come on home

"I'll be home for Christmas... you can count on me... please have snow and mistletoe... and something about presents under the tree?") Apparentely I should look that up. Anyway. It's true. I'm coming home. Soon. December 15th actually. Let me tell you why.

Some time last Spring, in what could best be termed traveller's greed (and in typical Hannah fashion) I decided that if I have a plane ticket to India, I might as well see as much as I can while I'm there. I decided to wander. I wanted to go to Nepal. To Thailand. And all over India. (Not to mention to Cambodia and Myanmar... but one has to be realistic.) So I decided to stay on after my four months of living in Kolkata with Word Made Flesh, and this became and remained the plan. Although it began to shift. When I got to Kolkata I began to understand something. That this trip was for me a living, breathing kind of faithfulness. I decided to give up most of my travelling. Now I would be living almost the whole time in Kolkata, with some weeks in Thailand.
Until recently when I began to realize how unsettled my heart felt. I wrote it off as homesickness and ignored it. Yet it was enough to keep me from actively working on the details of the trip, or feeling peaceful and expectant. This is when "the understanding" came. I believe God speaks clearly to some people. And perhaps even does to me. Although I also think we throw "God told me" around a dangerous lot in our faith culture. I've come to call it "the understanding" for lack of a better term. For me it means some combination of intuition and wisdom and I like to think... God. The understanding was that come Christmas, it was time for me to leave Kolkata. When the understanding comes, it usually comes quickly and crazily and leads me to do such things as drop out of college and move to India. For this reason it is something I both love and loathe. I find that as a person often guided by intuition and some intrinsic understanding, that there is always the danger of emotions interceding. I began to spend time listening and waiting. And sometimes speaking. Reminding God that on the deepest level I was not afraid to stay. That I was finding more of the depth of relationship by which I tend to measure the value of experiences. That I came here and fell apart even as I was put back together again. That Humpty Dumpty was scared to say goodbye. The longer I waited the more I knew that I needed to go home.

Many things have come from my time here. One of those things (and this has many parts) is that I can never seperate myself from the poor. I've seen and learned too much to walk away. Sometimes I curse these eyes and this knowledge, because I can never forget. But in this knowing there is also something that can only be described, as St. Francis did, as "perfect joy." In the meantime, there are people at home that soon will be moving apart to new cities, jobs, and husbands. I want to end with them what we started together. There are certain things that are as of now... unfinished. And would remain incomplete if I did not return. Whereas things here are reaching a stage of feeling settled as my time with Word Made Flesh draws to a close. I'm of course so very excited to be home to eat candy cane cookies and sit by the fire with my beautiful family. I'm looking forward to living with dear friends and joining Wild Hope on the streets again. I'm looking forward to Stumptown and sweaters. And of course listening to my Elvis Christmas tape in my Oldsmobile. I'm also grieving the loss of several months of teaching the children I've come to know at Shanti Dan. And leaving the women at Sari Bari who show incredible patience with my slowly developing Bengali skills. I wish I could learn more of what it means to be present in the Gach. To go in week after week and earn the right to call the women there 'my sister.' All of this I am still processing...

Through this I'm learning a few things about myself. Such is the nature of struggle. I'm seeing that sometimes I would seek adventure over constancy, even when this constancy is what I need (or what others need.) That sometimes I don't know the difference between everything and enough. And that sometimes, even gypsies have to stop their wandering and come on home.