Return is not restoration. Restoration presupposes that a former state can be re-established: that the scattered parts can be returned to their places and that the whole will then be the same as it was before. But spiritual life knows no such repeatability.
To return does not mean to enter once again into an identical spiritual stasis. It cannot occur twice, because inwardness has in the meantime been mediated by new experiences, encounters, absences, and changes. The one who returns is no longer the one who departed.
And yet, the need for return remains. What we return to is not a past state, but an unfinished question, an interrupted orientation, perhaps even a call that continued to act within us when we believed that we had abandoned it.
Return is therefore not a restoration of the past, but its in-flection: the bending of a former meaning into a transformed inwardness. What returns is no longer the same, but neither is it wholly other. It arises anew from the difference between what was and what we have become.
Authentic return is possible only as transformation. We do not return in order to annul the path we have traversed, but to allow it to change the meaning of the place from which we once departed.