Home is Where the Heart is

I openly admit to not liking the guttural sound of the German language. My best friend spent a number of years living in Germany while her husband was serving in the U.S. Army there, so we playfully disagree on the ‘beauty’ of the language. She loves the German language while I agree with Irish comedian Dylan Moran. “You couldn’t speak German because it’s a horrible sound. It sounds like typewriters eating tin foil being kicked down the stairs.”

I have succeeded in finding one magical word in the German language that I have come to treasure and identify with deeply. As an American, this word doesn’t exist in my country, but I vote that it should.

“Fernweh.” To English speaking people, it sounds like “Fairn -vay.”   The literal meaning is “far-woe.”  This word is the opposite of the German word, “Heimweh,” from ‘heim’ meaning ‘home’+ ‘weh,’ meaning ‘woe.’     Homesick and farsick. Fernweh is the yearning to see faraway places.  It’s not just wanderlust, though.

Let’s look at homesickness. First described by Swiss medical student Johannes Hofer (1669-1752.) The doctor-to-be created the word “nostalgia” in his 1688 thesis, combining the Greek terms nostos (for “returning home”) and algia (for “pain”) to describe an entirely new disease. Hofer described the disease as, “The pain a sick person feels because he is not in his native land or fears never to see it again.”  

Hofer personally observed patients becoming quite physically ill while away from home, but once they returned, the patients made a complete recovery. Nostalgia was actually an accepted medical diagnosis for soldiers to be discharged from their military service, albeit a looked down upon diagnosis.
 

Homesickness is truly more than a feeling. The word ‘sick’ is not a misnomer.  Joshua Klapow, a clinical psychologist and associate professor of public health at the University of Alabama at Birmingham states that homesickness takes one of two routes in the body.

“One is more of an anxiety bucket. You feel it in your stomach ― it’s an unease in which you feel uncomfortable, nervous, anxious, stressed, tense because you’re in a place or situation that’s not familiar, that triggers your fight-or-flight response.”  

 The other response is associated more with grief.  Klapow explains, “The comfort of home becomes like a person you’ve lost and miss, you may have some obsessive preoccupation with home and what you’re missing, comparing everything in your day to your experience back home, and that can create a lot of sadness.”

So, fernweh is the opposite of heimweh, but I believe it is no less powerful. The rising rates of depression, anxiety and suicide during this global pandemic probably have a direct correlation with our inability to travel to faraway places and give our bodies and souls a respite from the stress.

Personally, I have spent an inordinate amount of time inside my imagination during the pandemic. In my mind, I have felt the warmth of the Mediterranean sun as I climb the Italian hillsides, where breezes laced with the scent of lemon trees caress my face. I see myself sitting in a chair, bones being warmed by the sun, drinking limoncello, listening to the sound of the surf and forgetting all the cares of my everyday life. Italy is the place of my ancestors. A home away from home, and my heart longs to be there. 

I have a powerful case of fernweh, and sometimes it literally hurts like grief.

But there are days when my fernweh is for a place for which there is no map, no guidebooks, no travel websites. Heaven.

The Bible says in Philippians 3:20-21, “But our citizenship is in heaven. And we eagerly await a Savior from there, the Lord Jesus Christ, who, by the power that enables him to bring everything under his control, will transform our lowly bodies so that they will be like his glorious body.”

Heaven is where my passport begins and ends. My homesick and farsick, all in one glorious destination. I am not a citizen of Earth; I have a temporary visa.  Heaven is the place where my Lord and Savior dwells, and that is my home.

As comedian Tim Hawkins says, “If you’re a believer in Jesus, man, death should be a party. ‘Death where is thy sting?’  I ain’t afraid of death – bring it – not right now…..”

I agree with Tim. I am not afraid of death. I’m not rushing it either. But after I have had my fill of Italian hillsides and limoncello, Jesus is going to be there in heaven waiting to welcome me with a new body and supernatural landscapes that my mind cannot conceive of.

No more heimweh. No more fernweh. I will be at home in my faraway place, praising Jesus, as promised.

I hope to see you there.

6 comments