what we had when we dined and danced and laughed together, but these people are a part of me and I of them.
The last two lines of the poem challenge and puzzle me. It seems that the problem and pain will be increased by giving myself to be known by more people, but Berry says the opposite. As the Gospel attests, too, you have no excuse not to give yourself away because that is what Christ did for you.
Over a break from school this past semester, I learned that my head had become so full of life at college that I unconsciously thought that life could not be as full anywhere else. Time away forced me to see that people live well in other places. People live and think and serve and pray and show hospitality and seek to live well in other places. Perhaps I can too.
I am not consoled by all of this, but I am convicted by it. There is no solution to the problem of distance tearing relationships apart, but there is joy in knowing that my friends and family belong to me and are a part of me, no matter where I am. The result of these thoughts is the inadequate conclusion that hanging on is impossible and that I have to, as Anne Elliot does, clothe my imagination, memory, and ideas in the place where I am. When I leave this place, I have to turn and be concerned with a different group of people, because those are the ones I can physically be with. Even writing letters and making visits should not be an attempt to live where I am not or an excuse to avoid giving my time and attention to the people I can regularly be with. There is nothing I can change about these often unsatisfactory conclusions; instead, I must remember that people dine and dance and laugh in other places, and it is good there, too.
