Homesickness – Sunday, January 13, 1980
Of all the sicknesses which afflict man, homesickness is at once the easiest to contract and the most difficult to cure. For we can be exposed to this infirmity with a simple change of scenery or even a temporary move from familiar surroundings. We all remember our first extended leave from home: whether we were at camp, the home of relatives, or away at school—the symptom was always the same; it is the inexplicable longing for the one place we call home.
Homesickness is common to all people of all lands. As Sir Walter Scott observed:
Breathes there the man, with soul so dead
Who never to himself has said
This is my own, my native land?
Whose heart has never within him burned
As home his footsteps he hath turned
From wandering on a foreign strand?1
With these words Scott has also suggested the remedy for homesickness. For of all the maladies known to science, homesickness is the only one where the cure and the cause are the same. The only cure for homesickness is home.
The treatment, however, must include more than a return to a specific town, a certain street, a particular house. It must also involve more than a renewed acquaintance with familiar friends or neighbors. The longings and nostalgia we have for home are dependent upon more than people and locations, much more.
A good home is the only spot of all the places under the wide heaven where we are always sure of understanding; it is the one place that will take us in regardless of our failures and mistakes; it is the place where acceptance is not dependent upon wealth or success; the place where we can be happy just being ourselves; hopefully the place where love is always present.
Yes, the longings to return to this type of home are painful. But it is a pleasant pain, a pain which we happily bear. For even more painful than being unable to return home, would be never to have had a home to return to.
1 Sir Walter Scott. “Native Land” A Treasury of Great Poems, Simon and Schuster, 1942. p 660
“The Spoken Word” heard over KSL and CBS from the Tabernacle, Temple Square, Salt Lake City, Utah, January 13,1980 11:30 a.m. to 12:00 noon, Eastern Time Copyright 1980 Bonneville Productions
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January 13, 1980
Broadcast Number 2,630