One of the most popular pop songs that was a great hit, both internationally and locally, is surely Alice Merton’s song No Roots.
The lyrics in No Roots documents Merton’s life as being one of moving from place to place impatient to find a home where to live. The more she searches the more she never finds a home where she can live at peace with herself. Not finding a home makes her feeling, lost, lonely and, misunderstood. As a brilliant artist, Alice Merton manages to communicate to us this sense of not having a secure home, of not having roots through her exceptional song No Roots.
Having no roots is not a beautiful thing at all. Contrarily, it is really a painful thing to experience. During his homily at Mass on 5 October 2017, feast of Saint Faustina Kowalska, Pope Francis warned against having no roots, in other words, against a way of closing in on one’s self. When he reflected about the nostalgic tears of Nehemiah, who was cupbearer to the Persian king in Babylon, the Pope said that recognising one’s roots practically “means recovering the sense of belonging of a people”. Thus, taken from this perspective, the Holy Father said that “without roots we cannot live: a people without roots or at risk of losing roots, is a sick people”. He explained that “a person without roots, who has forgotten his roots, is sick. We must think of this psychological self-exile as a disease: it does so much harm. It takes away the roots. It takes away our belonging.”
Pope Francis emphasized that we should always hold on to our roots, especially our spiritual ones. Taking as an example the people at the time of Nehemiah who persisted until they could finally rebuild their city and then cried tears of joy, the Pope encouraged us to read the Eight Chapter of the Book of Nehemiah and ask ourselves if we have or would have embarked on a journey to recover our roots; or if we preferred to be closed in ourselves in the soul’s self-imposed exile.
Saint Augustine knew what it meant to have no roots and how tormenting this experience was for him. His Confessions are a cry of agonizing pain by themselves! “The liberty I loved was merely that of a runaway.” “Without you, what am I to myself but a guide to my own self-destruction?” “I myself was exceedingly astonished as I anxiously reflected how long a time had elapsed since the nineteenth year of my life, when I began to burn with a zeal for wisdom, planning that when I found it I would abandon all the empty hopes and lying follies of hollow ambitions. And here I was already thirty, and still mucking about in the same mire in a state of indecision, avid to enjoy present fugitive delights which were dispersing my concentration, while I was saying: ‘Tomorrow I shall find it…'”
Fortunately, that pervading and senseless procrastination was put to an end when Augustine opened his heart for God. His nomadic life with no roots was decisively changed into what Pope Francis termed as restlessness of spiritual seeking, restlessness of the encounter with God and restlessness of love. In simple words and unlike Alice Merton, Saint Augustine could sing I’ve got the roots because he kept searching. So, why don’t I look at my inner depth and ask myself: Does my heart desire something great, or has it been anesthetized by success, by things or by power? Saint Augustine could sing I’ve got the roots because he was restless in encountering God. Am I letting God find me through other people, experiences or the stirrings of my heart? And now that I know Jesus, am I making him more and more known to others? Finally, Saint Augustine could sing I’ve got the roots because he was restless in loving. As Pope Francis put it: “[Am I] ceaselessly seeking the good of the other, of the beloved, without ever stopping and with the intensity that leads even to tears?”
Fr Mario Attard OFM Cap