“A Long Way from Home”: The Travelling Man According to St. Basil

Abstract

The topic of this paper is taken from a well-known African American spiritual, sung by Louis Armstrong and many others: “Sometimes I feel like a motherless child, a long way from home.” This hymn expresses deep feelings of loneliness and estrangement. Two kinds of great distance, one spiritual and the other physical, are implicated: the singer is far away from God’s home and far also from his home and relatives in Africa. In addition, slavery adds strongly to the feeling of estrangement.