Banishment. From paradise? From your nest? From your old home? It is a stimulus, not a misfortune that falls upon you and drags you down. Rather, it is a driving force that carries you onward and upward, that spurs you on. If your life collapses, and your surroundings or your circumstances cast you out, then you must seek new circumstances, new surroundings. Some will go with you, and some will be left behind. If you come with me, I will go with you…
This is the taking of a new homeland. It is as if a people were moving into a new land with all its joys and achievements, but with its hardships and limits too. And we are not only beautiful, clever and strong, but at times ugly, foolish and frail as well. But we belong together, we go together. You may call yourself fortunate if one day you take stock of your life and understand, at peace, that you must live it out in the circumstances given, with the people who surround you. This is real peace, true tranquillity. Not the bitterness of resignation, but the joy of acceptance. For how beautiful is human community, when we embrace our belonging together. Then a veil falls over the blemishes, for they will always be there, but that does not matter. If we lean on one another, we go further. And for practising love, the lovable, the kind and those easy to handle are just as fit as the simple, the ungifted, the last. For everyone is needed. If God is no respecter of persons, how can man be one? Only malice is hard to handle, for it casts one out of the circle of love.
Murmuring is counted a deadly sin. Nothing is good enough for the man who murmurs, for in a fool, teaching stirs anxiety, not discernment. In the new homeland there must be new rules. If you want to build a golden age and a golden civilisation, you need golden rules. Shake yourself, leave the shadow of the past behind you, and bring only its lessons with you! A new beginning has its bloom – anything may come of it.
It is as if a hard era were closing when you declare: the hard times are over! What has been until now, with all its angularity and friction, was the age of materiality and a material mindset, of purification through strife. But let the new time be round: vital, alive. Let it be a time of growth, of practising love!
Taking a new homeland is a foundation. Setting out or banishment is its beginning, but settling is its end. Taking a homeland is the pledge that somewhere you will feel at home. Your future turns on the months and years that lie ahead of you. Greater responsibility, greater self-reliance are called for; one must step forward. A new homeland also means a new spirit, a new life, as if you were born again. A new life begins with the taking of a new homeland. And such a new life is life too – it must have room for many things. Work and feast days, learning and forgetting, successes and failures, yes, failures too. And yet trust that life will unfold beautifully. Know how to rejoice and to grieve, to rest and to stay up all night, to make sacrifices and to be deadly serious, and at other times to play the fool and laugh with all your heart. I believe that this pleases God. Once, one spring, a friend of mine said to me:
– How I would love just to lie out in the meadow and gaze at the clouds as they drift across the sky!
– Do it! – I advised, for we must always have time for this. My friend did not; I did. My friend stayed behind; I went on.