Exile

There are lots of directions I feel led to go with this. Lately, I’m intrigued by this word. Exile. Webster’s says it’s about self-imposed absence, or enforced removal from “one’s native country”. The way I’m thinking about it, it has a more expansive definition. “Exile” for me, is the spiritual and emotional experience of being separated from my home, my abode, or from my “homeland”.
Archetypally, the Garden of Eden represents the homeland from which humans were once and for all sent into exile. The Bible describes periods when the people of Israel were taken out of their “promised land” into exile, to live “dispersed” among the nations. The phenomenon of Zionism within the Jewish tradition is the conviction that God will return the people from their exile and once again restore them to that land of promise. The creation of the nation of Israel in the 20th century is seen by many as the fulfillment of that promise.
I’m considering lots of other kinds of exile in the world today. The Native Americans driven off their rich, ancestral lands to live in places they have no relationship with. The people of Tibet violently chased away from their homeland by the Chinese. Africans captured from the land that sustained them for millennia, and shipped to the western hemisphere to fuel the industrial age. There are many more examples of people who have become exiles as the result of war and conquest.
Sometimes people are exiled because of natural disasters. People become refugees – seeking “refuge” from floods or pestilences or political dangers. But just moving from one’s hometown to a strange city can feel like being “in exile”. Today I’m thinking sadly about the growing population of homeless people in our country who have been evicted from their homes, their abodes. We have an entire lexicon of words to describe many kinds of exilic experience: eviction, displacement, marginalization, expatriation, immigration, emigration … you can think of others.
Christian tradition has picked up this idea and effectively taught that the earth is not our home; that we can’t count on living safely and securely in relationship to the material world; that we must hope (and work!) for a place in our real home, in heaven. Certainly that’s how the modern era has shaped our experience. But Jesus taught something different. “The ground upon which you stand is your home; The Earth is the domain of Divinity”.
I think this religious mistake is largely responsible for leading us to this critical moment in global survival. I want to see it corrected.