I am a Third Culture Kid. This was a term coined for those of us who have lived in different countries as children; those of us who don’t belong wholly to any culture: our parents often have a home, or ‘first culture’ and we have lived in another country or countries as ‘second cultures’. Thus, in the end, we live between cultures, we live in the limbo of the Third Culture: a culture of movement, of fluidity of friends and environments, religion and language, changing taboos and chameleon social expectations.
The term, “Third Culture Kid” is a kind version of a truer term: exile. We are foreigners both abroad and at ‘home’, and often our own parents cannot understand the exile we feel when they are finally, with a sigh of some relief, settling back into their home culture life. The exile for the child is hammered home also in the moves; like a political exile, in an international move, you lose everything: everything. The plates you’ve eaten dinner on, the furniture, the pets, the climate, everything. Often I think you also fall into grave danger of losing any religion, because for all of us, but especially for children, the acquisition and deepening of faith is deeply connected to the physical environment and culture in which it is first received.
I have, all my life, felt the grief, the deep and unnamed sorrow of the exile. I have felt like I lived in a desert which was only peopled by the things and memories I could somehow smuggle out of the places I’d left. I have also felt guilty for this sorrow, because after all, I was privileged enough to see so many good things, from the lapis-laden ruins of Khandahar to the salt-bleached temples of Delphi and Corinth. I played happily all day in the crystalline waters around the islands of Greece and camped across Europe. No, I would not trade those things. But since my return to my parents’ home culture, I have been in exile. And as a young adult, I understood that I was also an exile even in my happiness, a foreigner in an ancient Muslim culture and a Greek Orthodox culture. No matter my love for these places, I was an exile.
Now, I have found home. It is the Catholic Church: precisely because She shares two things with me that are essential parts of me: She is international, and She is an Exile; but primarily because She has as Her Head the Extremely Humble, the Willing Exile, Christ in the Eucharist.
As we have been talking about the possibility of the Holy Orthodox and the Catholic Church uniting, we discussed the two basic differences which, in my theorizing, are the principal differences. One was the nature of the Church, the nature of St. Peter himself and the role he was given: the other is the mode of Christian perfection for the believer. And it is here where I think there is hope of any unity.
The Orthodox see the Christian life as a pursuit of perfection, as the Catholic does. But there is a sense in the Orthodox understanding of it , as being a totally otherworldly, spiritual pursuit, one that is helped by the Church. There is, in my understanding, a sense of the necessity of withdrawal from the world, as epitomized in the monks of Mt. Athos. I believe, imbedded in this, is the sense of being an exile, and the hope of return, the return within oneself to find the Kingdom of Heaven. I think, from my research, that the Orthodox impression of the Catholic is that we do not have enough of the sense of withdrawal from the world, that we are trying to establish some kind of Kingdom of Heaven that is visible rather than purely spiritual, and thus we have compromised with the evils of the world. They see us, I think, as losing the identity of the Christian exile.
Herein, I think, lies the key to unity: for as a follower of Christ, we are by His example, exiles. It is the nature of a Christian. If one is a Christian, one is an exile yearning for heaven, yearning for the fullness of the Beatific Vision: but I think that there is also a sense of urgency to evangelize: to seek and to save the lost. This is where I think that Orthodoxy fails. Our Lord came, in the physical, to seek and to save the lost. He sat with sinners, and yet he remained an exile, rejected by those who should have been His own. He was crucified outside of His own House, by His own priests. And yet He told His disciples to go out to every nation, and to take nothing with them, to live as exiles, in detachment, in order to seek others to save them.
As we know from modern life, a person’s environment and upbringing affect how they can receive the Gospel. It has become harder and harder to reach people, immersed in such a culture as we have now, mainly in the West, but this culture of death is spreading over the globe. And there are other modes of the death culture in the East, the communism and atheism, the devil worship and the worship of the nothing. Therefore, the idea of the Catholic, to try and transform culture to become a fertile ground for giving others the Gospel, is a sound one. But the Orthodox warning that there is a danger in this of forgetting one’s nature as an exile is a warning that we should look at carefully, especially in the Church after the sixties and Vatican II.
Our meeting ground with the Orthodox is in the desert of the exile. It is in the hope and spirit of Elias, of John the Baptist, “a voice crying in the wilderness”. It is in persecution and death in the service of love, of Him who is love, that all who truly seek Christ will be able to see His Body. Let me elaborate on this by quoting extensively from Fr. Romano Guardini’s book, The Lord:
And Elias? It is not too much to call him the mightiest of the prophets. Not as a speaker; there is no record of exalted or path-blazing words from his lips. He left no book; hardly a sentence that is in itself anything out of the ordinary. Nor did he have any remarkable visions or revelations. Yet no other prophet looms as huge against the bottomless depths of divine mystery as Elias; nowhere in the whole history of prophecy do we find an existence of such huge proportions. However, it is encrysted in the immediacy of the moment, and that moment is terrible.
It is the reign of King Achab, a man who so hated God, that down the centuries it was said that because of him God’s wrath still hung over the people of Israel. There he stands in the Books of Kinds, the prototype of rebellion, with him his wife Jezebel, who was even more hardened in wickedness that he. It was she who erected everywhere the altars of Baal and taught her people the worship of idols; she who annihilated the priests of the Lord. For years Elias had to hide from her wrath. During Achab’s reign darkness covered the land, the darkness of hell. It was against this dark the Elias had been sent. He never was able to proclaim the tidings of the coming kingdom; he had to fight to the end against a wall of blackness, hardened disbelief; against the violence, blasphemy and bloodthirstiness that stalked through the land, Elias’ life is one titantic struggle against the powers of evil. The spirit of the Lord seethes in him, lifting him high above the human plane, spanning his strength far beyond the human breakingpoint. Once the tension relaxes, he sinks to the desert sand like a spent animal and begs for death. But again the angel touches him and strengthened by divine refreshment, he wander forty days to Horeb, the holy mountain. Thus he fights the terrible fight to the finish, relentlessly breaking the power of the idols, until at the given hour, the fiery chariot swings him off and bears him to the unknown.
The description of the kingdom of Achab and his satanic queen should sound eerily familiar to us, a kingdom that Pope John Paul II named, “The Culture of Death”. And like Elias, the Church, the Body of Christ on earth, the Church Militant, must fight this to the end. We will meet in the desert; we will finally meet as exiles, in the spirit of Elias. We are waiting for the spirit of Elias: for the return of the Orthodox and the return of the believers in Christ who are too at home in their ‘first cultures’- mainly the Protestants- which will occur in the desert of exile, in the spirit of Elias, in anticipation of the Return of the King.
