Coming Home to YourSelf : Homesickness and Nostalgia

Homesickness.  How would you define it?  When have you felt it?

Sometimes it’s not just about feeling sad to be away from a familiar place or people.  At a deeper level, it’s a yearning for the “missing piece” in our souls, a profound sense that where we are now in our lives lacks an element vital to our flourishing.  And even when that feeling is just vague and elusive, we should trust it and follow it up.

‘Homesickness’ used to be taken very seriously.  At its most extreme it was acknowledged by physicians that it could cause death.  Its other name, coined in the seventeenth-century by Johannes Hofer, was ‘nostalgia’, from the Greek nostos, meaning ‘homecoming’, and algos, meaning ‘pain’.  This wasn’t our modern, soft-centred understanding of the word, but it designated a whole range of severe physical and mental maladies.  Doctors even looked for the offending ‘nostalgia bone’ to cure!

Nostalgia was blamed for the sickness suffered by Swiss soldiers when they came down from the mountains to the low lands to do battle.  But it wasn’t so much to do with altitude as the emotional dislocation connected with fighting as a mercenary far away, and facing the possibility of never seeing home again, which affected them.  Switzerland famously has stayed neutral, but possibly the fact of engaging in war, for money rather than patriotic conviction, made that despair worse.

Nostalgia as a pathology was next recognised in the American Civil War, when it was revered as a noble affliction, as soldiers pined for their homes, wives and families.  Apart from one death-certificate citing nostalgia in the First World War, when it became superseded by ‘shell shock’ as the pre-eminent battle-induced malady, the twentieth-century killed it off as a serious pathology.  Why would this be?  Industrialised society needed mobility and  the consequence of rootlessness was brushed over, even stigmatised as weakness.  And so ‘nostalgia’ was weakened and acquired its rosy tint.  Indeed, I have some beautiful ‘Nostalgia’ roses in my garden!

Nature's mandala : the Nostalgia rose

But let’s return to the full force of the evocative term, ‘Home’, and the aching desire we can experience to be enfolded in its welcome and shelter.  There is a Welsh term, hiraeth, that doesn’t seem to have an exact equivalent in English.  Hiraeth  is imbued with longing and desire for home- in Wales- with a touch of grief for that which is perceived as lost.  There are cognate words in Breton, Cornish, Scottish Gaelic and several European languages, so clearly this powerful feeling is recognised in a number of cultures.

Are you old enough to remember the German tv series, Heimat, which explored the theme of leaving and returning home over a wide sweep of the twentieth century?  It’s a place which can stifle us even as it pulls us back later, if we are not a compatible match with our own homeland.  I realise that for myself here in the remote and   beautiful Yorkshire Wolds, where I can find my DNA in so many of its churchyards.  I know deeply the landscape and the coast; I love the place, but I’m still not quite sure I can fully grow here to feel prepared for that ultimate homecoming.  Could it be that in the smaller self there is buried a sense of hiraeth, an ‘earnest desire’ for our home in God.  “You have made us for yourself, O Lord, and our hearts are restless till they rest in you”, said St Augustine in the fourth century.  Maybe it’s the human condition; we yearn to return to that unity, that non-duality, to reside and rest in our one true and eternal home.

You may also like to read Richard Rohr’s exploration of “Holy Homesickness” here.

All blessings, Valerie

September 2025