Our Real Country

It’s a gift of being a third-culture kid that you learn that a person can be from more than one place. You can have two homes. I’m from both Wisconsin and Monrovia. I don’t mean that I’ve lived in both places, although I have. I’m from both places. They are both equally home. I’m as much a missionary kid from West Africa as I am a Midwesterner.

When I say home, I mean your real home, that place where you feel most like yourself, the place you go back to if you can, the place where you might want to be buried. It might be where you are right now, but if you’re a third culture kid, it’s probably not. It may be a place completely alien by comparison to where you live now. There might be a house there that you once lived in, a house there you can still go back to, or it may be a place that you’ve never actually lived but know is the home you’re meant to be from. It probably isn’t where you were born, since few people stay long enough in the place of their birth to be from that place.

People who never leave where they’ve lived their whole life may have a harder time recognizing home, even though it may be right below their feet. I think it takes living away from a place to learn whether a place is that kind of home for you, the kind of place where your soul (in the secular imaginative sense, not the theological one) breathes deep and can rest. It’s often only recognizable in its absence. We may need to live overseas to learn that the earth our grandfather tilled with horses is home, though we thought it dreadfully boring when we were fifteen years old. It may take never smelling day-old fish again to realize the sweat-drenched streets of an east Asian market are home for you.

This kind of home, wherever it may be, is an icon of our innate yearning for Home, that urge for the Other and for More that C.S. Lewis said is built into each of us, regardless of whether we acknowledge it indicative of our immortal nature as God’s children or not.

If I find in myself a desire which no experience in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that I was made for another world. If none of my earthly pleasures satisfy it, that does not prove that the universe is a fraud. Probably earthly pleasures were never meant to satisfy it, but only to arouse it, to suggest the real thing. “Mere Christianity,” C. S. Lewis

The Germans call it Sehnsucht, a kind of deep longing that is almost a sickness.

It was the Unicorn who summed up what everyone was feeling. He . . . cried: “I have come home at last! This is my real country! I belong here. This is the land I have been looking for all my life, though I never knew it till now. The reason why we loved the old Narnia is that it sometimes looked a little like this.”  “The Last Battle,” C. S. Lewis

I believe this is why certain kinds of home speak to us so deeply, why we ache for those places, why we want even our mortal remains to reside there. Some aspect of that place carries echoes of our Real Country. Wherever your Home is, whatever your Home is, it sometimes looks a little like that. It’s why it can be more than one place: all creation is a shadow of what is to come.  Sometimes the shadow lifts a little bit and for a moment the glass is a little less dark. Home is where the shadow between here and There is the thinnest.