So deeply embedded in the world’s dream of freedom, youth, art, and pleasure has this city become, that the feeling that the stranger has in Paris, is a feeling of return.—John Clellon Holmes, A Wake in the Streets of Paris

Recently, but far across the Atlantic Ocean, my husband and I rented a pair of rickety old bicycles and rode through the French countryside from the train station at Vernon to the little village of Giverny and the gardens of my beloved artist, Claude Monet. I had read in a travel guide that Monet’s gardens seem strangely nostalgic for fans of his artwork. Indeed, the Japanese bridge strung over the opaque waters of the lily pond, the beds of wild red poppies, nasturtiums, daisies, and sunflowers, and the climbing roses blooming overhead on iron rods looked astonishingly beautiful and familiar.

It was like stepping beyond a veil of paint and canvas into the world that Monet so loved and so frantically and compassionately attempted to capture in his paintings. It was as though I had been there before, as though I had already known these imaginative gardens. Monet had inhaled the air of this garden, the colors of the light, sky, and leaves, and exhaled onto hundreds of canvases, the land as he loved it. And because of that, turning each bend in that marvelous garden was like more like returning to a destination long known and loved.

I’ve felt that peculiar nostalgia elsewhere in Europe. Sometimes it is as oblique as a fleeting notion that filters in through an open window with the light of dawn, or the simple lines of the landscape flowing past the window of a train car. I have seen glimpses of little towns with hewed stone houses that I could call home and have known God’s presence in the echoing silence of village churches. I have felt at home drifting through the labyrinth of Paris’s metro system and over the blindingly blue Adriatic Sea and have loved the song of languages that are not my own.

And now that we have come home to the suburbs of Northern California, I find myself missing the cities of Europe and likewise the colors of the countryside, and all those parts of Europe where I have wandered. I do not know how to explain it—this longing for a land that I loved at first sight years ago and that I miss so viscerally. It is more than a tourist’s joy at seeing the Eiffel Tower glittering like a jewel against the night sky, more than a collage of obscure memories: of street music filling metro tunnels, the lilt of the French language, and the showering of images typically seen only in art history books. It is even more than the sense of being securely cradled in the palm of God, as I so often feel in the damp, cool stone caverns of chapels and cathedrals across Europe. It is the feeling of being at home more than anywhere else in the world.

So will we ever pick up and move to Europe? Maybe. Maybe never. Time is slippery, and so is life. It takes us on journeys we never intended, teaches us lessons we never thought to learn. I’m on the ride, sometimes steering, sometimes letting go and staring at everything whizzing by. Really, there is beauty and truth and poetry in every landscape, in every language. And there is possibility everywhere we find ourselves. And so for now I’m simply grateful to know what it is to feel at home somewhere in the world. I’m grateful to know what it is to be alive—and to belong: pieces of me belonging to Europe, to California, to art, to words, to chapels in which I have found God, and all of me belonging to myself, and yet also to my beloved, and yet in a larger sense to God. Belonging is important. And, accordingly, place too is important.

I have returned from Europe with the conviction that we ought to honor the sacredness of place and the profound impact of beauty on life and spirituality. The miracle of the artist in Monet was in the genius of his eye as much as his hand. He spent much of his life seeing, absorbing, and recreating what his eye saw.

Likewise, I think we ought to see and make of our lives, our worship places, and our pockets of belonging, something like an impressionist’s work of art. I mean this, both in an allegorical sense in which we absorb and recreate kindness, grace, and simplicity, and also in a literal sense in which we honor visual art, beauty, and architecture in our sacred places, in the various modules of our lives, and in the places we call home. We ought to embrace and honor the small embodiments of heaven that we find here, so that we may more fully appreciate the heaven to come. We may be just passing through this earthly home, but undeniably with the gift of being able to comprehend and create beauty.

In the Protestant church in downtown Heidelburg, one side of the church is lined with traditional stained glass windows, whereas the other is lined with recreated modern stained glass art on spiritual concepts. It is a bold union of ancient and modern. During much of the week, tourists file through the church staring quietly at these windows, but this architectural beauty is not simply a tourist site; it is also—and perhaps primarily—an active place of worship. The same is true of the famed Notre Dame of Paris, and of thousands of other churches and cathedrals across Europe. People worship within these magnificent, ancient works of art and make of them spiritual homes. It’s a beautiful reality and one that threads a little bit of heaven into earth, I think.

Several years ago, my mother and I were looking out a train window over the bucolic Swiss landscape. Tiny villages lay woven into gentle knolls and valleys. In the distance, stood the snow-crested Alps. "This is just how I imagine heaven will look," my mother said. I knew exactly what she meant. I’ve felt little bits of heaven, flickering realizations of God’s presence, in Paris, in lily pads in Monet’s garden, in the ivory curves of the Pieta in the Vatican, in love given and returned like breathing, in morning streaming through windows across the earth . . . in so many earthly vessels containing the light of heaven.

Therein are the tiny threads of awe and soul-moving hope with which I weave, slowly and delicately, my image-in-making of heaven. I hope that when I step through those pearly gates, it will feel like I’ve already known that place—that it will be the culmination, the explosive radiance of all the love and beauty of God seen, created, and re-created in this earthly life. I hope that it will feel like returning home.

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