We heard Bernard O Donoghue’s poem Westering Home, (read it here) the story of the poet driving home to Ireland through Wales and how he senses that Ireland becomes present the further west you go:

“driving west through Wales
Things start to feel like Ireland…”

but its not the chapels or the buzzards, not the mountains which give the poet his sense of home approaching, it is says Donoghue;
“…the architecture of the spirit;
The old thin ache you thought that you’d forgotten-
More smoke, admittedly than flame;
Less tears than rain. And the whole business
Neither here nor there, and therefore home.”
(from Westering Home in Here nor There, Chatto, 99)
I love that and I instinctively know what it means, “neither here nor there and therefore home”.
Perhaps we can be at peace with being out of place, dis-located, neither here nor there.

And Talia Gutin’s reading spoke of the strange experience of ‘Fernweh’, a German word meaning far-sickness instead of homesickness, which I read as a homesickness for a place you’ve never been to…

I ve been interested in this idea for a long time; homesickness for a home you ve never been to. Perhaps like the sensation of nostalgia for a past that you never had. Both these seem to speak to a strangeness an other-ness. and otherness is something our spirituality must remain open to, which we must recognise if our spiritual life is going to be more than just a comfort zone.
And this is a paradox, because in order for our spirituality to be effective it must always to some degree keep us searching, keep us from the sensation that we’ve arrived.
There s a great passage in Moby Dick by Herman Melville (who was a Unitarian by the way, there are records that he failed to keep up payments on his pew rent – so he was the best kind of Unitarian) its the 23rd chapter and in it Melville explains that in a storm the most dangerous place a ship can be is close to shore, because no matter how much the sea-farer may look longingly at the port, and the lights of the houses of those safe and dry at home, to get any closer would mean being smashed on the rocks. Melville warns of the dangers of security, of being too settled or too tempted by the lure of apparent security.
In our terms there is a correlative with the gospel stories of Jesus’ refusal to engage with the temple tradition, his antagonism with the guardians of a certain kind of religiosity. Neither on the mountain nor in the temple he says repeatedly in different ways, not the dogmatic but the pure, not the showy but the humble, not the rich but the destitute and the prostitute are the people of God, give a way all you have and follow me he says, renounce security…

Strangeness points us towards a spirituality which can hold true to itself but which can also accept the plurality and multitude of other spiritual perspectives.  According to Richard Kearney this is not relativism but relationalism, dwelling in a spirituality which holds relation with other spiritualities – and with secularity:
The sacred… has the potential to keep the secular on its toes, never content with itself, always compelled to imagine and reimagine new modes of living democracy, more just, more creative, more hospitable. And the secular for its part can serve the salutary role of keeping the sacred from being hijacked by theistic fundamentalists. To secularise the sacred is to bring it back into the body of time where living beings act and suffer. To sacralise the secular is to remind liberal democracies that there are always neglected strangers, not only at their gates but in their midst” Richard Kearney,  Anatheism, Colombia p.145

This recognition of the stranger in our midst is essential,  but not simply the stranger in our society, the newcomer, or refugee but the stranger within ourselves.  The intimate stranger who misses a home she’s never been to, or who longs for a past he was never in, the stranger who experiences feeling suddenly at home in a place you ve never visited before or identifies immediately with a person you meet for the first time, one you’ve never seen before – who might well ask, like Nasruddin: then how did you know it was me?