Jesus Is My… Pirate Ship??
Reconciling my incessant wanderlust and desire for home
“In town I finish begging for food. Content, I carry the cloth bag, wondering which place to call home. Could that be my hut near the white cloud?”
– Ryōkan
As I have (hopefully) shown in my previous work, the idea of ‘home’ is complicated and at times frustrating for Third Culture Kids (TCKs) and Adult Third Culture Kids (ATCKs) such as myself (Langley, 2023). Afterall, what defines home? Is it where we were born? Where we grew up? Or perhaps where our family now lives, or where we now live? Is it a matter of where we feel most welcome and comfortable? Is it necessary to have any sense of home at all? As I’ve discussed previously, having a TCK background means that I can feel ‘at home’ just about anywhere in the world, but also that I have no firm sense of belonging anywhere I go and a feeling of cultural homelessness everywhere I go (Langley, 2023). Amidst all these questions, there are two major desires which seem to compete and contradict within me: the desire to continually roam the earth, travel, and never settle down, and then the desire to do the opposite–to find a home at last, to make a life for myself, and to feel the sense of belonging that I have gone so long without. This desire to continue a mobile lifestyle is common to TCKs, as “many TCKs develop a migratory instinct that controls their lives. Along with feeling rootless, they often feel restless as well” (Pollock and Van Reken, 2017, p. 189). In order to reconcile these two desires, or at least to try to understand what I really want, I turned to an unlikely source: my favourite stories.
As I’ve read about TCKs and as I’ve thought more and more about how my background as one may have affected various aspects of my identity, worldview, and preferences, one interesting thought I had was whether it had anything to do with my taste in literature, film, and television. I have loved reading since a young age and as I’ve grown older have gained a considerable appreciation of certain films and television series as well. As I’ve thought about it more, I have found that the stories that I like most tend to be united by a few common themes. For one, I like stories wherein the protagonist goes on a (physical) journey, also, I most enjoy stories centered around male friendships, especially when they are comical in nature, and finally, I like stories about vagabonds, pirates, and other wanderers (separate from the ‘journey’ category, as these do not have a home they return to, nor an expected termination to their travels). I can quickly observe how all three of these themes may have arisen out of my own experience as a TCK. The journey motif encapsulates my love for adventure and travel, but also represents my desire for a home to return to and a sense of comfort and belonging. My preference for the theme of male friendship likely comes from my lack of consistent, long-term relationships in my highly-mobile upbringing. And my sense of camaraderie with vagabond characters I believe is born out of my persistent wanderlust and my desire to be free from the confines of attachment and ‘home.’
I would like to take some time to explore my magnetism toward each of these three themes and, in doing so, ultimately arrive at an answer of what I want: to find home, or to remain unbound. The first theme I will look at is the journey motif; specifically, I will explore this theme through the stories of The Hobbit and Samurai Champloo.
That brings me to my next topic: friendship, and especially friendship between male characters. Growing up with essentially no consistent relationships outside of my family, it is no wonder that I gravitate toward this idea of male friendship. This is again not unique to my experience, as a study by Lijadi and van Schalkwyk found that often “the only stable relationship for TCKs was within their own family” (2014). Furthermore, they found that those they studied “could not reach a deep level of friendship as they were constantly on the move.” While I do feel that because I did stay in places for longer stretches of time (4–5 years) I was able to build some stronger relationships, but that only made it all the harder when I ultimately had to leave them behind. As Pollock and Van Reken have said, “TCKs usually place a high value on their relationships” (2009, p. 136), which I find very true of my own experience. But as I have struggled to make and maintain meaningful friendships due to my mobility, I feel I put a high value on an ideal which I don’t know if I can really obtain. And so, besides resonating with the characters of Samurai Champloo as they dread the end of their journey and thus the end of their time together, I also gravitate toward stories centered around friendships that don’t end, perhaps trying to appreciate in others that which I feel is lacking in my own life. Two examples of this kind of deep male bond that I admire appear in the television series Psych and between the persons of David and Jonathan in the Bible.
This idea of friendship and deep relationships draws me toward another idea of ‘home.’ According to Pollock and Van Reken, “home is often defined by relationships” (2017, p. 186). One student in a study by Alice Wu said that “what contributes to one’s sense of home is the people you grow up with.” In further studies by Wu, she found that in 1994 as well as 2014, “students mentioned how essential their families were to finding home” (Wu, 2015). One challenge this brings about, however, is that upon entering college TCKs lose “the one thing that was stable in [their] life–[their] family.” This was certainly my experience. While I had already struggled with the transition to living in America, at least throughout high school I was with my family, the people who had remained with me for all of my life. But upon entering college, I was completely alone at last, in a strange land with nobody I could call family or even a friend. This deepened my longing for meaningful friendships all the more–I wanted to find people who I could remain close with and rely on now that I was out of my parents’ house. Of course I still love my family, but I feel that now that I’ve left the household, I no longer identify my family’s home as my own, in the physical or relational sense. I never feel homesick for it, and when I visit it feels like just that–a visit, not ‘coming home.’ And so now I search for a feeling of ‘home’ or belonging among friends or a community. But this still comes into conflict with my desire to be unbound, free to roam and wander as I will. Even if I am not attached to a physical location I call home, if I find ‘home’ in a person or group of people, then I feel I would be attached to them and would have either a duty or at least my own emotional compelling not to leave them for too long, restricting me to shorter travels and forcing me into a plan of return. This, or I would need to have a home among a community of people who are likewise wander-orientated and willing to join me in whatever travels I may take. But alas, it is unlikely to find people who are so inclined and who will always have the same migratory-desires for the same places at the same times and so it feels hopeless to wish for such a community-based, mobile home. This brings me to my next discussion of two motifs that I think will help me obtain a clearer picture of what it is I am searching for: vagabonds and pirates.
While I sometimes long to be a vagabond, a ‘lone wolf’ kind of character who can come and go as he pleases and has neither physical nor relational restrictions, I ultimately find it an unsatisfactory answer. It fits my idea of restlessness and my migratory-impulse, but it fails to fulfill my longing for meaningful relationships and sense of belonging.
The ‘pirate ship’ and ‘pirate crew’ ideas, on the other hand, reconcile both desires and thus provide for me the perfect answer both to finding home and also to remain free to roam. Only one problem remains… where do I get a pirate ship? Of course, I don’t want a real, literal pirate ship. Okay, that’s a lie, I definitely do. But not as a home. Rather, I believe the answer lies in a more metaphorical pirate ship and crew. But as I mentioned earlier, it is unrealistic to expect to find people to continually travel around with me based on my whims, or to find people with the exact same whims. This brings me back to One Piece. The Straw Hats (the crew of the main characters) are not a group of people who travel around with Luffy (protagonist) just to follow his whims and go from here to there. Rather, they are united by both their individual dreams/desires as well as the overarching goal of the group: to find the One Piece. This, believe it or not, is how I have come to find my home in a place you might not associate much with cartoon pirates: Christianity.
While I grew up my whole life in a Christian family and the Church, it wasn’t until later in life that I really came to find my own faith, and it was only fairly recently that I came to understand my home as being found in Jesus and his Church. Much like the Straw Hats, while different people within the Church have their own personal dreams, goals, and ideas, we are all united by a common mission and vision. As I have traveled independently from my family the past few years, studying abroad in Japan or volunteering along the East Coast, I have found that wherever I go, it is easy to find a home with the Church. It is something that transcends national, cultural, and even personal borders, which has made it easy to find a family and home no matter where I go. While I was in Japan, for example, while I loved staying with my host family and greatly appreciated their efforts to make me feel comfortable, it was ultimately in my Christian friend’s home where I felt ‘at home.’ Despite being there only less than a year, that friend has become one of my two closest friends around the world; the bond we have as brothers in Christ breaks down the boundaries which I feel have oft kept me from making deep relationships, and made it easy to become close. And now, wherever I go, so long as there are Christians there, I have a home–both relationally and physically among them. In this way, I have found that the Church (the global body of Christ) is my crew, and Jesus is my pirate ship. I both have a home in Christ, and the freedom to roam. In fact, I find in the Bible the greatest cause for me to continue traveling: “Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you. And behold, I am with you always, to the end of the age” (Matthew 28:19–20, ESV). And so I have a unified mission along with my fellow believers to go out into the world, not based on our common or individual whims, but based on the need for people to hear the Gospel.
Bibliography
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