"How does it feel," goes the famous refrain of Bob Dylan's song, "to be without a home, like a complete unknown, like a rolling stone?
     Most of us reading this blog have a home, a place to which they can go, a base from which they can plan and carry on with their life.  Most of us have a memory of a beginning.
     Too many others, however, do not.  Too many human beings, the flower of God's creation, wander across the planet, alone and forgotten, shorn of beginning, stripped of base, trekking through landscapes, mental and physical, which have no place for them. Too many of us have nowhere to go.
     It's easy to say that home is a state of mind, and it is easy to make home a set of experiences if we have a home already.  Many decades ago, as I tramped alone through incredibly remote stretches of the mountains of northern Alaska, I knew that when I came out, I have somewhere to go.  I knew I had a tangible destination.  I had no trouble picturing home as a concept.
     To be without home, to be bereft of base, lost and deprived of all linkage to the world, is to lose something vital to human flourishing.  It is to lose hold of what, in part, has made us who we are.  We may be here, we may be there, but we are unknown:  like a rolling stone.
     Yet even if we are known, to ourselves as well as others, we remain essentially alone. The transience of this existence guarantees it.  One day, even those whom we consider to be our closest friends will be gone, be it before or after we pass.  Nothing, as someone wrote as he watched lava swarm over the ancient Roman city of Pompeii, lasts forever. We walk in a world that, without any God or eternity to see it, is in truth like a rolling stone, great, amazing, and magnificent, yet fated to forever roam through a trackless cosmos.
     Is this really all there is?