Christian Life

Searching for Home: Spirituality for Restless Souls
By M. Craig Barnes
Brazos Press, 2003
(192 pages, $15.99, paperback)

reviewed by Gail Mitchell

“The real home for which we yearn isn't the place where we grew up or the new place we're hoping to build, but the place where we were created to live.” As a former pastor of the National Presbyterian Church in Washington , D.C. , and a current professor at Pittsburgh Theological Seminary, Craig Barnes has had ample opportunity to deal with people who are yearning for meaning in life and for that perfect place where they feel cherished and safe from the storms of the world: home. He knows first-hand what that feels like, not only because it is a quest common to all human beings, but also because his own father left his family and his career and spent the rest of his life exclusively on this search, only to die alone in a trailer park in Florida .

The search for home, Barnes says, is really a desire for paradise—to get back to the Garden of Eden, where we can have it all. He reminds us, however, that even the Garden had a forbidden fruit, not to lead mankind into sin but to remind us that home is not meant to be perfect, for we are creatures and not the Creator, dependent on God, who alone is perfect. Even so, we can't get back there, we can only move forward in time; thus our search for home ultimately is the search for heaven, the “place in the heart of God where we were created to dwell.”

Dr. Barnes points out that the search for this place has, in a sense, changed in America over the last hundred years. Until the last century, the majority of Americans, whom Barnes calls “settlers,” never moved far from the place where they had grown up, either in the heart of a city or out on a farm. Nor did these settlers think much about living in another environment: they “settled” for what life handed them. Happiness, or heaven, was “in the sweet by and by,” and meanwhile we'd better get the back forty plowed. After World War II came the rise of suburbia and the quest for the American dream. The people of this generation were the “exiles,” moving for the first time away from family roots in search of the American dream. To the exiles, God was “way beyond the blue” above them. The words “ under God” were added to the Pledge of Allegiance. In fact, all of life was seen vertically as they climbed the ladder of material success. Now we are a nation of “nomads.” When the farms disappeared and the American dream was found to be hollow, the current generation began roaming—to a new town, a new job, a new house, over and over, looking for happiness, for heaven, for home.

Eight hundred years ago, another person was on that same journey. In 1302 Dante Alighieri became a political exile from his hometown of Florence . He spent the rest of his life roaming around Italy under the patronage of others, sorrowful because he found “how salt is the taste of another man's bread, and how hard is the way up and down another man's stairs.” He found expression for his sorrow in writing his Divine Comedy. In this great poem, Dante is a pilgrim on a physical and spiritual journey through hell, purgatory, and heaven. Craig Barnes uses Dante's poem as a parallel illustration for the life of a nomad in 21 st -century America . As Dante moves from confession of sin (Hell), through contrition for sin (Purgatory), into communion with God (Heaven), so the modern nomad must, if he wants to find his true home, stop his aimless wandering and begin instead a journey toward God.

As he describes this journey, Dr. Barnes gives us many powerful thoughts to ponder along the way. In discussing Dante's Inferno , Barnes reminds us that we can't break God's law: it will always go on, but violating His law breaks us . He compares Dante's climb up Mount Purgatory to unloading the spiritual and psychological baggage we have collected, which weighs us down so much that we can't look up and see Heaven. He reminds us that the Hebrews were in the wilderness (their purgatory) for 40 years, being transformed from runaway slaves (like modern nomads) to faithful people. Although removing sin from our lives isn't easy (purgatory is a mountain to climb, after all), it does get easier the further up you go because you have gained more faith. In Dante's glorious and light-filled Heaven, Barnes tells us, we are supposed to be “e-motional,” moving out of ourselves because we are supposed to be verbs, not nouns. He ends, as does Dante, by distilling the nomad's quest for home into the need for transcendence and communion with God, which we can only partially accomplish on Earth, through worship and the sacraments.

While Searching for Home is a thought-provoking and inspiring book, it's a bit disturbing that Dr. Barnes gets a few things wrong. When he quotes Dante, he is on solid ground, using Mark Musa's excellent translation. However, when he describes certain parts of Dante's Hell in his own words, he gets things wrong: Barnes puts the wrathful in the 4 th circle instead of the 5 th , and worse, he says the suicides are forced to drag around their bodies “because they did not want to live the life they were given.” However, this sounds more like the fate of the hypocrites, whose gorgeous robes cover immense lead weights they must wear around their necks while marching around the circle. The suicides are actually turned into trees and can only speak if someone breaks off a branch, which then begins to bleed. Later on, Barnes also says that Jerusalem was destroyed 70 years after the Crucifixion, which is off by about 30 years. These points may be minor in light of the many profound statements Barnes makes and the strength of his arguments, but they cast some doubt on the care and attention he gave to his research, at the very least.

He also becomes more than a little repetitive as he uses example after example of modern nomadic life. It almost seems as if he meant to publish each chapter separately and so has to repeat his basic points in each one before moving on to the new train of thought. Perhaps he intended for the book to be read only a little at a time, in which case the repeated summaries would be helpful. However, when reading the book straight through over the course of a week or so at most (it's only 182 pages), the repetitions are somewhat annoying.

The subtitle of the book is Spirituality for Restless Souls , but Dr. Barnes spends a lot more time describing the problem than presenting solutions. Perhaps that is because people who read the book must first recognize that they are nomads before they can even begin, with Dante, the long journey to the foot of God's throne in the highest heaven. Craig Barnes is obviously a traveler well on the way. Searching for Home can be a road map or at least a directional sign to help all of us nomads find the way home.

Gail Mitchell received a B.A. in Mathematics from Longwood College and a M.Ed. in Educational Guidance from Virginia Commonwealth University. She furthered her education through the Dallas Institute for Humanities and Culture and in 2006 received a National Endowment for the Humanities grant to study Dante in Italy. Since 1995 she has taught a variety of courses at New Covenant Schools, where she currently serves as guidance counselor and teacher of World Literature and Calculus. Gail has one daughter, Carrie Lynn, and lives in Lynchburg, VA, with her husband Ernie.