Carrying Home: Theoretical and Theological Reflections on the Politics of Attachment and Belonging

Each person has a deep, unconscious sense of what feels like home to them. Formed in one’s earliest experiences, the term home is another way to describe what psychoanalyst Christopher Bollas calls the “unthought known.” One’s unthought known creates a longing in one and motivates one to search for home—to recreate the earliest childhood experiences that feel like home. Theologically, we might say that the longing for home is, in part, the longing for God, wholeness, and what is Good. Homing, or the process of recreating home, is not a neutral process, however. Rather, it is one fraught with political, economic, and psychological challenges born of exclusion and injustice. Pastoral practitioners can facilitate processes of mourning, witness, agency, and change.