"I think we can go home in a much deeper way. I think we can go home to our own souls."

Larissa Kaye Batten (llbeara@aol.com) writes "Soul Food," a weekly column for SpiritSite.com.  

Larissa is a prolific writer whose work has been featured in several publications.  

You can visit Lara's web site at www.miracleanimalrescue.com (site will open in a new window).

The last time I visited my childhood home, I lit up the driveway with my car lights and peered into my old bedroom from the outside.

I was no longer welcome in my family’s home. I had pulled and pulled and pulled on the skeletons and secrets in our closets until Truth tore and danced and whirled through our lives so we would never be the same again.

I was given an ultimatum. I would have to stuff the secrets back into the closets in order to be welcome again.

I read Thomas Wolfe’s You Can’t Go Home Again in those years, and I became convinced I would never go home again. I was bitter, devastated, and desperate for any hint that someday I would go home again.

I traveled to Ireland, not for the first time, and fractured into pieces of misery. I had paid a gruesome price to walk the path of Truth, and I was convinced I would never be whole again.

I met an angel in Ireland. He was disguised as an Irish musician who traveled the roads and wild beauty of his country in a bumpy white van with an array of instruments and peace.

"I need to share something with you," he told me as he drove me through the hills and heather of the west of Ireland out to Achill Island.

"I have just returned from my childhood home, where I had not been for 20 years," he said.  "And for the first time, I was able to forgive and to accept."

Then he told me something I had never heard before and have never heard since.

"Home isn’t a place; home is a feeling. We carry it inside us."

I could not conceive of the meaning of this, but it sounded full of a promise I certainly had not found anywhere else.

So I tucked the words inside me, somewhere amidst the horrific emotional pain I did not know how to eradicate from me. The words remained with me, and the promise stayed safe inside until the hope in it began to manifest itself in my reality.

I had decided that Thomas Wolfe passed on to me that I would never be able to go home again to the only home I felt I had known.

Indeed, I had known no other home. I did not yet know the home of having a personal relationship with God and spirituality. I had grown up without any conception of God whatever. I was a reformed Jew, and we observed certain practices and traditions out of respect to our culture and ancestry. But if I heard anything about God, I did not hear it anywhere deeper than my ears.

Last week in my Celtic spirituality class at Boston College, the professor referred to Thomas Hardy and his concept of not returning home.

"We can never return home in the same way," the professor said, "because we are no longer the same. We have all of our experiences with us now."

In the past, I would have agreed with him. But in the past, I saw home as a place. I saw home as where my family resided. I saw home as the place that contained my childhood, what I could remember and all I had forgotten.

I disagreed with my professor, and I raised my hand in class to tell him. On my path of Truth, I do my best to stand up behind my Truth.

"I do believe we can go home again," I told the professor and my classmates. "I think we can go home in a much deeper way. I think we can go home to our own souls."

Not only do I now know and believe that home is a feeling rather than a house, but I understand in a way I never did the journey of the soul.

Where once I sought to return to a physical house and group of people to come home to my "family", I now seek to become one with my soul.

For me, my soul is the God in me. My soul is the home of me. My soul is Truth, love, peace, the unity of me and my higher essence.

For years now, I have traveled the path of spirit. I have visited with angels, I have conversed with God, I have listened to the grace of the Holy Spirit, I have felt Jesus pass through, I have lived as best I can by the principles of love and service.

And in the process of this path, I have come to know my own soul. I am home in my soul.

And while I have not a drop of Irish blood, I know inside my soul was born in Ireland.

I do not imagine a house in Ireland in which I lived. I do not picture brothers and sisters with whom I played. I do not think of parents who raised me.

I simply have a knowing inside that in the untouched mystery and mysticism of the simple and rugged hills and sea, my soul was born.

I know this in my soul. I feel a calling to the place, and yet Ireland is not a place for me. It is a wonder, a knowing, an understanding, a peace and resistance as well, a somehow knowledge that I have been there before and that one day I must return.

My home in Ireland is not a cottage in a certain village. It is not a genealogy related to a group of relatives.

It is a quiet nature, a oneness with earth and sea, a love of air and ground, a sigh, a letting go, a release, a one of spirit and nature, of peace and earth, of soulfullness and serenity.

If only my ashes are carried to the sea in Ireland, I know I will have gone home again. I will have gone home in a deeper way. I will have gone home to the knowing in my soul.

I can go home again. I can go home deeper. I can go home to my own soul. I can go home to God in me. I can go home to the unity of soul and spirit.

I know my soul was born in Ireland, and I know to Ireland I will go home.

I also know this feeling does not belong to anything tangible or physical.

It is to the spirit I return.

No, home is not a place. Home is not a house.

Home is the feeling of spirit.

Home is the knowing of soul.

Home is one.

Home is the one of life and God.

Home to God.

Home to the God in my soul.

Amen.

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