2001 CONFESSIONS
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Contents © 2001
by Jim Holman.
All rights reserved.

NOVEMBER 2001 CONFESSIONS

DISCONTENT

Two years ago, I wrote about buying the home in which I now live, and the lessons it provided me -- detachment, acceptance, patience. I also mentioned a desire for permanence -- to be where I am going to be for the rest of my life -- and the way the ordeal served as a reminder that this world is not in fact home. Two years later, the desire remains.

I am ambitious. My ambition is not for fame or power, and not entirely for wealth, though my poor wife is regularly barraged with my good-natured fantasies: "You know what would be nice to do if we had a little money to throw around?..." No, I am ambitious for a place, a locale -- I am ambitious for home.

"Our hearts are restless until they rest in Thee," says Augustine. Myself, I long for heaven on earth, or at least some measure of the permanence of heaven. I see a distorted reflection of myself in my four-year-old son, who does not want to go to heaven because if he did, he would not get to come back to his real home -- the home in which he lives now. I want the home in which I live now to be like heaven, too -- I want it to the be the home I live in always, the unchanging place where I spend my life.

For years, my heart has been torn between the paradise of California (and all the blessings -- most notably my job -- that this place affords me) and the place I still find myself calling "home," back in the northeastern part of the country. (How odd for my son to hear me say this when we visit. "No, Dad, this isn't home!" he reminds me, "our home is in California!") But after my summertime sojourn with my brother in Michigan, after that extended, two-week contact with my close-knit family, I began to pray for discernment about where I wanted to live. (I know, I know -- praying to discern what I want, as opposed to what God wants. I shall return to this. Not long after, I found that my attachment to the west had waned, while my longing for "home" had welled up. I began daydreamy searches on Realtor.com for houses near my hometown, a practice I had to give up before it became an obsession.

My desire for permanence extends to other realms as well: I was horrified when I heard that the average American will change jobs seven times in his life. I want my job to be my job; I want the stability that my father has in his job as a professor at a state university. But the one permanence excludes the other. Moving is not really an option right now -- my job, fantastic in nearly every respect, is tied to this place, and there isn't much of a market for my talents.

And then I stumbled upon this one property, just outside my hometown's city limits. A former nursery, planting beds everywhere, working apple orchard and blueberry patch. Twenty acres, mostly wooded, backing up on a university-run nature preserve. Four bedrooms, three baths, built by the man who lives there. And at a price that reflected the region's depressed economic status. It looked like paradise. I sent my mother to look at it. I started praying for a sign. I had no prospects, no reasonable expectation, but still I prayed. (I had convinced myself that once I was "home," I would stop wanting to move, that I would have found my resting place. Of course, there is no guarantee of this. "Home" is not heaven, after all.

So I was kneeling in Mass after receiving communion, praying for a sign that would point eastward, when this came to me. "You are ambitious, and you must actively seek to overcome this ambition."

Oh, it was a painful moment. My heart wrapped itself around my desire and moaned in protest. "There is nothing sinful in wishing to be somewhere else! He wants to be close to his family, a positive good!"

"Ambition is opposed to gratitude -- you have had blessings rained down upon you, but all you can see is what you lack. Ambition is opposed to submission; God has put you where you are for your own good. Your dissatisfaction, the suffering that comes from your distance from your family, may be just what you need."

It's not that I think it wrong to ever ask for anything from God besides holiness; it's just that my desire here has ugly aspects and balks at the idea of submitting should God oppose it.

So it may not be enough to finish every prayer of petition -- "Please help me move" -- with the statement, "Not my will, but Thine." It may not even be enough to move that statement to the front of the prayer, giving the submission of will a priority in time as well as being. It may be required to remove the petition altogether, along with the desire which gives rise to it. (Is that really necessary? I'm honestly not sure. Another matter for prayer-- the increase of which, at least, is something good coming out of all this unrest.)

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