Searching for Home By M. Craig Barnes Moving Traveling Searching for a spiritual home

We're sorry, but this content is no longer available on Beliefnet. You may enjoy the following related articles: Anne Graham Lotz: At Home in Heaven Christian Prayers for Moving My Spiritual Bike Tour, Part 1 Spiritual Cyclist Draws Closer to God, Part 2 Photo Gallery: Sacred Spaces Across America Under the Tuscan Sun: At Home in Italy about her adventures in renovating the house, called Bramasole, which means in part "to yearn for." Often the book describes the frustrations of having to leave Bramasole to return to her life in San Francisco, where she spends nine months a year. This means much more of her time is spent away from the place she yearns for than in it, which is pretty descriptive for all of us. * In one of the most telling chapters of the book, she describes her observations of the many friends who stop by to see her Tuscan house on their way. As is typical of American tourists, they crammed in far too many stops in their travels, never spending much time in one place, and thus, never getting to know the places along the way. After seeing this repeated pattern, she concluded, "It’s not the destinations; it’s the ability to be on the road, happy trails, out where no one knows or understands or cares about all of the deviling things that have been weighing you down, keeping you frantic as a lizard with a rock on its tail." Eventually, however, we run out of trips and other distractions from the deviling things of life. That’s usually about the time we decided just to move again and look for another rock under which to place our tails. * Quite a bit of literature has been published lately by sociologists and cultural observers who are fascinated by our transiency. One of the most popular of these, written by Gary Pindell, is called A Good Place to Live: America’s Last Migration. Pindell’s thesis is that now people are no longer willing to live anywhere the job calls, and given such recent technological advances as telecommuting, it is no longer necessary. Now, he claims, people are more interested in finding a "good place" in which to settle down. The good place has main streets with grocery and hardware stores you can walk to, and perhaps bump into your neighbors along the way. It hasn’t been wrecked by developers, strip malls on busy four-lane boulevards, and the endless sprawl of ugly houses that all look alike. We’ve had it. We’re sick of it. And we are looking for a good place again. But the reader doesn’t get too far into the book before wondering if the "last migration" to a good place doesn’t look an awful lot like the migration of the Cleaver family to their suburban home in the 1950s. * Pindell illustrates the search for a good place with his own life. After painting an almost idyllic description of his community in Keene, New Hampshire, complete with the white-steepled church on the village green, he decided that it wasn’t quite good enough. As he says, "Fully cognizant that there were lots of places in North America far worse than Keene, I set out to see if I could find better ones...." He soon discovered his search was common to thousands who were all using the same short list of towns. So he organized his book by chapters describing fourteen “good places”—towns ranging from Asheville to Santa Fe. The fascinating thing about his descriptions is that there was something wrong with all of them. Right. Exactly right. * That’s because we’re yearning for home, and home has nothing to do with how good the place is. It has everything to do with whether or not it is the right place. And the right place isn’t something you choose, but a place that chooses you, molds you, and tells you who you are. TEXT ENDS HERE -->