Posted on: 11th June 2025

‘Rightmove Addiction’, it is a real thing apparently. In the world I inhabit here at the Crypt, the dragon of addiction takes many forms, but I have to say, never addiction to a property website. However, if the news reports are to be believed, there is a form of addiction where people spend inordinate amounts of time looking at other people’s houses and wondering…could I live in a house like that? (Try saying that sentence again with the soft American tones of Lloyd Grossman from Through the Keyhole, you know it makes sense!)

We are not Rightmove addicts in our household, but we do look at Rightmove and wonder sometimes about other houses in the town where we live (bigger garden? detached? different style?) or sometimes even where we could might relocate to when retirement looms (here? there? more rural? bungalow?). They might be speculative thoughts, but I do sometimes step back and ponder the restless element that lies within these wanderings.

It leads me to one of my favourite lines of poetry from Little Gidding, the fourth in a quartet of poems by T.S. Eliot. The poems deal with the spiritual journey of life, reflecting on the seasons that lead to the first flush of summer and new life. Eliot wrote that it is not the beginning but the end where we start from and phrased this in the words…

We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.

So often my wife and I’s restless wanderings and wonderings of whether we might one day move, end up in the same place, where we realise that we are already so blessed where we live, and can’t imagine being anywhere else. In Eliot’s image, our journeying takes us back to where we inhabit already, but we know the place truly as if for the first time…and so through that knowledge we are filled with a deep sense of peace and contentment. St Paul in his letter to the Philippians spoke about ‘the peace of God, which surpasses all understanding’, and this is the peace I understand as being a deep contentment, of really knowing the place we inhabit for the first time or ourselves for the first time. It is the peace I pray that our sisters and brothers, whom we care for at the Crypt, come to know within themselves in the fullness of time. Not necessarily in terms of a physical home (although we constantly hope and pray each and every person will find a home), but more being content with who they are, being at peace with themselves, being at home within themselves.

By Reverend Andy Muckle, St George's Crypt