The Land That Makes Us Exiles

With full credit to Phil Chevron who wrote “Thousands Are Sailing,” recorded brilliantly by the Pogues on their album “If I Should Fall from Grace with God,” let me quote two lines from this song:

“Where e’er we go, we celebrate
The land that makes us refugees.”

The Pogues of course sing of the bittersweet experience of Irish emigrants and the land that exiled them. It is not merely that they look to Ireland as the land from which they were exiled; they look to Ireland as the land that by its very history and nature made them exiles. Yet the response of the overseas Irish is no simple alienation, no absolute turning from and repudiation of Ireland. Rather, wherever they go they lift a glass to celebrate that very land which made them refugees.

Transmute this to Christian terms. We celebrate heaven, the realm that makes us, not refugees, but certainly exiles in this world. As citizens of heaven, we know that this world, between creation and eschaton, is not our home. Would it not be far simpler and easier to be at home fully in this world, in this life? That cannot be because God has broken into our existence and inaugurated a new realm and new life through Jesus Christ. Thereby God in Christ, on the bittersweet cross, has transformed us into exiles.

Or rather, God has transmuted our exilic status. Once exiles from heaven in this world because of sin, we are now exiles of heaven in this world because of salvation. We cannot feel at home in this world. We feel daily the dis-ease of living in this world which falls so far short of God’s good and beautiful creation and redemption. We long to be at home and live in heaven. And so while the experience of heaven we have in this life by virtue of God’s coming to us in Jesus makes us know and acutely feel our exilic status, we actually celebrate that which makes us exiles. Wherever we go, we raise a cup and celebrate the land that makes us exiles us in this world, so that we are nevermore at home truly and fully in this life again.

A more devout person than I might object and point out that it is this life which makes us exiles, not heaven. I would agree, I suppose. Such is the technically correct theological perspective. Yet it lessens none at all the sense of exile, and it will not be in the next life that we experience exile but in this one. Here and now we are exiles. It is not heaven where we begin but here. Take heaven off the map, and we might come to feel truly at home here (albeit though death lurks as the final destroyer of such). Yet the announcement and inauguration of the kingdom of heaven in this world shakes to the core any sense of at-home-ment in this life. Hence, sailing one way or another, we arrive at being exiles celebrating that which makes us know and experience that we are indeed exiles in this world. This is much a part of the paradox of penultimate Christian existence.