Many of us raised in a certain type of evangelical church grew up singing the popular gospel hymn, “This World is Not My Home.” The first line of the song declares: “This world is not my home, I’m just a passing through.” The song speaks of a desire to move on from this present world, looking forward to arriving at “heaven’s shore.”
The gospel hymn has received no shortage of criticism from Christian thinkers. For example, New Testament scholar N.T. Wright speaks critically of the song, accusing many evangelicals of being Platonists. After all, God created this physical universe, and intended humans to live in the world he made. Should we not commit to the material nature of this present world since God fashioned the world as good? One might dismiss the song for misreading Genesis and the whole narrative of Scripture altogether.
Roger Olson writes about how some of his teaching colleagues use the song as an example of bad theology. The lyrics of the song are low-hanging fruit for those who want to criticize certain forms of American dispensationalism or disengaged pietism.
I do not know much about the history of the song or how its lyrics were written, or what the author’s intentions were. Nevertheless, I can appreciate some of the concerns the song’s critics are raising. If we think this world is ultimately destined for the trash bin, some Christians can be tempted to have an indifferent attitude to the present world around us, disregarding the needs of the least of these and casually destroying the natural environment. Singing bad theology can have practical consequences. So, Wright and others are raising their red flags. However, in spite of its detractors, I want to provide a different way of understanding the song particularly from a post-colonial, Asian American perspective that retains its spiritual value for the well being of a diverse, global church.
In Celine Song’s masterful film Past Lives, she beautifully conveys the depth of the existential realities surrounding friendship, love, loss, and immigration. The film tells the story of Nora Moon and Hae Sung, a girl and boy living in Korea who deeply care for one another. We are introduced to them walking side by side from school every day, sharing moments of playfulness and sorrow. Even though they are children, they possess a mutual, rich affection full of innocence and joy. The young girl’s family decides to move to Canada to further the parents’ professional goals, and the two young friends abruptly part ways leaving them both feeling unsettled.
While Nora grows to find a stable life in Canada, she does not fully fit into her new North American culture. Twelve years later, Nora and Hae Sung serendipitously reconnect through social media. Even though they are separated by significant geographical distance, they continue to talk to one another through emails and video calls, disclosing the inner parts of their hearts. Throughout their conversations, they speak in Korean, and Nora is able to recover some connection back to her homeland with Hae Sung. The viewer catches a glimpse of the couple recapturing something dear to them that they once lost. However, the physical separation takes an emotional toll on Nora, with neither one of them intending to immediately move to be with the other given their current professional aspirations. At Nora’s request, she and Hae Sung abruptly disconnect from communicating. They are both left grieved and longing for companionship. Soon after, Nora meets an American writer, and they eventually get married. Hae Sung also enters into a dating relationship in Korea. Another twelve years pass, and Nora lives in New York in a committed relationship with her husband, but Hae Sung is going through some turmoil with his girlfriend. He chooses to visit New York where Nora resides, with the intention of seeing her. They reconnect once again—this time in person—and they are both overjoyed to see each other face to face after twenty-four years. Nora processes her complex feelings towards both Hae Sung and her Korean heritage as she is married to a white American living in New York. On his final night in America, Hae Sung and Nora share a conversation about their own intimate relationship and what might have been. Hae Sung departs to Korea leaving Nora crying in her husband’s arms.
Langdon Gilkey points out that art can have a prophetic role; it can open up the truth behind and within the ordinary. Past Lives beautifully weaves together themes of love, longing, culture, and home. While it is not an explicitly religious film, it discloses something profoundly theological about the human condition: we are creatures who long for home but live perpetually in exile, grieving what has been lost. It is a story that deeply resonates with many of us who were raised between two cultures, two homes—we might even say two worlds. Those who have been geographically displaced understand and feel the struggle of navigating relationships from your place of origin and the place in which you presently find yourself.
My parents journeyed from India to the United States where I was born. The first time I was on an airplane I was less than five years old. My family traveled almost annually between south India and the United States. For my cousins in India, I was practically a white man— speaking in English, spoiled by luxuries, unaccustomed to their ways of life. Despite their slurs, I still recognized that coming to India was coming back to the place that could well have been my permanent home. Indeed, in a sense, it was my home—it was my land of origin. The reason that my last name is Varghese, or I enjoy spicy foods, or my skin is brown is directly related to the place where I am from. My oldest childhood friend lived in India; it was there among the guava and jackfruit trees that I first learned how to play and develop social bonds.
All the while, I knew that I was perceived as a Westerner in India. To be sure, I happily claimed my Western identity, embracing the privileges of individual choice and free expression against age old taboos and traditions. Indian culture with all of its customs and prohibitions often felt too restrictive and overbearing. I loved the great thinkers of the Western tradition: Plato, Augustine, and Shakespeare. On the other hand, my white friends in America affectionately called me, “brownie.” My classmates related to me as someone who brought spicy Indian food to lunch, could not have romantic entanglements prior to my parents’ arrangements, and had a strange last name. Occasionally, my ethnic identity was confused with being Hindu. Was I ever really one of them? After all, from my side, I found the lax moral standards of American culture perplexing and shameful. I did not understand or appreciate the lack of respect for elders or family ties and the careless sexual mores. Surely, there ought to be limits to one’s individual self-expression. Indian culture endowed me with an appreciation for hospitality and community that was substantially deficient in the West.
In my younger years, I considered my participation in both cultures a strength. I could draw from the best of both worlds, so to speak. While there is a way in which that continues to be true, after becoming a father, I have come to see my displacement has also rendered me divided, leaving my children with a fractured heritage. I am not quite Indian or American—I am a deplorable tertium quid. If I was raised solely in south India or the United States, my family, my values, my home would all be unified.
To complicate matters, I married an Indian raised in a British school who migrated to the United States for college. Our children have grandparents and cousins scattered around Asia, North America, and the United Kingdom. When I consider many of my white, American students who were born and raised in one place their whole lives, I feel that they possess something I don’t: a unified experience and identity—a unified heritage. For many of them, going “home” means something particular, concrete, and stable that they can visit in this present world. Spending one’s time over the holidays is bound to a fixed place.
Certainly, my parents coming to the United States has given me a lot—privileges of opportunity that it is difficult to imagine being without— but it has also taken something from me. This is undoubtedly a feature of the modern world. As I watched Past Lives, it struck me as a story distinctly of late modernity. Technology has made the world smaller, but it has also left us feeling more disconnected. Moving across the globe, and consequently rupturing our communities, has never been easier and yet our souls bear a heavy cost.
My feelings are not unique. It has been well-documented that missionary kids and third culture individuals struggle with social belonging and feelings of homelessness. Chloe Donahue explains what Ruth Useem meant when she coined the term “third culture kid,”:
The third culture is without a single geographical location, language…nationality, or ethnicity. These constructs are often the foundation through which people…find belonging… Thus, the TCK experience is inherently dynamic, mobile, and forever shifting… likely causing similar dynamics in a TCK’s sense of identity and belonging.
Consider comments from third culture individuals themselves: “There are little things that you’ll pick up everywhere you live, whether it’s values or traditions that you take with you everywhere you go, so you’re not 100 per cent entirely at home anywhere” or “I suppose the truly odd thing is that I very often have a feeling of homesickness, yet it seems like a paradox, as I’ve never had a home, and I don’t know where it is that I’m yearning for!”
Such voices represent the sentiment of many of us whose families have voyaged around the world. The question of belonging and finding a home is a frequent theme among TCKs.
However, it is at this locus of unsettledness that a third culture person finds a point of connection with the people of the covenant in Scripture. Shifting geographical locations and the accompanying transient ways of life are central to the story of Israel. N.T. Wright himself emphasizes the motif of exile in biblical theology; it is the “central drama” Israel was acting out. The Jews returning from Babylon back to their land were permanently displaced—had they ever truly come back home? Immigrants and their children recognize something of themselves in the story of a people who have been wandering, searching for peace.
The church in the world today can expect to encounter more people like this. The authors of one study purport that “children of immigrants represent one in four children in the United States and will represent one in three children by 2050,” and that the “children of Asian and Latino immigrants together represent the majority of children of immigrants in the United States.”
The fact is that from its very inception in the book of Acts, the church has always been global. We would do well to remember that the church ministers to people across ethnic and national lines, especially since the church emerged as a multilingual, transnational diaspora.
What the third culture person experiences with regard to an unsatisfied search for home, Christian writers (from St. Augustine to John Bunyan) have been addressing for centuries on a spiritual level. C. S. Lewis famously describes the inner, aching hunger of the human heart; a desire for that which it not knows what. He identifies it as Sehnsucht—an overwhelming, ineffable longing. Lewis points out that the good and beautiful things we experience in this temporal world are not ultimately intended to satisfy, but instead point to the higher reality for which we are searching. Lewis writes of temporal beautiful objects, “For they are not the thing itself; they are only the scent of a flower we have not found, the echo of a tune we have not heard, news from a country we have not visited.” For Lewis, the pleasures of this world may awaken desire, but they cannot altogether fulfill it. In his famous quote from Mere Christianity, Lewis writes, “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.” For Lewis, we are invited to participate in the life of God thereby filling the particular hollows of our hearts.
Simply put, many of us in the church, especially those with third culture experiences, possess a palpable desire wherein we are searching for our place of belonging and rest, and we do not principally find it anywhere in this world. One occasionally gets the impression from some modern theologians that Heaven will be a kind of earthly utopia where poverty, social inequality, and environmental abuse will be eradicated; if we band together and work hard enough, we might just be able to achieve it on this planet.
Peter Kreeft provides a helpful corrective, “We denizens of this third rock from the sun are all homeless aliens, refugees, strangers in a strange land, orphaned, bereaved and exiled… ‘This world is not my home, I’m just-a-passing through.’ If we have forgotten that today, we have forgotten an essential theme of our whole story.” I think Lewis and Kreeft are correct, and I can think of no other way to make sense of the biblical identification of the people of God as sojourners for whom Christ prepares a new place (1 Peter 2:11; John 14:3; Revelation 21:5).
In the final moments of Past Lives, Hae Sung turns to Nora as he prepares to say goodbye and he sparks their wonder about whether this present life is not the final act, but is instead a glimpse of a life that is yet to come where their fragmented relationship will find its fulfillment. The film’s somber conclusion gestures toward the deeply Christian intuition that whatever bonds we may have, they remain incomplete in this present age. The story echoes Christ’s eschatological exhortations, “The kingdom of heaven is like…”
Critics of the 20th century gospel hymn would do well to remember that for many of us, as we have journeyed around the globe, we feel ourselves in a liminal state, still looking for our home. Before dismissing the hymn as naïve American theology, we might ask what kind of spiritual burden it sought to relieve. “If heaven’s not my home, then Lord what will I do?” carries with it the resonances that even as we are unsettled, we do indeed have a home that we are longing for and that we will one day experience, and without which we are left homeless. Our hearts are restless until they find their rest in that which transcends creation—the ultimate reality which lies beyond this world.
Alister McGrath writes, “Dissatisfaction can set us firmly on the road that leads to the discovery of a personal God.” In the perpetually shifting sands of this present age, our Father in whom there is no shifting shadow remains our fixed beacon of hope. While Wright’s critique rightly guards against a disembodied spirituality, the gospel hymn expresses a genuine and even necessary Christian insight—one that resonates powerfully with those who live nomadically. For many immigrant believers, the song gives voice not to Gnostic escapism but to the ache of displacement, and the yearning for a home that this world cannot provide—a celestial city whose building and maker is God where we will enter into our eternal rest.