The days have gotten warmer, and I—along with many of my fellow Americans—have turned my attention to the great American pastime: baseball. As theologian David Bentley Hart has pointed out, one of the mystical peculiarities of baseball is that, unlike in most other sports, the object of the game is not to attack the other team’s side of the field to deposit a ball or puck into a goal, basket or end zone. Rather, in baseball, the object is to come home.

I think there is something in this dynamic of baseball that reflects a pattern in my own life as a Jesuit. Our faith teaches us that our final home will be with God forever in heaven. But in our vocations on earth, we also are called to seek a home—a place that perhaps can give us a glimpse of what awaits us in the world to come.

Before I was a Jesuit, I spent a couple years as a seminarian in the Archdiocese of Cincinnati. I had a sense that God was calling me to be a priest, but I didn’t know where to take the calling, or how God was calling me to live it out. I was never really at peace in my years at the diocesan seminary, and despite being in my hometown of Cincinnati, I did not truly feel at home. I felt like I was in a “far-off country”—or χώρα μακρά, to use the Greek of St. Luke’s Gospel in describing where the Prodigal Son goes after he leaves his father (Luke 15:13). I felt far from home.

Thanks to the influence of a few Jesuits whom I had gotten to know over the years, I left the diocesan seminary and discerned a call to the Society of Jesus. When I arrived at the Jesuit novitiate in St. Paul, I was ushered into the chapel for a welcome ceremony with my twelve novice classmates and our families. I was nervous about the new surroundings, and I didn’t know anyone. But then one of the second-year novices stood up at the ambo and said, “Brothers… Welcome home.” He repeated it: “Welcome home.” When I heard these words, I knew something was different in the Society of Jesus. I had entered a new family that was welcoming me home.

Ironically, I quickly learned that being “home” in the Society of Jesus actually meant being on the road a lot. In just over six years of Jesuit formation, my mission has taken me from Detroit to Massachusetts; from St. Louis to Guadalajara; from the flimsy railway cars of Amtrak on my 30-day pilgrimage to the sturdy brick of Saint Ignatius High School in Cleveland.

Through these travels, I have never lost the sense of coming home that I felt on the first day of the novitiate. For Jesuits, “home” means more than the place we are from, or the building we live in. As one of the earliest Jesuits, Fr. Jerome Nadal, SJ, said, “The world is our home.” We are called to go out and meet the world so we can bring to it the Good News of Jesus Christ.

Like our founder, St. Ignatius of Loyola, who left his family’s estate behind to seek God’s will on a pilgrimage across Europe—or like his companion, St. Francis Xavier, whose pilgrimage took him to the limits of the known world in India and Japan—we Jesuits love the road. Indeed, the road, and the world we meet on it, is our home.

The Society of Jesus calls everywhere home. It is the love of God that calls us there—to the things, and the places and the people of this world. I have always felt at home in the Society. I have always felt like this is where God wants me to be.