For the last 10 months I’ve been living in Ignorance. The building in which I live has been declared unfit for human habitation on the grounds of fire risk, a risk that has been present since the day I moved in so I’m now living in Danger. The postcode is the same but this house is no longer a home (officially). In this situation the council are obliged to ensure I’m not left homeless but that could mean putting me in a hostel. Its ironic that I’m being asked to move from the place that feels most like home at the moment to somewhere that would feel more like a prison to ensure that I am not homeless.

We can define ‘home’ as the place where we live but very often it is merely the place where we are ‘homed’. When you think of the refugee camps in Lebanon, people have been homed there for decades yet they are still referred to as refugee camps, full of refugees, camped. They are sojourners, in transit, hoping and praying that, some day, they will be not merely re-housed but be allowed home.

By the rivers of Babylon the Israelites sang laments for their homeland. They had been re-housed in a prosperous, thriving country yet they wept for the city of Jerusalem, which was now a home for jackals and peasants, a city in ruin to which none of them would return for another 50 years. The Negro slaves in America sang of the land of milk and honey on the other side of the Jordon. Canaan, for them, was not a location in the Middle East but heaven where their souls would be liberated from the bitter struggle of life.

For the human heart, home is not a physical location but a place of rest – not a rest from work but from strife and distress. One of our most primitive fears is that of abandonment; to be excluded, banished or just neglected. Children would rather be punished than ignored. Many people would rather live in dysfunctional relationships than be left on their own. Suburbia is full of homeless people, living in houses surrounded by hundreds of others yet spiritually exiled – refugees camped in their own front room.

I’ve been homeless for the last 3 years. I’ve not been walking the street or squatting but where I’ve laid my hat has not been my home. Like the exiled Israelites I’ve sung laments for my beloved Jerusalem (Jerusalem means ‘city of peace’). It seems that when the heart cannot be where the home is it creates its own version of home in cherished memories, a picture, a poem or a song. This is no better illustrated than in Home Thoughts from Abroad by Robert Browning. And who better to present it than our own John Hurt (see link).