For the past two weeks, I’ve been traveling with my wife. We left the kids with my mother-in-law, hopped on the plane in Newark, NJ at 8:00 in the morning, and were in Japan the afternoon of the following day. We made Kyoto our home base and spent the whole two weeks traveling to temples, shrines, and mountaintops – all of them holy places to the Japanese. And this was, in truth, the point of our trip: to see the sacred in Japan.

You might wonder what a Christian priest was doing by searching for the holy and the sacred in shrines and temples. I did visit a two churches (St. Agnes in Kyoto and Christ Church in Nara; more on these in a further post), and I took great joy in receiving the Eucharist in a country that I love so deeply, but most of our time was spent in Shinto and Buddhist buildings, passing through large, orange torii gates, and looking at statues of buddhas with hundreds of hands. And, moreover, I believe that my joy in Shintoism and Buddhism is a specifically Christian joy. One might ask a question that has been asked, in slightly different forms, since the apostle St. Paul: what has Kyoto to do with Christ?

There is an easy answer to this question, and it is that our tradition, beginning with the Bible encourages us to listen to and learn from the prayer traditions of other faiths. St. Paul writes about God’s presence being made known in religions beyond Judaism, and the idea of natural theology (that God can be known through Creation, which includes other religions) is an early and deeply developed theology. Medieval peoples looked to their pagan pasts to understand and express their Christian faith, just as modern Christians looked first to Greece and Rome, then to expressions of Christianity all across the world, to further understand how God speaks to us. Learning about how Shinto honors nature helps us Christians learn how to care for Creation, and digging into Buddhist meditation can shine a light on our own Christian tradition of contemplation and how our forms of meditation and those of Buddhists are the same and how they differ.

Also, learning about other cultures is just plain fun, so why not?

That’s the easy answer. It’s something I’ve written about here before, and it’s something that I preach about on Sundays: Learning about other religions and other cultures can help us understand more about who God is, who we are, and how to serve others in Christ’s Name.

There is something, however, that is specific to Japan, and it may be specific to me. I’m certain that others have experienced this before (my wife is one of them), and others have certainly experienced it in other cultures that for me remain mysterious, foreign, or simply unknown. It is this, that Japan feels strangely like home to me. And in that sense of “home” I learn something very important about who God is and something very important about how God is calling me to live my Christian life.

I am in no ways ethnically Japanese. Both sides of my family come from the British Isles almost exclusively. Three out of four of my grandparents were born in Britain and Ireland, and I was raised in a very typical second/third-generation home. The furthest afield my heritage gets is Germany. I have zero Asian heritage and only learned about Japan in high school. And yet, somehow, I have never felt more at home than in Japan, and specifically in the area around Kyoto.

I’ve long wondered why this is. Maybe it’s because there was so much Japanese influences in 80s pop culture when I was growing up. Maybe I just really like anime. Maybe there are some vague, cultural connections between growing up as a British American and the Japanese culture and tradition. I don’t know, but what I do know is that I became a mature Christian in Japan.

The Episcopal Church teaches that we become part of the Church when we are baptized, be that as infants or as adults. The Episcopal Church also teaches that, at some point, a baptized person needs to made an adult confirmation of faith – namely, they need to make a mature decision to accept and take on the Christian faith beyond the promises of their godparents and their upbringing. This is called Confirmation, and it is a Sacrament of the Church just as much as Baptism is, just as much Confession and Healing are, and just as much as the Eucharist is.

I was confirmed in Eugene, Oregon at the Church of the Resurrection, back in the 2010s, but I became a mature Christian some time before that. I became a mature Christian in the Buddhist temple complex of Enryakuji on Mt. Hiei (specifically in the Konpon Chudo) in 2004 and while watching the wind blow through the rice paddies in Adogawa-cho in Shiga Prefecture in 2008 or so. My experience was much less a mature choosing of Christian faith, but of being chosen, much like Jesus’ words in John 15:16. Nor did I suddenly think, “Ah, yes, Jesus is God.” The knowledge of Jesus’ identity was infused into me like tea in hot water. I simply believed.

Now, why did this happen, and why did it happen in Japan. Again, I’m not sure. All I know is that God prepared for me a home in Japan, and I have “lived” that home ever since. Returning to Japan for these two weeks was a confirmation of that home and a continuation of it. For me, a part of who I am will always reside in Japan – and not in a metaphoric way, but in a very, very real way.

I write all this not just to tell you about myself. Well, that’s one reason, but I also write this because I’m convinced that you, too, have come to a place that is so very foreign from you and yet so very much your home. It may be another country, it may be another person. It may be that you left your home and rediscovered it once again as your home. God creates in us and shows us home in so many different ways, and our job is to honor that home to the best of our abilities.

What have I learned by finding my home in Japan? I’ve learned about how to honor small things like stones and like little pieces of bread. I’ve learned the importance of a calm pace to life, and I’ve learned to see things for what they really are, not just what I want them to be. I’ve learned how to let myself die, be it a death to my self as Jesus died to himself or a death to death itself, again, as Jesus died to death.

What have you learned from catching a glimpse of your home in the mysterious? What is God showing you in that home? And how is God calling you to live that home?