Spiritual homelessness is a way of naming the aftermath of spiritual homelessness that many survivors of childhood violence experience. Survivors often have an all-consuming desire to belong, to find home, to be at home. The attempt to find a community of belonging - a material, psychic, spiritual home - as a source of solidarity and companionship for the healing journey too often involves the survivor miming acceptable responses to their abuse and healing. Traditional metaphors for God and understandings of suffering place the burden for the ongoing suffering of trauma upon the victim. Meanwhile, mainstream, idealized mythos of home and belonging, spoken about in Christian tradition, places arrival or homecoming in an after-this-world realm. While some survivors adapt to a certain religiosity, others come to recognize that dominant metaphors, images of God, languages of sin, and explanations of suffering do not fit their experiences. So they look elsewhere. They search. While there is a healing, and I would argue holy, quest at work, often this seeking and searching is misunderstood and judged. A false stability is prized over what is misnamed as instability. I suggest that the universal and ancient practice of pilgrimage can become a form of homemaking to aid in the journey of healing. The practice and metaphor of pilgrimage offers an additional way of understanding home as more than a destination; a place that one returns to when the pilgrimage is completed. Instead pilgrimage as homemaking opens up imaginative ways to explore one’s self “on pilgrimage” as Dorothy Day expressed it. Pilgrimage as homemaking offers ways to explore that God travels with us and makes her home within us.
NOMADIC ONE 
Near Valdez Alaska
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