What does it mean to be an exile? I suppose you'd have to talk to one to understand; perhaps even an interview with an exile wouldn't give you much real information, either. You'd have to have been exiled. But the question is not, "What does it feel like to be an exile?" but rather, "What does it mean?"
"Meaning", used in this question, has the connotation of 'purpose': What is the end, the directing paradigm, the teleology of being an exile?
I can think of many types of exile in my life. First, a very concrete one at age ten, when I was forced to leave Greece, where my heart lived. I have never gotten over this, this splitting of my soul. Do exiles, the more deeply suffering ones, exiles from their home because of war, ever get over it? Do exiles, the political ones, ever get over it? Do exiles, the third-culture kind, like me, ever get over it?
I have read in many stories, especially of the medieval bent, how a hero or villain is "banished" and he pleads, begs, for some other punishment, even death. I have felt my heart go back to that time, at ten, when I also wished to run away from my parents (a child's version of wishing for death) rather than leave my beloved Anatolia, for some foreign place; I had some presentiment that it would not be a place which welcomed me, that I'd be somehow an outcast. I was right. But are we meant to become so entwined with a place, a physical place? What is the mystical connection between ourselves and a place comprised of dirt and rocks with some culture plastered on it? No, I know it is more than that. We are deeply connected to places because we are composite beings, and we humans, because we are also spiritual, imbue places with spiritual realities: even as children, we sense this and connect with all of it much more easily and deeply than we do even as adults. That is why the places and people of our childhoods always retain a certain luminosity, a magic, which never leaves many of us- perhaps until we visit and see its destruction. Then our hearts are broken.
I have also felt exiled from people I've loved. From childhood friends, from those I've loved on the crest of life and lost due to the changing, sometimes inexplicable currents of lives meeting and sundering. I have never forgotten, not in my heart, those moments of joy, and in those memories do I most chafe against a linear existence, one we cannot escape, in which those times of real love, in deep sweetness or in friendship become hard jewels set in the past. We cannot escape the linear nature of our existence; in fact, it has been ordained for our life on earth. So there must be a meaning in it, similar to the meaning of being an exile. Time itself creates the state of being an exile.
There is an old proverb, which I hate: "Love makes time pass, and time makes love pass." I hate it because I think that then it cannot be love. This is speaking more about pleasure, I think. Love does not pass, not real love. But how does an exile from loved ones go on in a healthy way? How does one re-invest, an important stage of grief, if time does not make love pass? And the most important question: how do we truly continue to love if the real person is not with us, at least from time to time? Does it become the unhealthy love between ourselves and a vaporous memory?
I have also been an exile from myself, in those periods when I have tried, for safety or love, to fit into a mold which others set out for me, and consequently lost my own voice. To lose oneself is part of the pain associated with both the concrete, physical exile from the soil we love and the exile from those we've loved and lost. When we left Greece, I had certain knowledge that I'd left part of myself there, that I could no longer live to the rhythm of joy and sunlight, that the sea and the colours of beauty and light were drained from me, and I went on my journey a shell of the person that I was. In rebuilding, trying to fit into a new culture, into an extended family whom I did not know, into a culture which seemed gritty and twisted, I lost myself for many years. I lost my God because I had no real face or voice left with which to know Him. But as my sister, my partner in this loss, once said in a song, "You danced with me, through a bend in time." And He does.
Sin itself, trespassing the moral law, also creates in us an exile from ourselves, from our real face which is always before God, and destroys the true love which is the bridge between ourselves and reality, and the 'other-ness' of those we are called to love as well as the ultimate Other, our God. And sin can take larger, social forms, such as trying to be in the inner circle, to please others for the sake of advancement or to create a facade, becoming a fake of ourselves. All this is deep, hellish exile beside which the physical exile because of war or simple loss becomes a potential portal of growth and hope.
For me, my physical exile from the land of my blood and heart has made me feel like a wanderer, of sorts, on the face of the earth. I have struggled for an identity, and held understandings with other third-culture kids, understandings like the lighting of one candle to another. I have felt myself a citizen more of the world, and had no phobic patriotism which might blind me to the actions of the country in which I hold citizenship. I have become a culture-explorer and discovered richness everywhere; and in the pain, I have grown to understand how to discern bad culture from good, however amateur and often mistaken I've been at times.
There is still the question of exile originating in a linear existence, of the loss of those we love in this life, and the question of how love lives, real love, based in real people and not just memory. I think that there is an essential, real, eternal person inside each of us, and true love, rather than being blind, has true sight. If we love, we can see more like God. We see, if we truly love, the potential, the person that ought to be, whom God wills, whom God is trying to accomplish despite flaws and sin. If we love, we become co-conspirators with God in helping this person become what he or she should be. This is true, I think, for the love of friendship as well as eros, although the love of eros has an arrow-like strength for the melding of two persons into each other, and in a mysterious way, echoes the love of God for the soul, in that in becoming loved by God, we begin to be melded into Him, to become like Him: although mysteriously, this love, if true, and moral, always retains and enhances our uniqueness. Eros, and the love of God, is a beautiful paradox, and the person we love, whether with us in the day-to-day or not, is truly with us in essential things. Is the only thing that can separate us the marring of sin which destroys, in the end, the person meant by God? I do not know, but the person who loves always sees, and hopes, like God always loves and hopes.
So we see something eternal and real, and non-linear, when we love truly. This does not pass with time. There are those whom I have seen again after ten or twenty years, or more, and knew as I knew them so long ago: it is expressed in, "we picked up where we left off". I believe that part of the fear of loving is the fear of the loss of self, of exile, and of loss in a linear existence. But this fear is a half-truth, because in love, we are multiplied, we can become more ourselves even as we give ourselves away, and love does not die or impoverish, even in loss in this life. It is not easy, and there is pain, there is real exile. But there is hope, not necessarily for the consummation of real love in this world, but hope nonetheless. It is why people who have faith in a good God can continue through great loss, and even in time, grow though it.
I have felt my soul stretched and raw, when I've been through a leaving, an exile made necessary by circumstance, sin, or choice-for in every choice there is a yes and a no; and sometimes I have felt that I was, as Bilbo says in The Hobbit, "like butter spread over too much bread"; and like Frodo, feeling that some wounds do not heal with, or in, time. But still, I will to believe in love, in love that does not pass with time, a love found again in the ultimate eucatastrophe, or sudden turn from bad to good, that is found with God after this life. God willing I will make it there, past this exile. I hope it looks like Greece, too.
Perhaps the real meaning of exile, of a linear existence, is to test us in our hope, our love, and to teach us the real meaning of home- for as it is said, and I like this much better, "the darkness helps us to understand the true value of the light." Or something like that. I could change it, like this: "being an exile shows us the true meaning of home."
Or, perhaps, I just want too much and should just be more easy come, easy go. However, like Gandalf says at the end of The Return of the King, "Not all tears are an evil"; in other words, some things, some necessary exiles and goodbyes deserve the honor of tears. To deny this is to become flippant and shallow, I think, or to become a person who embodies the life equivalent of a womanizer. A lifenizer, in the endless search for the easy life, the perfect situation, quick-releasing anything that requires the risk of pain, or exile.
Maybe I can still believe in endless, eternal love, and be the exile of solemn joy traipsing through a field on a full spring day- like the Mole in The Wind in the Willows, who leaves his home and marvels in the River and the Rat, rejoicing in what is, what will be with God. And yet even the loving, happy Mole, upon scenting his old home in the midst of deep winter, weeps about the loss of it after so many months away. And, in one of the most beautiful metaphors on friendship, the Rat puts his impatience with all this weeping aside and helps the Mole find his home; then as they find that his home has been left in a shambles, the Mole weeps again in his shame over having the well-to-do Rat see his humble abode. But the Rat, with true charity, "-praised everything he saw, and said, 'Why Moley, you've a capital little place here! Capital!' " And they feast, as only love can do, on the remains of a sausage. It is a moment of kairos, a time when the love of God breaks through into existence and exile.
For you, you exile full of angst, and sorrow, do you not know, exile, that I know every hair of your head...that I know when each lark falls to the ground, and you, you are worth many of these...
