• Valson Thampu

Ever since the outbreak of the Israel-Gaza war, the homelessness of our species has haunted me. About 80% of the people living in Gaza being in a state of chronic internal displacement, driven like cattle from one end to the other, is not an easy thing to contemplate. It is, also, not an easy thing to keep out of one’s mind. It haunts you like a lurid sin.

That obsession peaked for me with the bombing of Beirut. I have not visited that city. So, this obsession is nothing personal. Perhaps it is a thematic, if not spiritual-philosophical obsession.

Some four decades ago, three men were seen sitting late in the night around a tiny table in a dingy restaurant in Beirut. They sipped tea and munched snacks at intervals. But for these alimentary intervals, they were engrossed in poetry. The poet in this instance was Faiz Ahmad Faiz, the greatest Pakistani Urdu poet in those days. Out of him flowed an endless stream of poetry, enchanting the other two: Iqbal Ahmed -himself, a distinguished poet- and Edward Said, the celebrated Yale professor of literature. Faiz and Iqbal had fled Zia-Ul-Haq’s dictatorship in Pakistan and found refuge in Beirut. They were refugees or, as Said would have said, men who left behind something heartbreakingly dear to them. They fled because there was something heartbreakingly unbearable to them; like water rushing uphill when pumped.

There in Beirut, the creative trio, conjured up for themselves a fleeting sense of at-home-ness, if I may put it somewhat clumsily. To them, Beirut was where the homeless could afford for themselves a spell of at-home-ness. Beirut has had its ups and downs since then. Today, it has become, who knows for how long, a smoking, trembling symbol of homelessness. Is that city on its way to becoming another Gaza?

My mind waders over to the words of Jesus, ‘Come to me, all you who labor and are heavy laden, I will give you rest’. But, pardon me, who is this man who issues such a blanket invitation? One who had ‘nowhere to lay his head’. This contradiction used to trouble, even incense, me. Perhaps I now have a hang of this provocative paradox. It is only the homeless who understands, and hence also cares for, the homelessness of humankind, a point that underlies Jesus’s parable of Lazarus and the rich man.

Our homelessness has a hoary history, going all the way back to Cain. He became ‘a wanderer on the face of the earth’ for killing his brother, Abel. And that too, in the context of worship! (Is there, do you think, any nexus between worship and homelessness?) Since then, homelessness has been the fiery mark of the human condition. To be human is to be homeless. Who, but the homeless, need refuge, or God? God-as-refuge makes sense only to the homeless. The very thought bamboozles the rich. Perhaps the blessedness of the poor in spirit is that they are free to alleviate their homelessness. But it has to be the sort of poverty that kept the trio in the Beirut restaurant in a bliss of poetic ecstasy. Was that why Jesus urged his disciples to ‘be perfect’? Did he mean that perfection, of the sort he envisaged, is the antidote to homelessness? Are we homeless because we are ‘stuffed men, hollow men’, as T.S. Eliot, would put it?

Much good has come out of human homelessness, no matter how unbearable that predicament is.  Jesus on the Cross is the image of ultimate homelessness. The two foremost blessings of homelessness are: (a) a purification for freedom, and (b) a passion for home, which becomes truly itself only when it is discovered for oneself. You are born into a house; but home is what you make for yourself. In a sense, physical birth involves an organic forfeiture of home.

As for the anguished longing for freedom, consider the Jews in Egyptian bondage. It is a homeless man -Moses- who is singled out by Yahweh to be the agent of their liberation. But there is no parachuting into the homeland. Between the slavery-land and the home-land lies the ordeal of wilderness. Wilderness, it seems, is the nursery for learning what it means to be free in the homeland.

Jesus’s parable of the Lost Son is a re-take of the same pattern. In the sanctified paradox of the parable, it is the ‘lost son’ -the son who went into homelessness- who truly realises what it means to have a home. The stereotypical son becomes homeless. The lost son ‘enters’ the happiness of the father; the ‘not-lost’ son excludes himself from it. He is lost! The incompatibility between ‘my joy’ and ‘your joy’ -father’s joy and son’s joy- is the quintessence of homelessness.

Am I romanticizing homeless? Conjuring up a palliative for human existence on this wretched earth that we love like mad? I hope not. It is terrible to be homeless. But, it is the given, and there is no escaping it. One way or another -in our public life, in our relationships, in our professional contexts, in our religious plight, in our sense of unease with others and ourselves- the mark of Cain flames on our foreheads. But that is not the end of the story. That we may not find a home where we thought we would, is only one half of it. The other half is that we can find homes; not only in the world to come, but also here upon this heartless earth where you are given stones when you beg for bread. And, if the parable of the Lost Son is any indication, all it takes is a return journey. The road that led you to the far country is also the road that will lead you homeward. What needs to change is not the road, but the direction.

Jesus said, ‘Repent, for the Kingdom of God is at hand’!