Homeward Longings: Beauty’s Beckoning
- smegburke
- Mar 20
- 3 min read
Updated: May 14
Recently I’ve come across a few books which have made me feel seen in aspects of my life and longings. I suspect it’s not incidental that these authors have experienced enduring health issues, something that has shaped my life these past few years in ways I’m still trying to understand.
“This Homeward Ache” by Amy Baik Lee is on living with a view to the restoration God is bringing about, a future that doesn’t diminish the beauty of here and now, but is manifest in it. She weaves her life story around central themes from C.S. Lewis’ work that have long resonated with me - his pursuit of joy, a longing for beauty he describes as “Sehnsucht”. In “Surprised by Joy,” such joy is central to his life story, “an unsatisfied desire which is itself more desirable than any other satisfaction.”
For Lewis, the longing surfaced in childhood experiences: the distant hills of an early home, a tin full of moss evoking Eden. Lee recalls a meadow filling her with similar yearning in her youth, as it drew her beyond it. I have difficulty singling out particular places or moments, perhaps vivid tales of far-off countries from childhood (pony stories set in misty moors…) or familiar places transformed in dreams into expansive and adventure-filled ones, shrunk to real dimensions upon waking.
In adulthood, various experiences have left me with such longing. Music, in its beauty and fleetingness. Unexpected encounters with sunlight. Memories of places visited, usually distant ones — the sunlit ochre facades of the Aventine hill in Rome, light piercing dark interiors of old churches, the repose of rich, softened colours on a Ugandan landscape.
Lee opens her book by quoting “Till We Have Faces”, my favourite novel by Lewis, a retelling of the Psyche and Cupid myth. In it the former character confides: “The sweetest thing in all my life has been the longing—to reach the Mountain, to find the place where all the beauty came from—my country, the place where I ought to have been born. Do you think it all meant nothing, all the longing? The longing for home? For indeed it now feels not like going, but like going back.”
This aspect of longing for things past is strong in me. Maybe its a lack of imagination or hope, but I often cling to former experiences. There are seasons of life I idealize and return to in memory. But I appreciate how Lewis and Lee suggest the backward glance may also look forward.
Lewis suggests “These things—the beauty, the memory of our own past—are good images of what we really desire [but] they are not the thing itself; they are only the scent of a flower we have not found, the echo of a tune we have not heard, news from a country we have never yet visited.”
Lee describes longings like nostalgia for the past and appreciation for beauty, but concludes “Sehnsucht is far more like a strong current running at the center of all these longings, or a glint of sea on the horizon, or an unexplained rush of wind in the close quarters of an upper room. Something calls, and some counterpart in me, rejoicing, wakes up.”
One way Lee joyfully responds to this call is to record beautiful things she encounters, attending to God’s gifts in daily life:
This, then, is my small book of beauties: my offering of gratitude for the constant newness of his mercies, which are often as fresh and unexpected as snowdrops springing from the lately frozen earth; my attempt to be attentive to the beauties that, like grace notes upon a melody, speak volumes about the Composer of this world. It is my (insufficient) record of the kind of love he has for us, evidenced through Christ and rippling out in a thousand vivifying waves from the Resurrection…
Last week I witnessed my first snowdrops cresting the winter-worn earth here in Hamilton, full of promise. As we approach Easter, on this first day of spring, I hope we may be alive to such beauty as a call from God to His resurrection life.
Image Credits:
Photo by Jasmin Ne on Unsplash
Photo by Nic Berlin on Unsplash
Sources:
Amy Baik Lee, This Homeward Ache, Brentwood, Tennessee: B&H Publishing Group: 2023
C.S. Lewis, Surprised by Joy
C.S. Lewis, Weight of Glory and Other Addresses, New York: The Macmillan Company: 1949
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