Homecoming Part 4

September 11, 2026

“You can exist without your soul,” Professor Lupin explains, but without it a person loses all sense of identity and becomes an empty shell.

—J. K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban

In the book, a Dementor is a creature whose “kiss” sucks the soul from a person. In the book, it extracts the soul completely. The body keeps living with a beating heart, but all memory, personality, and consciousness are gone forever. What are the Dementors of our lives? They are the people, ambitions, fears, possessions, resentments, or desires to which we surrender so much of ourselves that we gradually lose touch with who we really are. A Dementor in our lives can seem like something wonderful.

It is anything that envelops us to the point that we transfer our sense of home away from our soul and place it in something outside ourselves—something that will bring us what we seemingly want—success, approval, wealth, power, another person, even an image of who we think we ought to be. 

This phenomenon is tenderly portrayed in L.M. Montgomery’s short story “A Soul That Was Not at Home.” An orphaned little boy, Paul Hubert, is raised in his home village by a humble fisherman, Stephen Kane. Paul loves Stephen and makes a happy life beside the enchanting sea, its rocks, and little reflecting pools. He creates his own small imaginary rock people, whom he plays with and loves. He named his first rock person Nora, and she was special to his heart because she was first. He writes about his experiences in a little homemade notebook. 

One day, a fine lady meets Paul on the beach, realizes he is an exceptionally intelligent child, and eventually offers him a new life of privilege. It seemed a wonderful opportunity for someone who had suffered so much misfortune. On his first night away, Paul awakens in the luxurious surroundings of his new home—the home everyone, including Paul, agreed would be best for him—and is overcome with the deep awareness that he could never live there. So, Paul wrote a note to his benefactor, who in fact cared for him, saying, “Something is calling me.” And Paul made the ten-mile trek back to his seaside village. In the morning’s first light, he saw Stephen readying his boat for the day and said to him, “I’ve come back. I had to.” 

The Dementor may make a convincing case for why we should dwell elsewhere, but the soul knows its true home. Sometimes an outer place, relationship, or way of life corresponds so deeply to our inner being that leaving it can feel like leaving part of ourselves behind. If the Dementor is allowed inside the door, it may eventually suck the soul out of us. Paul was removed from the landscape that corresponded to his inner life. And his soul knew it. Paul listened to his soul, which had not stopped calling him home. The Dementors of our lives cannot destroy the soul, but they can estrange us from it. They can make us forget where home is.

I believe that when we have wandered too far from ourselves, beneath all the other voices, the soul keeps calling: Come home.

Spiritual Practice

Write a description of your soul’s inner landscape.

Inquiry

Why have you ever left your Soul’s home? What has drawn you away from your soul’s home?

Prayer

Dear God, 

I pray to become more sensitive to the times and places in which my soul is not at home.

Amen