Spiritual Homes & Liminal Spaces
How rivers flowing into the sea and third culture kids might help us understand shifts in our spirituality (+ a fun little surprise to share with you!)
As the subtitle of this posts suggests, we’re going to meander through several things here that came together for me a couple of weeks ago. And if you make it to the end of the post, you’ll also get to see a sneak peek of the cover for my new book! :)
Before jumping there, I’d love to share some curiosities I’ve been swirling in since I saw a river flowing into the sea on the very northern tip of this wild place that I currently call home.
I was taking a walk to explore a bay, following the instructions in our Airbnb that said to follow the river down to the beach. I savored the sound of water cascading across rocks and stones toward the shore, scampering closer and closer to the waves I simultaneously heard crashing on the coast. It was a glorious symphony of sounds. As I soaked in the salty air, I noticed that the river, like many others in that place, was a rich red color.
In this area, where bog and peat are vast, the water that flows out of it carries its first home with it in a rogue hue that thins and thickens at different depths. Like tea that’s been steeped, you can see where this water has been—in the peat and the bog—even when it’s traveled miles and finds a new home in another body of water.
Steps later, I found myself at the north sea with her crystal clear water inching toward me as the tide was coming in. Waves lulled back and forth.
Running directly into these waves, the red river was still flowing strong, with the river water being pulled by the tide every few moments, before releasing back into the flow of the river. Both waters ebbed and flowed, back and forth at this threshold, colliding, dancing, combining, releasing, and creating something distinct as they met.
I stood at the intersection, mesmerized.
While I looked at this mixture of waters, a light bulb went off in my body. It was as though I was seeing a tangible representation of a category I was already familiar with—third culture kids—and, a curiosity sprung up inside of me: might the category of third culture kids offer a helpful framework for people (self included!) who have experienced significant shifts in their spirituality?
Third culture kids are people who spent significant developmental years in a culture that is different from their parent’s home culture. I know this category because I am a third culture kid—I grew up between the United States, Canada, and the Netherlands, with American parents. My body knows the love and longing that gets tied up with these different homes, carrying these different cultures with you into each other, naturally creating a third culture that’s unique to your experience of the two. As a third culture kid, the home you inhabit isn’t just one place—a way of life that inherently includes ache, loss, and longing wherever you are. For me, this is the most mind and body bending pieces of being a third culture kid: there’s not actually one singular place that feels like home to you, because you embody more than one home in your bones.
Looking at the water, I saw the sea bringing its salt as it converged with the red river, just as the red river water brought its hue into the clear sea water. Similarly, my time in different cultures and homes came with their own distinctiveness that shaped who I am, not only while I was in those homes, but also anytime I shifted to another place. I brought their distinctiveness with me when I went back and forth between different homes. And just as this leads to third culture kids creating their own unique third culture from their experiences in different places they have known to be home, I saw a unique third water come together. There was a space where it wasn’t the red river, and it wasn’t the salty sea: it was both all-at-once, a new, unique, body of water.
The waters in front of me were different from what I had known though. Unlike the homes I carry with me anywhere I go that are separated by geography, the two bodies of water in front of me didn’t have thousands of miles separating them. Instead, as they met, I could see the third new thing they created alongside the places they came from.
And while this metaphor certainly breaks down at points, lets stick with it a little longer, curiously considering how it might help make sense of navigating spiritual shifts in our lives…
For myself and most others I know, shifts in our spirituality don’t happen out of the blue. Oftentimes something happened. And more often than not, the something that happened was harmful, wounding, and/or traumatic in some way, even if we don’t have the language for it (or even if it doesn’t feel safe or accessible to name it as such).
And if a shift in our spirituality has happened, that also often means there’s been a shift in the place we consider our spiritual home.
Maybe that spiritual home was a church.
Maybe that spiritual home was a certain type of theology or beliefs.
Maybe that spiritual home was a community of people we considered to be our family.
Maybe that spiritual home was tied up with our job, our future plans, or our whole sense of security.
And if we’ve experienced a spiritual shift because something happened—a something that was harmful—we’re rarely making a change because we had a choice in the matter.
Maybe we were forced to leave.
Maybe it was too painful to stay, even though we’d give anything to feel at home like we did before the something that happened.
Maybe they protected the people who did the harm, making it no longer safe to stay.
Whatever the case, like the red river water that carries the hue of its former home wherever it goes, whether we choose to or not—and whether we want to or not—we generally bring pieces of our former spiritual homes with us as we move through life, even across miles or into new bodies of water, into new homes.
That new home might be a different church.
That new home might be a non-church space or a new season of non-spirituality.
That new home might feel like a never-ending liminal space, like a desert, or like a temporary rental.
And as we step into these new homes, we can’t not take the red hue of the water with us that’s flowing in the river from our first home. Meaning, we can’t not create a third thing between our previous home and where we find ourselves now—a third culture, just like what’s created for third culture kids.
And as I looked at that red river water, I couldn’t help but wonder: How many of us are walking around without an anchored sense of home in our spirituality, but instead, feel a push and pull like the ebb and flow of the red river water meeting the sea’s tides, not finding a place of rest, but swirling in murky middle space that doesn’t come with a guidebook of how to navigate its waters?
How many of us ache as we carry our previous spiritual homes with us, with the red hue representing wounds of spiritual trauma, confusion from harmful control, or grief from loss? All the while also longing for the simplicity of the bright salty water of the sea—a new home that is clear and pure. But, when our red river water meets that clear water, rather than simply entering the clear water, our red river water creates a murky mixture as it flows into the tide.
Maybe we feel stuck in that murky mixture and would give anything to swim far enough away to reach clear waters.
Maybe we find ourselves torn between what was home in the past and the possibilities of a new home ahead of us, unsure of which direction to try and swim.
Maybe we’re sinking, not even sure of where we are, exhausted from the currents we’ve already swam through or been tossed around in.
The middle-space of not really having an anchored sense of spiritual home after spiritual shifts is brutal, especially when there’s often so much pain, confusion, and loss that we’re already holding when we’re trying to navigate shifts in our spirituality.
All of those shifts for each of our lives are tied to stories that include their own details and wounds. And even though those details and wounds will be different between different people, I can’t help but think about something else I know as a third culture kid: Every time I meet someone else who is also a third culture kid, there’s an instant connection. Beyond words, our bodies know that we both get what it’s like to hold more than one home in our being as we move through life. Our homes don’t have to have been in the same for us to get this—for us to get what it’s like to hold a third culture in our bones.
And similarly, our spiritual shifts don’t have to have been the same for us to understand at a gut-level what it’s like to have lost a place that was once a spiritual home, or what it’s like to be in a place of liminality when it comes to our spirituality/spiritual home. Even if the places that were our former spiritual homes aren’t the same, or even if the ways we’re navigating life on the other side of spiritual shifts looks different, if we’ve known this middle space, there’s a resonance that runs deeper than words.
And as I chewed on these curiosities on that beach, I realized that that very resonance that runs deeper than words—deep down in our gut-level knowing, burrowed deep down into our bones—is the very place I wrote from when I crafted the pages behind the cover you can see below. The thing I hadn’t been able to put into words behind the why of this next book was happening in front of my eyes in the shape and form of those waters.
And so, even though I didn’t plan it this way, as I shared these reflections on that river running into the sea today, I’m also going to (excitedly!) share a sneak peak of the cover of this new book.
These pages are filled with thoughts, questions, and cries from the depths of my soul, from the murky middle space of having experienced significant spiritual shifts on the other side of spiritual trauma, no longer having a clear spiritual home, finding myself at times floating, at times sinking, at times lost at sea, and at times bogged down back in the river. And while I know what each of us has walked through is different and unique, my hope and longing that’s woven into my writing is to invite each person who has known this murky middle space to find a home in these pages—a place to land, a place to rest, a place to be held, and a place be witnessed.
And now that this is way longer than I intended, I’ll land here for the day, simply saying I can’t wait to share more than just the cover of this book and place her pages in your hands 💛
For now, enjoy a peak at this beautiful design, and if you want to see her up and live online, you can follow this link. More details to come over the next few months :)
And genuinely, I would love to hear what you think about the imagery of the red river running into the clear sea, and if this connects at all for those of you who have experienced spiritual shifts or find yourselves in what feels like a murky middle space without a clear spiritual home on the other side of shifts in your spirituality.
