During the past thirty years, Larry McCloskey has become an accomplished writer, while his day job/vocation has been working with students with disabilities. He wrote Lament for Spilt Porter with a sense of urgency born of the need to reconcile a haunting sense of loss with our muted desire to find our way home. The desire for home—how we fit into this life and anticipate the next—is our most basic spiritual impulse, fueling our hopes and fears, passions and pathologies. But sadly, for many of us, the hunger for home has been supplanted by the primacy of self, with predictable results. At a time and in a place of greatest affluence and freedom, with technological means to connect all of us at all times, many of us are unhappy, isolated and on the question of meaning, lost. In the modern world, the individual rules without rules, but the cohesiveness of family and the need for home remains. Finding our way home and living the spiritually examined life has become more difficult in this warp speed modern distracted world. So maybe the only way forward Is to look back, rediscover the wisdom from the cast of characters that populate our past and informs our present, to find the miracle in the minutia, to go home.
