gregory the great on exile

Looking at James Alison's work (which I am still trying to find in electronic form) has got me interested in the way exile is constructed as a kind of ideal within the Christian tradition (or, better perhaps, within Christian traditions). I think this is especially interesting, given Jess's focus on the idea of exile in Jewish thought. I've been looking at an article published in the 1960s in Speculum (which is a journal for medievalists). It's by Gerhart B. Ladner and is called "Homo Viator: Mediaeval Ideas on Alienation and Order". Here's a short excerpt where Ladner begins by summarising something that Gregory the Great says in the Moralia (his commentary on the Book of Job):

There the great Pope says that temporal comfort on this earth is to the just man what the bed in an inn is to the viator, to the traveller on his journey: he will rest in it bodily, but mentally he is already somewhere else. And sometimes the just on his travels through life will even seek out discomfort and refuse to dwell in the pleasantness of transitory surroundings, lest by delight found on the journey he be delayed from reaching his fatherland, and by attaching his heart to the road of peregrination he lose his reward when the heavenly patria finally comes into sight. The just, therefore, do not settle for good in this world - they know that they are only pilgrims and guests in it. They desire to rejoice where they belong and cannot be happy in a foreign land. [...]

According to that great anonymous document of the mentality of the early Church which is the Epistle to Diognetus, the terrestrial lot of Christians is eminently that of strangers:

They reside in their own fatherlands, but as if they were non-citizens; they take part in all things as if they were citizens and suffer all things as if they were strangers; every foreign country is a fatherland to them and every fatherland is to them a foreign country ... They dwell on earth, but they are citizens in heaven ...

The mention of the inn in the first quotation made me think of the motels we stayed in in Minnesota and that you've occasionally stayed in during the journey. One may rest in them bodily but, to be a viator, one must mentally be 'already somewhere else'.