Before Matt Damon Was Odysseus, My Dad Read Me Homer

What an ancient story, a new Matt Damon film, and my father’s bedtime voice taught me about the journey

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There are some books we remember because we read them and there are others we remember because someone we loved read them to us.

For me, Homer’s Odyssey belongs to the second kind.

Christopher Nolan’s new The Odyssey, with Matt Damon as the great Odysseus, has brought one of the oldest stories in Western literature back into popular conversation.

But when I hear the names Odysseus, Achilles and Agamemnon, I don’t first think about Matt Damon, Hollywood or even ancient Greece.

I think about my Dad.

Before Matt Damon, There Was Dad

Some of my most cherished childhood memories are of Dad reading to me at bedtime.

And Dad did not always choose what we might now think of as conventional bedtime stories.

Some nights, he read Homer.

I was still young enough that I certainly did not comprehend everything I was hearing. The politics of the Trojan War were beyond me. I did not understand the complicated relationships among kings, warriors, gods, wives, sons and fathers.

But I knew the names.

Odysseus.

Achilles.

Agamemnon.

They sounded enormous.

Almost too large to belong to ordinary human beings.

There was Troy, a city somewhere beyond the edge of the world I knew. There were wooden horses, battles, ships, storms, monsters, gods, warriors and kings.

And above all there was Odysseus.

The man trying to get home.

That was the part I understood.

Maybe every child understands it.

Home.

After the fighting was finished, after Troy had fallen, Odysseus wanted to return to Ithaka—to Penelope, to Telemachus, to his own house, his own people, his own place in the world.

It should have been simple.

It wasn’t.

Homer turned that journey into one of civilization’s great stories of nostos—homecoming. Scholars of Homer have long recognized that the heart of The Odyssey is not simply adventure, but Odysseus’ struggle to recover home, household and belonging.

Read more about Homer’s Odyssey at Cambridge University Press

As a boy, however, I knew none of those academic words.

I just knew Dad was reading.

And somewhere between Scylla and Charybdis, between the Cyclops and Circe, between Troy and Ithaka, I would fall asleep.

The Strange Power of a Father Reading to His Son

I wonder now whether parents ever fully understand what they are giving their children in those ordinary moments.

Dad probably thought he was reading me a story.

He was doing something much bigger.

He was giving me a world.

More importantly, he was teaching me—without either of us realizing it—that stories mattered.

Perhaps that is part of the reason I became someone who loves history, poetry, music and old family stories.

Perhaps it is part of the reason I eventually became a writer.

Long before I began writing about my grandparents, Czech immigrants, old grocery stores, Nebraska farms, hospital rooms or the strange places where memory and faith intersect, I was a little boy lying beneath blankets listening to his father tell him about a man trying desperately to find his way home.

In my recent reflection, The Grandfathers Who Taught Me How to Live, I wrote about how so much of what forms us happens in moments that seem completely ordinary while they are occurring.

Playing catch.

Shooting free throws.

Going to a football game.

Stopping for a Frosty.

I would add another to that list now:

A father sitting beside his son’s bed with a book.

Because you never really know which ordinary moment a child will carry for the rest of his life.

Odysseus Was Never Really Searching for Adventure

The older I become, the more differently I understand Odysseus.

As a boy, I suppose I thought The Odyssey was an adventure story.

And of course it is.

There are monsters and shipwrecks, temptation, battles, supernatural forces, and fantastic islands.

Christopher Nolan certainly had no shortage of material for cinematic spectacle!

Visit the official site for Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey

But strip all of the spectacle away and something much simpler remains.

A man wants to go home.

That changes the story.

Odysseus is not wandering because he has nowhere else to be.

He knows exactly where he belongs.

Ithaka.

Penelope.

Telemachus.

Home.

Every strange island therefore becomes meaningful precisely because it is not Ithaka.

Every temptation threatens to make him forget Ithaka.

Each storm delays Ithaka another day, month, or year.

Every monster stands between him and Ithaka.

And every mile of sea matters because somewhere beyond it waits home.

Then I Discovered Cavafy’s Ithaka

Years after Dad first introduced me to Homer, I encountered another work that completely changed how I understood the story.

Constantine P. Cavafy’s poem Ithaka takes Homer’s homecoming and turns it into something almost universally human.

Cavafy tells the traveler:

“Keep Ithaka always in your mind.”

Read C.P. Cavafy’s Ithaka at the Poetry Foundation

But Cavafy does something brilliant with the ancient story.

He reminds us not to hurry.

The point is not simply to arrive.

The experiences along the way—the harbors, discoveries, knowledge, beauty, difficulty and even the years themselves—are what make the traveler capable of understanding Ithaka when he finally reaches it.

Ithaka gives the journey direction.

But the journey changes the traveler.

That thought has stayed with me.

Because at forty-four, I understand it very differently than I could have at eight.

We All Have Our Ithakas

I think most of us spend our lives sailing toward one Ithaka or another.

Sometimes Ithaka is a physical place.

I understand that particularly well.

I have written about the almost inexplicable spiritual pull I feel toward the places where my ancestors once lived in Home Beyond the Crest of the Hill; I understand why soil matters.

Why a house matters, hometowns matter, and why Grandma’s kitchen matters.

Why a certain hill, road, field or room can awaken something in us that cannot be explained by geography alone.

Home is never merely coordinates on a map.

Home is memory attached to place.

Perhaps that is why Ithaka matters so much.

Odysseus is not simply trying to return to an island.

He is trying to return to himself.

Sometimes the Road Home Is Nothing Like We Expected

This is where Homer’s story has become much more personal to me as I have grown older.

Because none of us gets the journey we imagine when we are children.

There are storms and losses, temptations and mistakes.

There are years when the winds seem determined to push us in every direction except the one we want to go.

Sometimes we become strangers even to ourselves.

And sometimes the voyage becomes so difficult that simply getting another morning feels like reaching shore.

That is part of what eventually led me to write my new book, 7 Reflections From the Edge of Death.

In One More Morning: Reflections on Survival, Faith, and Grace, I wrote about discovering that survival itself can become a kind of homecoming.

You return to familiar things and discover that they are no longer ordinary.

Morning light.

Family.

A familiar voice.

A kitchen table.

Another day.

I suppose Cavafy would understand that.

You finally reach the place toward which you have been struggling, only to discover that the real gift was not simply reaching shore.

The traveler who arrives is no longer the traveler who left.

My New Book: 7 Reflections From the Edge of Death

My new book gathers seven reflections on survival, suffering, faith, grace and what it means to be given another morning.

It is ultimately a book about the same question that lies somewhere beneath Homer’s ancient epic:

What do we discover about life when we realize how desperately we want to come home?

Get 7 Reflections From the Edge of Death on Amazon

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The Christian Ithaka

There is, however, another layer to this that I cannot ignore.

As much as I love Cavafy, Homer and the image of Ithaka, the Christian life adds something even more radical to the metaphor.

Scripture repeatedly describes human beings as travelers.

Pilgrims.

Sojourners.

People seeking a homeland.

The Letter to the Hebrews speaks of the faithful recognizing themselves as strangers upon the earth because “they are seeking a homeland.” It then makes the destination explicit: they desire a better, heavenly homeland.

Read Hebrews 11 at the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops

There is something astonishingly Homeric about that image.

We are sailing and get lost.

We encounter storms and sometimes forget where we are going.

Sometimes we mistake temporary harbors for permanent homes; we attach ourselves to things that cannot keep us.

And yet somewhere beneath all the noise remains that strange longing for home.

St. Augustine expressed the same mystery differently: our hearts remain restless until they rest in God.

Perhaps every Ithaka we love in this world is only teaching us the vocabulary of that deeper longing.

Grandma’s kitchen.

Dad’s voice.

Grandpa’s farm.

Papillion.

An old church.

A childhood bedroom.

The people whose presence once made us feel completely safe.

We love these places because, for a little while, they allowed us to experience something resembling home.

And perhaps they were giving us a glimpse of something greater.

The Monsters We Carry With Us

Cavafy makes one more observation that becomes increasingly uncomfortable as we grow older.

The monsters are not always waiting somewhere out there.

Sometimes we carry them with us.

Our fear, resentment, regrets, anger, and grief.

Our inability to forgive.

Or perhaps our obsession with what should have happened rather than what did.

Those things can become our Cyclopes and Laestrygonians.

They can keep us wandering long after the storm itself has passed.

Odysseus must keep choosing Ithaka.

So must we.

Maybe that is faith in its simplest form.

Remembering where you are going.

I Can Still Hear Dad Reading

And all of this brings me back to that childhood bedroom.

Dad could not possibly have known where my life would go.

Neither could I.

He could not have known the storms that would eventually come, the losses, the detours, the joys, the people I would love, the places I would go, or the stories I would someday try to preserve.

He certainly could not have known that decades later Christopher Nolan would make a massive film adaptation of The Odyssey starring Matt Damon and that its arrival would suddenly send his grown son backward through time.

Back before everything became complicated, before the long journey.

Back to a bedroom, a book, and Dad’s voice.

I can almost hear him again.

Odysseus was somewhere out on the wine-dark sea.

Penelope was waiting.

Ithaka was still somewhere beyond the horizon.

And I was slowly falling asleep.

Safe.

Home.

Perhaps Dad Was Giving Me Ithaka

That may be what moves me most about The Odyssey now.

I used to think Dad was simply introducing me to one of the greatest stories ever written.

Maybe he was doing something more.

Maybe every time he sat down beside my bed and opened that book, he was quietly building an Ithaka inside me.

A place memory could someday return to.

The strange thing about growing older is that eventually we become Odysseus.

We accumulate scars and encounter storms.

We lose people, we make mistakes, and we discover that some roads home are far longer than we ever imagined.

And eventually we begin looking backward toward the people who first taught us where home was.

Cavafy was right.

Ithaka gives us the journey.

But I think there is something more.

Sometimes Ithaka is not merely where the journey ends.

Sometimes Ithaka is the memory that gives us enough courage to keep sailing.

For me, part of Ithaka will always be a childhood bedroom in Papillion, Nebraska.

A lamp beside the bed.

A book in my father’s hands.

The names Achilles, Agamemnon and Odysseus floating through a boy’s imagination.

And Dad’s voice carrying me safely across an ancient sea until sleep finally came.

I had no idea then how long the journey would be or how many times in life I would need to find my way home.

I only knew Dad was there.

Perhaps that was enough.

Perhaps, all along, that was Ithaka.

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Continue the Journey

For more reflections on fathers, grandparents, memory, home, survival and the people who quietly make us who we are:

The Grandfathers Who Taught Me How to Live

Grandpa Barney’s Papillion: The Hometown That Raised Me

The Safest Place I Knew—Even at the Edge of Death

One More Morning: Reflections on Survival, Faith, and Grace

And my new book, 7 Reflections From the Edge of Death, is available now:

Order 7 Reflections From the Edge of Death on Amazon