Culture Shock

THE CHANGES THAT accompany a visit to a foreign country are disorienting yet expected. From the get-go, you know that there are going to be differences, so you brace yourself for them. Paid public toilets? Sure, that’s part of the deal. Colorful money and coins with holes in them? We’ll run with it. No idea what everyone around you is saying? Welcome to Denmark.

     On the other hand, the shocks that come from being back “home” after time abroad are abrupt and comical. It’s the extra weight of a church hymnal that has twice as many pages as you’re used to. It’s all the extra space between countryside houses. It’s the @quotation mark@ key being in the wrong place on the keyboard. It’s remembering how to work a shower with only one knob for both volume and temperature.

     It’s not an intense or deeply meaningful feeling. It’s just a little pause where newness interrupts an otherwise familiar reality–sometimes very literally, like exiting a bathroom for the first time and having to turn the knob a full 90 degrees because it won’t open at 45 like you’re used to.

     Once in a while, though, it does hit hard. The unfamiliarity builds up to a strange loneliness, a sense that you don’t belong in a place that you should be used to.

     I wonder if you get those moments too: moments of being home, but not. Even if you haven’t been traveling. Sometimes they come and go, leaving that same sense of being in a place where you don’t really belong. Wanting to find the place where you belong. Perhaps it’s a universal longing:

     “[The Old Testament patriarchs] all died in faith, not having received the promises, but having seen them afar off…and confessed that they were strangers and pilgrims on the earth. For they that say such things declare plainly that they seek a country.

     “And truly, if they had been mindful of that country from whence they came out, they might have had opportunity to have returned. But now they desire a better country, that is, an heavenly: wherefore God is not ashamed to be called their God: for he hath prepared for them a city.” (Hebrews 11:13-16, KJV)

     The first kind of out-of-place feeling is surely temporary. Within a couple more years, I reckon American things and mannerisms will be second-nature to me again. But the second is a more permanent longing. Some call it religion. Others, philosophy. I suppose I’m one of those strangers and pilgrims who have felt their lives interrupted by that divine newness of culture shock in a world where they don’t truly belong, and who look for “a better country”: something better than this material world. Something higher.

     Don’t we all want something higher?