By Ozodi Osuji
Three years ago, with retirement in mind, I pondered where to live. I liked the small town in which I did my undergraduate studies and decided to visit it and see if it is still attractive to me. I visited and stayed in a motel, rented a car, and went to most nooks and crannies of it. The town that was very welcoming and felt like home when I was a college kid now looked desolate; I felt in it as one feels in an abandoned town with nothing lively in it. What happened to give me this sense of desolation?
The town still looked as it did in the days when I was a student there. It cannot be the physical aspects of the town that gave me the desolate feeling; it must be something in me, something I now brought to the town.
I visited other towns to check them out, and in each I had the same eerie feeling that something was missing. I did not feel at home; I felt homeless in these towns.
Where then would I feel at home? Have I ever felt at home in any town, or is the feeling of home in my imagination and not the reality of my existence? Where is my home, anyway? Is my home my childhood home, and where exactly was that?
Now that I think about it, I have always felt homeless. I did not have a stable home, not in childhood or in adulthood. In the city where I grew up, we were always moving from place to place, with no permanent and stable home; in my father’s ancestral village, which I often visited, I merely stayed for a little while and moved on.
In the USA, I moved from city to city for school or work and had no permanent home. Thus, my mind considers me homeless.
I have always been fascinated by the homeless people I see living on the streets of America. When I see the folks who are homeless, I wonder if I could be one of them. I seek a way to help them. But how do I help them?
They are the product of a vicious economic system that does not care for anyone. If you have money, you rent or buy a house, and if not, that is your problem; you can sleep on the streets, and that is no one’s headache.
How do you help the homeless? Give them a place to live, housing, food, clothes, medications; all that costs money, so you have to give them jobs. Who is going to do so in a capitalist dog-eat-dog economy where folks are told that life is a perpetual struggle where each person looks out for himself and not for other people?
(Years ago, I volunteered at a homeless shelter and even in a jail. I am a mental health professional and did some counseling in these settings. Many homeless people have mental health and/or drug addiction issues.)
Therefore, I cannot help the homeless. Many of them, I understand, prefer to be homeless and not have to worry about rent and fine clothing. Who am I to choose differently for other people?
I think that the origin of my sense of homelessness is spiritual rather than physical. I feel separated from God and heaven. Birth on earth is living in a place where there is no permanence, and things are always changing.
If so, it follows that the solution to my feeling of homelessness is for me to return to God and heaven. How do I do that?
Obviously, one does not have to kill oneself and die to return to God. Death is an illusion. One returns to God by realizing that one is part of God and tuning out one’s identification with the separated ego self in the body and embracing the spiritual side of one that knows itself to be one with the spirit that folks call God.
We are like the prodigal son who left his father and siblings’ home and wandered in a far-off country, failing at the many things he did to survive in the alien land and feeling lonely, and finally remembering that he has a father, a heaven, a home where he is welcomed, and that all he has to do is accept that he made a mistake in leaving home. So, he went back home and asked his father to welcome him back, and the father did exactly that.
One can build a physical church as a sanctuary for homeless folks to go to find refuge, but a church is also a temporary home; if you do not pay for maintenance of the building, it will collapse. Indeed, some church buildings are repossessed by the lenders who lent money with which they were built.
The only way to return home is to remember that one’s real home is in God, and to return to it spiritually.
In childhood, our physical world seems fascinating, but after a certain age it seems a desolate place, a place we feel not at home. The solution to that desolateness, the abandoned town feeling one feels in an old world, is to mentally return to one’s true home in spirit, in God. In real terms, this means living through one’s real self, the son of God who is one with God.
One’s real home is not one’s childhood home; that home, at any rate, is long gone; the houses are long gone; one’s parents are gone; the children one grew up with and played with on the streets are now either old or dead, and even if one can reconnect with those of them still alive, they cannot provide one with a feeling of belonging, again.
Our only home is in God.
If one is an atheist, one can accept nothingness and, upon death, disappear into the nothingness from which we came.
Once one grows past childhood, one’s home is not one’s childhood home with one’s parents, siblings, and peers at school. That happy world is gone. One cannot recreate the past.
What one can do is focus on loving relationships with people around one. Living lovingly with the people around one is actually the only way to feel at home in this world or any other world.
During our high school days, one of my cousins used to look at me in the face and tell me that I am pessimistic and ask me to try being optimistic. Apparently, he believed that folks can simply change their basic approach to existence. It does not work that way. Those blessed or cursed with thoughtfulness tend to be pessimistic. I have been pessimistic all my life. As Boethius said, Philosophy is the consolation for philosophers. Is a tendency toward pessimistic philosophy bad, or is the best approach to life the cheery attitude found in poets? Are Alexander Pope and William Blake preferable to Arthur Schopenhauer and Jean Paul Sartre?
Ozodi Osuji
September 15, 2026
