Homesick for heaven

"There have been times when I think we do not desire heaven but more often I find myself wondering whether, in our heart of hearts, we have ever desired anything else" (C.S.Lewis).

My daughter told me today that she missed the announcement of a class trip to Manhattan's MOMA because she was in dreamland. It was a preemptive admission that defused a potential rebuke from me because she knows full well I have been there myself. The fantasy world is so much better than this one, though many a teacher in the 60s did not see it my way.

Mr. Lewis is right that we are all homesick. Some of us are more conscious of it than others. We were smitten, at one time or another, with a fleeting pang, an instantaneous abduction, that took us, as the song says, "out of the commonplace into the rare." It left in its wake dissatisfaction with anything else.

I have been asked from time to time to give a short bio for some retreat talk. I put down the usual and expected statistics, but it always feels like a lie. The things in my past that have changed my life have never coincided with the visible events. A truer biography would be an intelligible jumble of moments sitting on top of my grandfather's slide under the pines, and split seconds while hiding during a summer game of hide and seek.