Past Reflections

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August 16, 2009 - Exile is Not Always A Bad Thing

by Father Edward L. Beck, C.P.

When Laura Ling and Euna Lee were finally released from North Korea last week amid much fanfare, we all breathed a collective sigh of relief. We tried to imagine what it would be like to be detained for 140 days in a foreign country by complete strangers. When my mother was five years old she and her sister were placed in an orphanage by my grandmother who felt she could no longer care for them. I once asked my mother what it was like. She said, “It was awful. Everything familiar was ripped away from me.” I suppose that’s what’s it’s like to live in exile. Maybe we know that feeling at different times in our lives. A sudden illness, the dissolution of a marriage, the loss of a child, the betrayal of a loved one. Experiences that cause us to lose a sense of home and safety that we we’ve associated with that place or those people. But maybe there can be a positive side to such dreaded experiences. Maybe they can become the impetus to see that it’s ALL temporary and fleeting. Detachment can thrust us into realizing that ultimately we do stand alone in relationship to God and our world. But alone need not mean isolated. We live connected, however temporarily to people and places who become home for us. But they are not our final home. We know our ultimate goal is to construct a lasting home that has nothing to do with brick or mortar. And I don’t only mean after death. I mean that place of comfort inside that we take with us no matter where we are geographically. My grandmother eventually retrieved my mother and aunt from the orphanage and brought them home. But my mother always realized after that how tentative that home was. And she never took it for granted again. I suppose that’s something of what Laura Ling and Euna Lee are feeling now. But a deeper feeling may come with the realization that the love and support of their family and indeed a whole nation never allowed them to be very far from home. It is indeed where the heart is. But, as they now also know, it sure does feel good when heart, body and home can be all in one place.

TO WATCH FATHER BECK GIVE THE ABOVE REFLECTION, CLICK HERE: HOW DO YOU FIND HOME WHEN EXILED?