I am part of a group of local colleagues that meets weekly to study and reflect on the lessons appointed for Sunday. I call it "The Clergy Lectionary Bible Study and Giggle Society". I attend faithfully because I always learn something new.
This week, I learned about “fernweh”. I think I’m pronouncing it correctly. It’s a German word: ‘fern’ meaning far and weh meaning ‘pain, misery or woe’. Fernweh, then is ‘far sickness’ – the opposite of homesickness (which is heimweh). It’s a longing for far-off places, especially those you’ve not yet visited. Of course, the Germans would have a word for such a thing.
It’s not exactly wanderlust, which is a strong desire to travel. As I understand it, wanderlust is a restlessness, an unsettled feeling that causes one not to stay too long in any one place.
Fernweh, is a longing for places where life would be better – greener, warmer, more beautiful than where one lives right now. It can be a real location or an imaginary place like Middle Earth or Narnia or Camelot, or as a crew member on the SS Enterprise in the series Star Trek.
It’s not ‘saudade’, something my grandmother used to talk about a lot. Saudade is a word in Portuguese which does not translate easily into English. The best way to describe it is to throw a bunch of similar words at it like: longing, loneliness, desire, melancholy, and incompleteness. Not one of those words is an exact translation but all of them together begin, at least, to point to the meaning of this deep emotional state.
My grandmother used to say she had ‘saudade’ for Portugal but she never wanted to ever return to her homeland. She grieved for her mother and missed her dearly but she did not have saudade for her. Grief is grief but it saudade is saudade. She would be sitting at the kitchen table while my grandfather sat napping on the living room sofa and say she had saudade for her husband.
“But, VaVoa,” I’d say, “he’s right there in the next room”.
“Yes,” she’d sigh, “but I have saudade for the man I married.”
Fernweh, I think, most accurately describes what I’m hearing in today’s scripture. It’s a longing for a place – real or imaginary – where life would be better. It’s a place you know in your heart exists but you’ve never been there before but are willing to travel great distances to get to it.
Fernweh helps me understand this passage from Jeremiah, known as ‘the weeping prophet’, as well as the words of the psalmist who sings, “My soul has a desire and a longing for the courts of the Lord; my heart and my flesh rejoice in the living God.”
Even Paul seems to want to infuse the people in Ephesus with fernweh as he writes to them that they may be given “a spirit of wisdom and revelation as you come to know him, so that, with the eyes of your heart enlightened, you may know what is the hope to which he has called you. . . .”
And, I think fernweh helps me understand why the Magi traveled so long and so far, following a star. The Magi were priests in the early religions of ancient Persia. They were seeking the one who had been prophesized to be the Messiah, the Savior of the world.
In following a star, they were following the dream of salvation. Coming from the East, their caravan could have taken up to 50 or 60 days to reach Bethlehem.
Their journey was fueled by the longing and desire which is buried deep the souls of every human being, to return home, home to the place none of us has ever been but the place where we are told human beings were born – Eden. The Garden of Paradise. Where we will be in right relationship with God once again.
I think some of us here have the same fernweh which drove the Magi to seek and find the Savior. We have this sense, this feeling, this inkling that there is this amazing vision of what this church, St. Paul’s Church, can be. We have a glimmer of what God is calling us to be and we would travel long distances in our imagination and creativity in order to be there, in that place.
Others of us have my grandmother’s saudade, that indescribable longing, that pining, for what once was. There is a sheet hanging outside the pastor’s office that’s titled, “What I Want the Vestry to Know.” Someone has written, “I miss my 8 o’clock friends.” The sadness of that – he longing of that, the pain of the grief of that – breaks my heart every time I read it.
I don’t know if we’ll ever return to an 8 o’clock service but I do know for certain that if we do, it will never be the same as it once was. It can’t be. That part of the life here at St. Paul’s is gone; it is over. And yet the memory of it lingers in the hopes and in the hearts of many people.
Some of us find ourselves midway between saudade and fernweh – between an indescribable longing for that which we can no longer have and that for which we long and desire. To leave behind what we once had and reach for something new and unknown feels disloyal somehow to what we once loved and cherished. And yet, others of us are deeply committed to the dream of what can be, to what we know is possible – even though we’ve never seen it and despite the obstacles and challenges ahead of us.
Here’s the thing about Matthew’s Gospel story of the Magi: The Holy Family welcomed the Magi – men who were from a different land and language, a different religion and a different social status, but had a dream of what was possible and came to pay homage to the bearer of that dream.
The Holy Family, perhaps with some hesitation (we don’t know, scripture is silent on a lot of facts about this event), perhaps with a measure of saudade – understanding that the safety once knew no longer shelters them – but perhaps accepting their gifts with the same spirit of fernweh with which they were given.
However, the Magi also welcomed the Holy Family into a dream of the unknown to which they had been called. They came bearing gifts. Gold: The dream of a better world. Frankincense: The dream of unequivocal forgiveness and unconditional love. Myrrh: The dream of preserving the promise of unlimited possibility and boundless hope. The dream of preserving the promise of justice and peace and yes, joy. Joy, anyway. Joy in spite of the challenges. Joy in the midst of the struggle.
You may have heard the news from Sharon, our Sr. Warden, who announced last Sunday that we finally have a signed Letter of Agreement between the diocese, the wardens and vestry and me. As I begin my first year with you as your pastor, I admit to you that I’m not at all certain of where we are going. I have an image, but frankly, it’s fuzzy. I only know that we have been called together to build a bridge from where we are now to where it is God wants us to be.
And I know that we need to build ourselves up because the vision is that, just as the Holy Family and the Magi were the vehicles of God’s will, we, ourselves, are that bridge.
We are the bridge from here to there. We are the ones we’ve been waiting for. We are the vision God has for this place. Small and humble as the Holy Family, and yet great things are possible.
I know this in the very core of my being.
I can also tell you that I aim to be faithful to the vision of the journey we are about to take together, fuzzy as it is for me and for some of you.
Let’s blame it on fernweh. Far-sickness. The longing to journey to a place we’ve never seen.
I also know that there are those who will tell us that we are being quite unwise. Oh, some have already told us that what we’re trying to do is not possible. Not exactly in compliance with the canons. Others have told us we can’t. Won’t. Shouldn’t. Indeed, the question could be asked: Who would undertake to build a bridge without knowing exactly, precisely where it was going?
Well, I know one answer to that: The Holy Family, for one. Had they known that this journey from Nazareth to Bethlehem would lead to Golgotha, I wonder if they would have said ‘yes’ to Gabriel.
Having said yes once, Joseph, at least, found him saying yes not to return home to Galilee, but to take a detour to Egypt. And even then, after their sojourn in Egypt (some say it was as long as 12 years), Joseph returned not to Bethlehem, which was his ancestral home and the place where Jesus were born, but to Nazareth, on the outskirts of Galilee, where they would attract little attention.
Another answer is The Magi. They only knew that a dream had been born. They saw it in the stars and sensed it in the core of their being. The Savior of the World had been born. They wanted to pay homage and to catch a glimpse of the possibilities that were now present.
Scholars call that An Epiphany – a manifestation, a showing; when something of the nature of The Divine of The Holy is being revealed. Not in concrete terms but in inklings and hunches, glimmers and dreams.
And so, here we are. You and I. Forming another Holy Family which is having our own epiphany about where we are and where we think we’re going – accepting even with unexpected detours.
We may not know where, exactly, the bridge we are building is going to be, but we do know one thing for certain which we learn from the Magi: If we follow the star, we’ll never be lost.
Amen.
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