“In my beginning is my end . . . In my end is my beginning.

~T.S. Eliot (Four Quartets)

I was in an unfamiliar room in a large house with strangers when a man reached for my hand and said:”Come on, kid, let’s go home.” I looked up at him, wondering silently, “Where is home? AND who are you?”

In retrospect, I know this incident must have happened sometime before I was three-years-old. I have to believe that someone would have named this man for me as being my Dad. However, I had no body-felt sense of relationship with him or a sense of where home was for me. How could I have at this point of my journey considering the circumstance of my beginnings?

I was three weeks old when my Dad, then barely eighteen years old, left to serve in WWII. When he returned he assumed he was coming home to be a husband and a Dad. To his dismay, he discovered that my mother had long since abandoned their marriage and me. Seemingly, both his wife and child were gone.

After doing some detective work, my Dad found me in the home of Mrs. Schultz, an elderly widow of German descent who spoke broken English. I had arrived in her care after a series of unsuspecting babysitters discovered that my mother had no intention of either picking me up at night or paying them for taking care of me. Her motivation to seek them out was apparently two-fold: 1.] freedom from the responsibility of being a mother and 2.] avoidance of pressure by my Dad’s family members who had become aware of her gross neglect of me. God alone knows how many babysitters’ homes I lived in the year before Mrs. Schultz’s house became the final one in which my mother left me.

When my Dad said, “Come on, kid, let’s go home,” he would be returning me to Mrs. Schultz’s house. As it turned out, her house became my home for at least another eight months while my Dad, picking up the pieces of his life, lived elsewhere. Unlike my mother, he returned to visit and sometimes took me places with him before returning me “home.” With time, I came to know him as my Dad and gained some sense of being home when I was with him.

In my twenties, my quest to know “where is home?” resurfaced in light of a growing hunger to know where home was within myself and subsequently to make sense of the circumstances of my history. Hitting up against a world of unresolved loss and pain, I called out to God for comfort and truth. A huge shift came – I began to realize I was deeply loved from the inside-out. As the healing process continued to unfold, so did my need/desire to yield no less than all of me – mind, heart, and eventually BODY – to the source of this love. The path proved to be an ever-deepening doorway that revealed a spacious inner sanctuary where I came to know oneness with God. In this sacred inner home, my Soul Core-Self realized God had been with me from my beginning.

A key element to the healing of what I call the pain of the ages [i.e., unresolved generational pain passed down] is to remember that we are not our circumstance. We are not bound by them; no matter how powerless we may feel in the face of them. The door to freedom opens up when we consciously become aware to the truth: we are born into this temporal world, of time and space, as Soul-centered beings – loved and wholeness bound. By divine design, our lives are a continuous unfoldment of this wholeness. Built into the maturation process [i.e., healing and integration] is the call to keep returning home to our Soul where we can consciously deepen into this truth.

Where is home?” is a universal question that we all ask in one form or another throughout our lives. Our Soul is our starting place – the home of eternal love, belonging, security, authentic connection, joy, vitality, truth, guidance, wisdom, meaning, and purpose. It is in returning home to our Soul that we then can put into perspective the circumstances of our temporal life within the truth of our timeless story.

“We shall not cease from exploration

And the end of all our exploring

Will be to arrive where we started

And know the place for the first time.”

~ T. S. Eliot (Four Quartets)

If you’d like to continue exploring this theme further, please take a look at my reference materials:

Suggested Soul Practice & Reflection:
A Home of Your Own & Returning Home

Suggested Book:
Coming Home to Myself – Reflections for Nurturing a Woman’s Body & Soul, by Marion Woodman and Jill Mellick