"I have often felt like a refugee in my own country. However, when I finally began a conscious effort to reconcile this contradiction (in my late thirties), my heritage turned out to be quite different from the rootless, maladjusted stereotype I had accepted. The more I examined the distinctive combination of grief, alienation,and nostalgia that I associated with the TCK legacy, the more I noticed that many of these "unique" characteristics were also shared by immigrants and refugees. A greater portion of American blues,folk, and rock and roll lyrics seem to be motivated by a nagging sense of loss, a desire for wholeness that is often phrased as a longing for home. Then I began to notice that the Christian sacrament of Communion- by its very name a celebration of community- expresses these same yearnings: "Do this in remembrance of me" Share and be made whole. Be assured that you will find your way home.
My own pilgrimage to remember and be reconciled with a fragmented past has been no less of a redemptive experience- and one equally dependent on the power of community. Instinctively, I understood that to connect more fully in the present- to feel at home- I had to reconnect with my past. My "formative identity", I discovered, included not only the experience of international living, with the attendant cycles of uprooting and reentry, but also the particulars of history and place."

"Rediscovering a Sense of Place"
Paul Asbury Seaman