Fort, Museum, or Home?

What kind of house is yours?

Shared, life-giving love is what makes a house into a home. But like any authentic good, there is always a counterfeit. And when it comes to home, we can pervert the fundamental unit of human experience into a false form. Much ink is spilled on the social evils caused by broken families, even referring to such households as "broken homes." And while that concern is certainly valid, what fascinates me is the way that those with strong family values have also, often unknowingly, lost the vision of home by creating something else entirely. They commonly do this in two different ways, by failing to share the love in their walls with others, or by selectively sharing it in an inauthentic way. In both errors, the family's rigidly-imposed privacy both excludes the community without and begins to erode the family within.

Christian families of the previous generation faced an unprecedented attack on family values. Suddenly, taken-for-granted notions of human sexuality, marriage, and family relationships were called into question, rocking the foundations of society. Naturally, those with traditional family-values responded by defending themselves. At first, there was a battle, the cultural war in full-fledged aggression on an open battlefield. But then there was a change: Christians were discouraged and burnt out, and in some cases they began to pull out of the political scene and even their own local communities. Unable to contain the damage done around them, they became content to live their safe and stable family lives in isolation. The home became a sanctuary from antagonistic and disagreeable outside forces.

This was an understandable situation, but nonetheless stripped the home of its power to bring life to those without as well as within, be it the weary traveler of days past or the heralded neighborhood spirit of America's heyday. Instead, those with traditional views on family isolated themselves. This left fewer and fewer positive examples for those around them, those who were not raised in traditional households now had few, if any, models of happy family life. In this new arrangement, the home has become a fort for these traditionalist families, strong and safe within, but always afraid and never reaching out beyond their comfort.

But there is another strategy that good families use for interacting with those outside: turning their home into a museum. Unlike the fort families, these families have some sense of obligation to share their homes with the outside world. Those who metaphorically "pay admission" by carpooling with the family or by RSVPing to the party are allowed in, as long as they go "through security" by being a trusted and predictable consumer. The guest will be expected, the house in order. Only the best parts of family history will be displayed. The visitors will learn about each family member's achievements. They will admire the cleanliness of the living room, and the china pattern on the table. They will be able to see only the curated family. These visitors aren't truly being invited into a home – they're tourists.

Both approaches to the home are distorted, but neither of these views is entirely wrong. There is certainly a place for privacy and protection within the home. There are times to formally host guests and put on your best face. But it is not these times that make a house a home. Home is only developed through organic social relationships in which the biological family is willing to form a spiritual community, to invite others in in a way that isn't forced or planned, to let them see the good, bad, and ugly parts of family life. Paradoxically, this kind of mission will tie a family closer together itself, in the same way that mission trips bind together fellow travelers.

This will look different in every family, but it can begin with simple things like knowing your neighbors, feeding hungry college kids, or having a young girl with divorced parents over to tea. We only have a home if it is shared, and one of the important purposes of our family is to share it with others. Our best hope for renewing culture is a strong home life, but a home life for others and not just ourselves.

What do you think of this article?

Write a short response. It'll get sent to our symposium editors and, if approved, added to the symposium. People who read this article will see your response immediately following, and we'll promote your contribution individually to the John Jay Institute's network.

Image above from Flickr user Roger Schultz via Flickr Creative Commons license.

Fort, Museum, or Home?

What kind of house is yours?

Shared, life-giving love is what makes a house into a home. But like any authentic good, there is always a counterfeit. And when it comes to home, we can pervert the fundamental unit of human experience into a false form. Much ink is spilled on the social evils caused by broken families, even referring to such households as "broken homes." And while that concern is certainly valid, what fascinates me is the way that those with strong family values have also, often unknowingly, lost the vision of home by creating something else entirely. They commonly do this in two different ways, by failing to share the love in their walls with others, or by selectively sharing it in an inauthentic way. In both errors, the family's rigidly-imposed privacy both excludes the community without and begins to erode the family within.

Christian families of the previous generation faced an unprecedented attack on family values. Suddenly, taken-for-granted notions of human sexuality, marriage, and family relationships were called into question, rocking the foundations of society. Naturally, those with traditional family-values responded by defending themselves. At first, there was a battle, the cultural war in full-fledged aggression on an open battlefield. But then there was a change: Christians were discouraged and burnt out, and in some cases they began to pull out of the political scene and even their own local communities. Unable to contain the damage done around them, they became content to live their safe and stable family lives in isolation. The home became a sanctuary from antagonistic and disagreeable outside forces.

This was an understandable situation, but nonetheless stripped the home of its power to bring life to those without as well as within, be it the weary traveler of days past or the heralded neighborhood spirit of America's heyday. Instead, those with traditional views on family isolated themselves. This left fewer and fewer positive examples for those around them, those who were not raised in traditional households now had few, if any, models of happy family life. In this new arrangement, the home has become a fort for these traditionalist families, strong and safe within, but always afraid and never reaching out beyond their comfort.

But there is another strategy that good families use for interacting with those outside: turning their home into a museum. Unlike the fort families, these families have some sense of obligation to share their homes with the outside world. Those who metaphorically "pay admission" by carpooling with the family or by RSVPing to the party are allowed in, as long as they go "through security" by being a trusted and predictable consumer. The guest will be expected, the house in order. Only the best parts of family history will be displayed. The visitors will learn about each family member's achievements. They will admire the cleanliness of the living room, and the china pattern on the table. They will be able to see only the curated family. These visitors aren't truly being invited into a home – they're tourists.

Both approaches to the home are distorted, but neither of these views is entirely wrong. There is certainly a place for privacy and protection within the home. There are times to formally host guests and put on your best face. But it is not these times that make a house a home. Home is only developed through organic social relationships in which the biological family is willing to form a spiritual community, to invite others in in a way that isn't forced or planned, to let them see the good, bad, and ugly parts of family life. Paradoxically, this kind of mission will tie a family closer together itself, in the same way that mission trips bind together fellow travelers.

This will look different in every family, but it can begin with simple things like knowing your neighbors, feeding hungry college kids, or having a young girl with divorced parents over to tea. We only have a home if it is shared, and one of the important purposes of our family is to share it with others. Our best hope for renewing culture is a strong home life, but a home life for others and not just ourselves.

What do you think of this article?

Write a short response. It'll get sent to our symposium editors and, if approved, added to the symposium. People who read this article will see your response immediately following, and we'll promote your contribution individually to the John Jay Institute's network.

Image above from Flickr user Roger Schultz via Flickr Creative Commons license.

On Home: An Introduction

Welcome to our Symposium on Home!

Starting today and continuing through the next two weeks, our writers will be sharing their thoughts on the theme:

“There’s no place like home.” There is especially no place like a well-ordered, welcoming, loving home. Domestic tranquility is one of the most beautiful things in the world. But as Robert Farrar Capon wrote, “It is hard to make a home.” Homes of the hospitable sort do not just pop out of the ground. They have to be nurtured and maintained with patience and sacrifices that often aren’t noticed or appreciated. This work must be done while contending with any number of foes that do damage to home life: busyness (is it a home if no one is ever there?), the transitoriness of modern life, unemployment, workaholism, poverty, illness, divorce, and abuse, along with the garden-variety sinful cussedness that makes us all so difficult to live with.  This symposium will investigate what makes homes beautiful, and how to create them in a world filled with broken people who all need a place to call home.

It has been our pleasure to work with this talented group of writers to compile and present the following article symposium. Please check back daily for new articles!

And if any of these articles inspires you, please submit a response by clicking here! It’ll get sent to our symposium editors and, if approved, added to the symposium. People who read this article will see your response immediately following, and we’ll promote your contribution individually to the John Jay Institute’s network.

Sincerely, The Home Symposium Editors

JJI Managing Editor

Zachary Gappa has a degree in Political Theory from Patrick Henry College and currently works as both Managing Editor for the John Jay Institute’s Center for a Just Society and Operations Manager at Gappa Security Solutions. Most recently he has been enjoying trying to stay warm in Wisconsin while planning family activities for Summer.

JJI Editor

Anna Smith holds an MA in biblical studies from Westminster Seminary California and a BA in political science from Geneva College. She works at Westminster and lives in Southern California with her husband, where she loves the ocean but misses her native Midwest. She (mostly re-)tweets @AnnaSpeckhard.

JJI Editor

Lauren Bobbitt, a 2009 John Jay Institute fellow, has a background in literature and earned her MA at Marquette University. She currently works in communications for an organic dairy farm, where she enjoys the smell of manure and striving to reflect the good life in her living and writing.

Special Guest Editor

Liz Horst holds a degree in English literature from Grove City College. She works as a Suzuki violin teacher in the Washington, D.C. area and, in her spare time, enjoys immersing herself in great books and poetry.

On Home: An Introduction

Welcome to our Symposium on Home!

Starting today and continuing through the next two weeks, our writers will be sharing their thoughts on the theme:

“There’s no place like home.” There is especially no place like a well-ordered, welcoming, loving home. Domestic tranquility is one of the most beautiful things in the world. But as Robert Farrar Capon wrote, “It is hard to make a home.” Homes of the hospitable sort do not just pop out of the ground. They have to be nurtured and maintained with patience and sacrifices that often aren’t noticed or appreciated. This work must be done while contending with any number of foes that do damage to home life: busyness (is it a home if no one is ever there?), the transitoriness of modern life, unemployment, workaholism, poverty, illness, divorce, and abuse, along with the garden-variety sinful cussedness that makes us all so difficult to live with.  This symposium will investigate what makes homes beautiful, and how to create them in a world filled with broken people who all need a place to call home.

It has been our pleasure to work with this talented group of writers to compile and present the following article symposium. Please check back daily for new articles!

And if any of these articles inspires you, please submit a response by clicking here! It’ll get sent to our symposium editors and, if approved, added to the symposium. People who read this article will see your response immediately following, and we’ll promote your contribution individually to the John Jay Institute’s network.

Sincerely, The Home Symposium Editors

JJI Managing Editor

Zachary Gappa has a degree in Political Theory from Patrick Henry College and currently works as both Managing Editor for the John Jay Institute’s Center for a Just Society and Operations Manager at Gappa Security Solutions. Most recently he has been enjoying trying to stay warm in Wisconsin while planning family activities for Summer.

JJI Editor

Anna Smith holds an MA in biblical studies from Westminster Seminary California and a BA in political science from Geneva College. She works at Westminster and lives in Southern California with her husband, where she loves the ocean but misses her native Midwest. She (mostly re-)tweets @AnnaSpeckhard.

JJI Editor

Lauren Bobbitt, a 2009 John Jay Institute fellow, has a background in literature and earned her MA at Marquette University. She currently works in communications for an organic dairy farm, where she enjoys the smell of manure and striving to reflect the good life in her living and writing.

Special Guest Editor

Liz Horst holds a degree in English literature from Grove City College. She works as a Suzuki violin teacher in the Washington, D.C. area and, in her spare time, enjoys immersing herself in great books and poetry.

Home in Howl’s Moving Castle

What Miyazaki has to tell us about our selves, families, and communities

Social contract theory supposes that marriages are formed by voluntary “mutual compact” between the spouses. John Locke reckoned the inherent purpose of these compacts to be procreation; specifically, the establishment of a partnership and an environment for the care and upbringing of children who are expected to result from sexual union.

This account of the family Locke deduces from two premises: (A) that human beings are by nature equal and independent; yet (B) by some failure on nature’s part to follow through on this promise, infants enter the world at an extreme disadvantage in these respects. The family, then, is an accommodation to remedy this inevitable inequity. Presumably, if infants somehow were rendered independent, the family would not have to exist. In fact, Locke supposes that after parents have finished raising their batch of children there is no longer any reason for them to stay together other than convenience. Locke has of course chosen only one out of three reasons the Prayer Book gives for sacramental marriage: procreation. The other two are mutual help and support, and remedy of concupiscence.

Today Locke’s understanding of marriage is halfway lapsed; everyone believes that marriage is a free compact, but for what purpose nobody knows. Only “mutual support” is even vaguely indicated by today’s popular understanding of marriage, and often even that purpose is counter-indicated by the view that the parties to a marriage are already almost entirely self-sufficient persons who seek in marriage only the fulfillment of intangible emotional benefits.

What is really created in marriage, though, is an actual and potential home; an establishment with great significance as human habitat and political institution. It is a place of permanence and change, where children are raised and socialized, elders are honored and cared for, and adults find personal fulfillment and impetus for self-mastery in the duties and joys of structured relationships. In short, it is a place of love.

Art can offer a view of the secret truths of human life which the broad statements of philosophy only grope at. Japanese film animator Hayao Miyazaki achieves this effect especially well. Last year I explored how all of Miyazaki’s work reveals a deeply conservative disposition. Here I am keen to show how Miyazaki situates a surprisingly traditional and full-featured concept of “home” in an unstable context similar to our modern world, in his 2004 film Howl’s Moving Castle.

The film opens on characters who are mostly lonely individuals, out for themselves and only loosely bound to others. Sophie, the heroine, is the most rooted, carrying on her work in the family hat shop out of respect for her late father, and visiting her younger sister in another town on her day off. Two magicians, Howl and the Witch of the Waste, are in conflict over a former romantic affair, and both are on the run from the government. The country is about to go to war with a neighboring kingdom, and soldiers and propagandists roam the streets. Even in a busy commercial town reminiscent of nineteenth-century northern Europe, there seem to be few personal ties. The government tells everyone, especially the wizards, to do their patriotic duty and fight for their “homeland,” but this is propaganda. The war, we later learn, is little more than a pretext for Madame Suliman, the king’s chief sorcerer, to bring the rest of the country’s wizards under her control.

Sophie gets mixed up by accident in the wizards’ quarrel, and the Witch of the Waste curses her with the body of an old woman. Out of place in her former life, she journeys into the Waste to find a way to get rid of her curse. There she encounters Howl’s traveling castle and its animating intelligence, the fire demon Calcifer, who takes her on as a housekeeper.

As “Grandma Sophie” wins the hearts of the young apprentice Markl, Calcifer, and Howl himself, the once filthy and dreary castle becomes neat and clean—a house set in order. Through Sophie’s care and Howl’s awakened generosity, new people are welcomed into the family, including their former enemy the Witch of the Waste (who has lost her powers and become senile), and Heen, Madame Suliman’s asthmatic errand-dog.

As this family of outcasts grows, they inevitably become drawn back to civilization. Howl acquires Sophie's former hat shop and tries to set her up in business as a florist so they can live a “normal life.” But their domestic peace is threatened as the war brings danger of enemy bombs and government spies. Howl fights to protect the home, but he is being destroyed by his own magical curse—a demonic heart-sickness consuming his soul. It ultimately falls to Sophie to redeem Howl, protect the family, and end the war through her faithful love.

In all of his work, Miyazaki is concerned with the problems of social alienation in the modern world. Howl’s Moving Castle suggests a way to overcome alienation by establishing homes in which people who are lonely and lost may find a place to live and truly belong to one another.

While a home is partly a refuge from the outside world, it also has a mission to change and supply what is lacking in modern society. The natural family is one way this takes place. Families bring old and young together through natural affection. Families birth children and prepare them for integration in society. But families and the households they establish benefit more than those persons who are biologically related. They become centers of hospitality and life, with an influence extending beyond their walls. Even a home on the fringe of civilization, like Howl’s castle, ultimately fulfills a mission to society. The family is never totally separate from society—it is that element without which society cannot exist.

Families are part of the essential character of human nature and civilization, and not only because someone has to take care of the children. Naturalistic accounts of the family are true as far as they go, but accounts of family formation concerned only with the “natural” origin of the family leave out the social and spiritual dimensions of family life—the way that healthy families bring life to society from within. The impromptu family that evolves in Howl’s Moving Castle comes into being by accident, not biologically, yet comes to resemble a natural family anyway in essential characteristics: man and woman, old and young, home and hearth, hospitality, even the family dog.

One thing is for sure: If this family is not biological, neither is it formed by a social contract. It comes together quite by accident, but inevitably, because the family is the form into which the power of love always articulates itself to meet the needs of those it embraces.

What do you think of this article?

Write a short response. It'll get sent to our symposium editors and, if approved, added to the symposium. People who read this article will see your response immediately following, and we'll promote your contribution individually to the John Jay Institute's network.

Image above from Flickr user longplay via Flickr Creative Commons license. Image used for identification purposes.

Home in Howl’s Moving Castle

What Miyazaki has to tell us about our selves, families, and communities

Social contract theory supposes that marriages are formed by voluntary “mutual compact” between the spouses. John Locke reckoned the inherent purpose of these compacts to be procreation; specifically, the establishment of a partnership and an environment for the care and upbringing of children who are expected to result from sexual union.

This account of the family Locke deduces from two premises: (A) that human beings are by nature equal and independent; yet (B) by some failure on nature’s part to follow through on this promise, infants enter the world at an extreme disadvantage in these respects. The family, then, is an accommodation to remedy this inevitable inequity. Presumably, if infants somehow were rendered independent, the family would not have to exist. In fact, Locke supposes that after parents have finished raising their batch of children there is no longer any reason for them to stay together other than convenience. Locke has of course chosen only one out of three reasons the Prayer Book gives for sacramental marriage: procreation. The other two are mutual help and support, and remedy of concupiscence.

Today Locke’s understanding of marriage is halfway lapsed; everyone believes that marriage is a free compact, but for what purpose nobody knows. Only “mutual support” is even vaguely indicated by today’s popular understanding of marriage, and often even that purpose is counter-indicated by the view that the parties to a marriage are already almost entirely self-sufficient persons who seek in marriage only the fulfillment of intangible emotional benefits.

What is really created in marriage, though, is an actual and potential home; an establishment with great significance as human habitat and political institution. It is a place of permanence and change, where children are raised and socialized, elders are honored and cared for, and adults find personal fulfillment and impetus for self-mastery in the duties and joys of structured relationships. In short, it is a place of love.

Art can offer a view of the secret truths of human life which the broad statements of philosophy only grope at. Japanese film animator Hayao Miyazaki achieves this effect especially well. Last year I explored how all of Miyazaki’s work reveals a deeply conservative disposition. Here I am keen to show how Miyazaki situates a surprisingly traditional and full-featured concept of “home” in an unstable context similar to our modern world, in his 2004 film Howl’s Moving Castle.

The film opens on characters who are mostly lonely individuals, out for themselves and only loosely bound to others. Sophie, the heroine, is the most rooted, carrying on her work in the family hat shop out of respect for her late father, and visiting her younger sister in another town on her day off. Two magicians, Howl and the Witch of the Waste, are in conflict over a former romantic affair, and both are on the run from the government. The country is about to go to war with a neighboring kingdom, and soldiers and propagandists roam the streets. Even in a busy commercial town reminiscent of nineteenth-century northern Europe, there seem to be few personal ties. The government tells everyone, especially the wizards, to do their patriotic duty and fight for their “homeland,” but this is propaganda. The war, we later learn, is little more than a pretext for Madame Suliman, the king’s chief sorcerer, to bring the rest of the country’s wizards under her control.

Sophie gets mixed up by accident in the wizards’ quarrel, and the Witch of the Waste curses her with the body of an old woman. Out of place in her former life, she journeys into the Waste to find a way to get rid of her curse. There she encounters Howl’s traveling castle and its animating intelligence, the fire demon Calcifer, who takes her on as a housekeeper.

As “Grandma Sophie” wins the hearts of the young apprentice Markl, Calcifer, and Howl himself, the once filthy and dreary castle becomes neat and clean—a house set in order. Through Sophie’s care and Howl’s awakened generosity, new people are welcomed into the family, including their former enemy the Witch of the Waste (who has lost her powers and become senile), and Heen, Madame Suliman’s asthmatic errand-dog.

As this family of outcasts grows, they inevitably become drawn back to civilization. Howl acquires Sophie's former hat shop and tries to set her up in business as a florist so they can live a “normal life.” But their domestic peace is threatened as the war brings danger of enemy bombs and government spies. Howl fights to protect the home, but he is being destroyed by his own magical curse—a demonic heart-sickness consuming his soul. It ultimately falls to Sophie to redeem Howl, protect the family, and end the war through her faithful love.

In all of his work, Miyazaki is concerned with the problems of social alienation in the modern world. Howl’s Moving Castle suggests a way to overcome alienation by establishing homes in which people who are lonely and lost may find a place to live and truly belong to one another.

While a home is partly a refuge from the outside world, it also has a mission to change and supply what is lacking in modern society. The natural family is one way this takes place. Families bring old and young together through natural affection. Families birth children and prepare them for integration in society. But families and the households they establish benefit more than those persons who are biologically related. They become centers of hospitality and life, with an influence extending beyond their walls. Even a home on the fringe of civilization, like Howl’s castle, ultimately fulfills a mission to society. The family is never totally separate from society—it is that element without which society cannot exist.

Families are part of the essential character of human nature and civilization, and not only because someone has to take care of the children. Naturalistic accounts of the family are true as far as they go, but accounts of family formation concerned only with the “natural” origin of the family leave out the social and spiritual dimensions of family life—the way that healthy families bring life to society from within. The impromptu family that evolves in Howl’s Moving Castle comes into being by accident, not biologically, yet comes to resemble a natural family anyway in essential characteristics: man and woman, old and young, home and hearth, hospitality, even the family dog.

One thing is for sure: If this family is not biological, neither is it formed by a social contract. It comes together quite by accident, but inevitably, because the family is the form into which the power of love always articulates itself to meet the needs of those it embraces.

What do you think of this article?

Write a short response. It'll get sent to our symposium editors and, if approved, added to the symposium. People who read this article will see your response immediately following, and we'll promote your contribution individually to the John Jay Institute's network.

Image above from Flickr user longplay via Flickr Creative Commons license. Image used for identification purposes.

Building Home Takes Grit

What True Grit has to say about American communities

Americans have a particular relationship to their home. Based more on an idea than on blood, creed, or soil, Americanness is at once less stationary but more deeply felt than other national identities. We cannot claim the same felt sense of permanence that our ancestors in the Old Country did, but we nevertheless (or for that reason?) dearly love our hard-won civilization. Central to this sustaining tension is Americans' shared idea of mobility, both geographic and socio-economic.

But Americans' mobility is not simply expansionist—not merely movement for the sake of movement. It is constructive. We stumble onto wilderness and, slowly and with great sacrifice, build civilization. This proclivity to constructive wandering constitutes a central theme of that most American of movie genres, Westerns. In confronting the great Western frontier, Americans had to grapple with fundamental questions about progress, tradition, and the ends of a political order. They had to ask themselves why they were leaving their old homes, what sort of homes they sought to establish, and even what makes a home in the first place. The best Westerns dramatize these struggles and give voice to the American story, which is at heart one of making home in a strange world.

True Grit, the 1968 novel by Charles Portis twice adapted for the silver screen, follows a precocious fourteen-year-old girl in her quest to avenge her father's murder. Maddie Ross' journey brings her from her sleepy backwater of Dardanelle, Arkansas, to Fort Smith, Texas, and into the heart of the Choctaw Nation. Maddie is conspicuously young—forced by circumstance to take up her mission because of the lack of courage, will, or ability (i.e., the lack of "grit") in the adults around her. "Mama was never any good at sums," Maddie explains, "and she could hardly spell ‘cat.'" This is not meant to disparage; Maddie says of her mother that she "had a serene and loving heart … like Mary."

But precisely because of her Marian virtue, Maddie's mama cannot take up this mission; she cannot forge ahead. Maddie, on the other hand, is clear-eyed in realizing the need for justice, and is willing to act in pursuance of it. Importantly, Maddie turns to the law for balance. She doesn't just want to see her father's murderer dead; she wants to see him convicted and punished for the crime of killing her father. As she tells the eccentric Texas Ranger Laboeuf, who is also after the same criminal for a different crime: "I did not want him brought to Texas, to have a Texas punishment administered for a Texas crime." A constant theme of Western film and literature is the balance between barbarism and law—in Maddie's unironic insistence on legal recourse for her father's death, she stands as a sort of exemplar of civilizational progress, an overcoming of the lex talionis. But this progress is meant to preserve a certain stable order of the home that her father's death has upset. For Maddie the nexus between law, home, and justice is a tight one. Paradoxically, this quest uproots her from her home, bringing her deep into a dangerous wilderness where she almost dies.

In the climactic scene, Maddie is captured by a band of criminals, including the man who killed her father, and must look to the shady one-eyed U.S. Marshall she's enlisted for help, Rooster Cogburn, to rescue her. Rooster (played memorably by John Wayne in the 1969 film but even more ably by Jeff Bridges in the 2010 version) has a different conception of justice than Maddie—one not tied to the soil or the law. But this conception does not undermine his intuitive sense of right and wrong. For this reason Rooster lies somewhat outside of the bounds of civilized society, despite his role as an enforcer of its boundaries. Disgraced (Rooster fought for the infamous Confederate marauder William Quantrill and robbed a federal bank before becoming a Marshall), divorced (Rooster's wife left him for a clerk at a hardware store), and often drunk, Rooster is not fettered by the same bonds of home, family, or duty that Maddie is. So when Rooster finds himself hopelessly outnumbered by the criminal gang, he does not turn and run—instead, he "took the reins in his teeth" and charges ahead, firing from both hands. This sends a number of the gang flying, and Rooster's good aim dispatches the rest.

Explaining this tactic earlier in the book, Rooster ventures to "guess they was all married men who loved their families as they scattered and run for home." That is, the strong ties of home are what keep most men from risking their lives, preventing them from daring to great or noble deeds; likewise Rooster's uprooted existence lends him a degree of freedom, and it is a great act of heroism that he – eventually – commits this freedom to a just cause. Maddie's quest for justice, rooted in familial loyalty, becomes Rooster's quest for salvation, made possible precisely by his lack of loyalties. The fact that Rooster owes Maddie nothing by convention or by blood, but nevertheless chooses to make her cause his own (not only saving Maddie from the criminals but carrying her on foot through the night to a doctor after she is bitten by a viper) shows how the bonds of civilization form and expand beyond clan or tribe. Maddie repays Rooster's sacrifice by laying his body to rest on her land, assimilating him into a family he never had.

Maddie's sense of injustice, which might have never risen above the level of base revenge, is elevated by the constraints and tutelage of law; and Rooster's will, which has proven violent and destructive in the past, is elevated by an act of love. Thus True Grit suggests that to conquer the frontier and build a society worth living in, a citizenry must be capable of both order and caritas.

It is noteworthy also that, after her adventures with Rooster, Maddie never marries. She becomes wealthy and assiduously pious in a Presbyterian sort of way, and her neighbors come to think of her as a "cranky old maid." She spurns such judgment, saying she "never had the time to get married" and that it's "nobody's business" anyways. What of this sternness? The "grit" that propelled Maddie through her trials in the Choctaw Nation seems also to have overridden whatever natural inclinations she may have had to quiet domesticity. Maddie sacrificed part of herself (literally—the viper bite costs her an arm) in her search for justice, and she now stands somehow beyond the bounds of conventional society. But rather than discrediting her, Maddie's aloofness highlights how normalcy tends to depend on certain great individuals who cannot participate in it themselves. Maddie took up her mission when her loving mother couldn't, and it is upon Maddie that, in some sense, her family's respectability depends, even if she doesn't expand the family herself.

These tensions – between order and barbarism, justice and revenge, charity and duty – sustain the American quest for community. They animated the restive frontier spirit, out of which so much life and goodness has sprung. And they make clear the degree to which sacrifice is central to the enterprise of building culture. The great American director John Ford grasped this same insight—when Tom Doniphan (John Wayne) shoots and kills the vicious outlaw Liberty Valence (Lee Marvin) but lets Ransom Stoddard (Jimmy Stewart) take the credit, winning the hand of a woman they both love and rising to the rank of senator, he is sacrificing his own humanity for the sake of the future. "You taught her how to read and write," Doniphan reminds a hesitant Stoddard, "now give her something to read and write about!" And in Ford's masterpiece, The Searchers, Ethan (John Wayne once again), a stranger or even antagonist to his extended family's domesticity, enters into the depths of Indian territory to reclaim his kidnapped niece before walking off to "wander forever between the winds."

Our culture was built by men and women of extraordinary grit, who took up the unenviable task of setting up a civilization they themselves would not live to fully enjoy. In this way the American West, and the films that depict it, shed some light on what it means to make home: Not a Rockwell-esque scene of glowing tranquility, but a self-emptying process of construction. It is this spirit that has and ought to still define our American approach to community.

What do you think of this article?

Write a short response. It'll get sent to our symposium editors and, if approved, added to the symposium. People who read this article will see your response immediately following, and we'll promote your contribution individually to the John Jay Institute's network.

Image above from Flickr user milton.guerrero via Flickr Creative Commons license. Image used for identification purposes.

Building Home Takes Grit

What True Grit has to say about American communities

Americans have a particular relationship to their home. Based more on an idea than on blood, creed, or soil, Americanness is at once less stationary but more deeply felt than other national identities. We cannot claim the same felt sense of permanence that our ancestors in the Old Country did, but we nevertheless (or for that reason?) dearly love our hard-won civilization. Central to this sustaining tension is Americans' shared idea of mobility, both geographic and socio-economic.

But Americans' mobility is not simply expansionist—not merely movement for the sake of movement. It is constructive. We stumble onto wilderness and, slowly and with great sacrifice, build civilization. This proclivity to constructive wandering constitutes a central theme of that most American of movie genres, Westerns. In confronting the great Western frontier, Americans had to grapple with fundamental questions about progress, tradition, and the ends of a political order. They had to ask themselves why they were leaving their old homes, what sort of homes they sought to establish, and even what makes a home in the first place. The best Westerns dramatize these struggles and give voice to the American story, which is at heart one of making home in a strange world.

True Grit, the 1968 novel by Charles Portis twice adapted for the silver screen, follows a precocious fourteen-year-old girl in her quest to avenge her father's murder. Maddie Ross' journey brings her from her sleepy backwater of Dardanelle, Arkansas, to Fort Smith, Texas, and into the heart of the Choctaw Nation. Maddie is conspicuously young—forced by circumstance to take up her mission because of the lack of courage, will, or ability (i.e., the lack of "grit") in the adults around her. "Mama was never any good at sums," Maddie explains, "and she could hardly spell ‘cat.'" This is not meant to disparage; Maddie says of her mother that she "had a serene and loving heart … like Mary."

But precisely because of her Marian virtue, Maddie's mama cannot take up this mission; she cannot forge ahead. Maddie, on the other hand, is clear-eyed in realizing the need for justice, and is willing to act in pursuance of it. Importantly, Maddie turns to the law for balance. She doesn't just want to see her father's murderer dead; she wants to see him convicted and punished for the crime of killing her father. As she tells the eccentric Texas Ranger Laboeuf, who is also after the same criminal for a different crime: "I did not want him brought to Texas, to have a Texas punishment administered for a Texas crime." A constant theme of Western film and literature is the balance between barbarism and law—in Maddie's unironic insistence on legal recourse for her father's death, she stands as a sort of exemplar of civilizational progress, an overcoming of the lex talionis. But this progress is meant to preserve a certain stable order of the home that her father's death has upset. For Maddie the nexus between law, home, and justice is a tight one. Paradoxically, this quest uproots her from her home, bringing her deep into a dangerous wilderness where she almost dies.

In the climactic scene, Maddie is captured by a band of criminals, including the man who killed her father, and must look to the shady one-eyed U.S. Marshall she's enlisted for help, Rooster Cogburn, to rescue her. Rooster (played memorably by John Wayne in the 1969 film but even more ably by Jeff Bridges in the 2010 version) has a different conception of justice than Maddie—one not tied to the soil or the law. But this conception does not undermine his intuitive sense of right and wrong. For this reason Rooster lies somewhat outside of the bounds of civilized society, despite his role as an enforcer of its boundaries. Disgraced (Rooster fought for the infamous Confederate marauder William Quantrill and robbed a federal bank before becoming a Marshall), divorced (Rooster's wife left him for a clerk at a hardware store), and often drunk, Rooster is not fettered by the same bonds of home, family, or duty that Maddie is. So when Rooster finds himself hopelessly outnumbered by the criminal gang, he does not turn and run—instead, he "took the reins in his teeth" and charges ahead, firing from both hands. This sends a number of the gang flying, and Rooster's good aim dispatches the rest.

Explaining this tactic earlier in the book, Rooster ventures to "guess they was all married men who loved their families as they scattered and run for home." That is, the strong ties of home are what keep most men from risking their lives, preventing them from daring to great or noble deeds; likewise Rooster's uprooted existence lends him a degree of freedom, and it is a great act of heroism that he – eventually – commits this freedom to a just cause. Maddie's quest for justice, rooted in familial loyalty, becomes Rooster's quest for salvation, made possible precisely by his lack of loyalties. The fact that Rooster owes Maddie nothing by convention or by blood, but nevertheless chooses to make her cause his own (not only saving Maddie from the criminals but carrying her on foot through the night to a doctor after she is bitten by a viper) shows how the bonds of civilization form and expand beyond clan or tribe. Maddie repays Rooster's sacrifice by laying his body to rest on her land, assimilating him into a family he never had.

Maddie's sense of injustice, which might have never risen above the level of base revenge, is elevated by the constraints and tutelage of law; and Rooster's will, which has proven violent and destructive in the past, is elevated by an act of love. Thus True Grit suggests that to conquer the frontier and build a society worth living in, a citizenry must be capable of both order and caritas.

It is noteworthy also that, after her adventures with Rooster, Maddie never marries. She becomes wealthy and assiduously pious in a Presbyterian sort of way, and her neighbors come to think of her as a "cranky old maid." She spurns such judgment, saying she "never had the time to get married" and that it's "nobody's business" anyways. What of this sternness? The "grit" that propelled Maddie through her trials in the Choctaw Nation seems also to have overridden whatever natural inclinations she may have had to quiet domesticity. Maddie sacrificed part of herself (literally—the viper bite costs her an arm) in her search for justice, and she now stands somehow beyond the bounds of conventional society. But rather than discrediting her, Maddie's aloofness highlights how normalcy tends to depend on certain great individuals who cannot participate in it themselves. Maddie took up her mission when her loving mother couldn't, and it is upon Maddie that, in some sense, her family's respectability depends, even if she doesn't expand the family herself.

These tensions – between order and barbarism, justice and revenge, charity and duty – sustain the American quest for community. They animated the restive frontier spirit, out of which so much life and goodness has sprung. And they make clear the degree to which sacrifice is central to the enterprise of building culture. The great American director John Ford grasped this same insight—when Tom Doniphan (John Wayne) shoots and kills the vicious outlaw Liberty Valence (Lee Marvin) but lets Ransom Stoddard (Jimmy Stewart) take the credit, winning the hand of a woman they both love and rising to the rank of senator, he is sacrificing his own humanity for the sake of the future. "You taught her how to read and write," Doniphan reminds a hesitant Stoddard, "now give her something to read and write about!" And in Ford's masterpiece, The Searchers, Ethan (John Wayne once again), a stranger or even antagonist to his extended family's domesticity, enters into the depths of Indian territory to reclaim his kidnapped niece before walking off to "wander forever between the winds."

Our culture was built by men and women of extraordinary grit, who took up the unenviable task of setting up a civilization they themselves would not live to fully enjoy. In this way the American West, and the films that depict it, shed some light on what it means to make home: Not a Rockwell-esque scene of glowing tranquility, but a self-emptying process of construction. It is this spirit that has and ought to still define our American approach to community.

What do you think of this article?

Write a short response. It'll get sent to our symposium editors and, if approved, added to the symposium. People who read this article will see your response immediately following, and we'll promote your contribution individually to the John Jay Institute's network.

Image above from Flickr user milton.guerrero via Flickr Creative Commons license. Image used for identification purposes.

Third Culture Kids

What is home for children living abroad?

He grew up in New Jersey. She grew up in New Zealand. They met online when he was living in San Diego and she was working in the Congo. Before getting married, they lived in the Sudan. After marriage, they lived in the United Kingdom, Pakistan and Thailand. Where will be "home" for their children?

It sounds like some kind of logic puzzle, but it's not. This is my life with my husband and our first child, born last year in Bangkok, Thailand.

It's the kind of scenario with which the renowned Trappist monk, Thomas Merton, also grappled. Born in France, with a father from New Zealand, an American mother, and French and English educations, he spent his developmental years constantly moving across the Atlantic. In his autobiography, The Seven Storey Mountain, he speaks about acquiring a loose sense of "home" in France when he returned there as a child:

"That day...I discovered France. I discovered that land which is really, as far as I can tell, the one to which I do belong, if I belong to any at all, by no documentary title but by geographical birth."((Merton, Thomas, The Seven Storey Mountain: An Autobiography of Faith (Anv. Edition), Kindle edition: Mariner Books, 1998, 35.))

Yet throughout his autobiography it becomes clear that the notion of ‘home' seems to escape him just when he needs it most, such as when his father dies:

"I sat there in the dark, unhappy room, unable to think, unable to move, with all the innumerable elements of my isolation crowding in upon me from every side: without a home, without a family, without a country, without a father, apparently without any friends, without any interior peace or confidence or light or understanding of my own—without God, too, without God, without heaven, without grace, without anything."((Ibid, 79.)) (emphasis added)

Thomas Merton probably never called himself a cross-cultural kid or a third culture kid, but in today's language, he would be considered both. Our son is already a "cross-cultural kid," and at the nomadic rate we're going, may well end up a "third culture kid." Who are these "cultured" kids? And how are they affected by the lack of obvious response to the question, "Where is home?"

A cross-cultural kid (CCK) is "a person who is living or has lived in--or meaningfully interacted with--two or more cultural environments for a significant period of time during childhood (up to age 18)."((Pollock, David C. & Van Reken, Ruth E., Third Culture Kids: Growing Up Among Worlds, Revised Edition, Kindle Edition: Nicholas Brealey America, 2009, 30.)) A third-culture kid (TCK) is a sub-type of cross-cultural kid, and is defined as "a person who has spent a significant part of his or her developmental years outside of... their parents' home cultures."((http://tckid.com/what-is-a-tck.html, accessed 10 March 2015.))

As is evident in The Seven Storey Mountain, this "lack" of home is no trivial matter in shaping one's identity. It has also been argued that it's no trivial matter at a societal level if one considers TCKs "the prototype citizens of the future."((Ward, Ted, "The MKs' advantage: Three Cultural Contexts," in Understanding and Nurturing the Missionary Family, edited by Pam Echerd and Alice Arathoon, Pasadena, CA: William Carey Library, 1989, 57. )) There have always been TCKs, but their prevalence and influence is greatly increasing. Just look at President Obama.

My husband and I wonder what we should do as the parents of an actual CCK, and a potential TCK. Is it irresponsible to put our child in such a limbo? Do the benefits outweigh the loss of one place that is clearly home for him? In particular, how much does religious identity contribute to a sense of "home" for a TCK?

For now, we have a few years before our son starts to build friendships or go to school to decide how we feel about these kinds of questions. There is still time to establish a sense of geographical "home" if we choose to do so. For now, remaining abroad is the path of least resistance versus the prospect of settling down with all that entails vis-à-vis immigration, housing, jobs, and more. Living abroad is also still so interesting and vibrant, and makes sense in other practical ways. We approach the possibility of our son becoming a TCK with eyes wide open, cognizant of the enormous benefits that one can reap – educationally, linguistically, socially and spiritually – as well as the various challenges that one must face – such as distance from extended family, or the lack of educational, psychological or social continuity – when forfeiting a single ‘home'.

Lastly, there is a still higher question that seems worth asking, and which perhaps Thomas Merton would want to answer if he were here today. Maybe instead of trying to find earthly compensations for a lack of home, there are blessings to be found in this sort of homelessness itself. Would Merton have plumbed such spiritual depths or produced such spiritual insight were it not for his acute sense of homelessness? Perhaps being a TCK can constitute a type of sacramental, lived experience of Jesus' words, "Foxes have holes, and birds of the air have nests; but the Son of Man has nowhere to lay his head" (Matt 8:20)? Perhaps it provides a whiff of the eternal restlessness of which St. Augustine spoke, "Thou hast made us for thyself, and our heart is restless until it finds rest in thee"?

What do you think of this article?

Write a short response. It'll get sent to our symposium editors and, if approved, added to the symposium. People who read this article will see your response immediately following, and we'll promote your contribution individually to the John Jay Institute's network.

Image above via canstockphoto.

Third Culture Kids

What is home for children living abroad?

He grew up in New Jersey. She grew up in New Zealand. They met online when he was living in San Diego and she was working in the Congo. Before getting married, they lived in the Sudan. After marriage, they lived in the United Kingdom, Pakistan and Thailand. Where will be "home" for their children?

It sounds like some kind of logic puzzle, but it's not. This is my life with my husband and our first child, born last year in Bangkok, Thailand.

It's the kind of scenario with which the renowned Trappist monk, Thomas Merton, also grappled. Born in France, with a father from New Zealand, an American mother, and French and English educations, he spent his developmental years constantly moving across the Atlantic. In his autobiography, The Seven Storey Mountain, he speaks about acquiring a loose sense of "home" in France when he returned there as a child:

"That day...I discovered France. I discovered that land which is really, as far as I can tell, the one to which I do belong, if I belong to any at all, by no documentary title but by geographical birth."((Merton, Thomas, The Seven Storey Mountain: An Autobiography of Faith (Anv. Edition), Kindle edition: Mariner Books, 1998, 35.))

Yet throughout his autobiography it becomes clear that the notion of ‘home' seems to escape him just when he needs it most, such as when his father dies:

"I sat there in the dark, unhappy room, unable to think, unable to move, with all the innumerable elements of my isolation crowding in upon me from every side: without a home, without a family, without a country, without a father, apparently without any friends, without any interior peace or confidence or light or understanding of my own—without God, too, without God, without heaven, without grace, without anything."((Ibid, 79.)) (emphasis added)

Thomas Merton probably never called himself a cross-cultural kid or a third culture kid, but in today's language, he would be considered both. Our son is already a "cross-cultural kid," and at the nomadic rate we're going, may well end up a "third culture kid." Who are these "cultured" kids? And how are they affected by the lack of obvious response to the question, "Where is home?"

A cross-cultural kid (CCK) is "a person who is living or has lived in--or meaningfully interacted with--two or more cultural environments for a significant period of time during childhood (up to age 18)."((Pollock, David C. & Van Reken, Ruth E., Third Culture Kids: Growing Up Among Worlds, Revised Edition, Kindle Edition: Nicholas Brealey America, 2009, 30.)) A third-culture kid (TCK) is a sub-type of cross-cultural kid, and is defined as "a person who has spent a significant part of his or her developmental years outside of... their parents' home cultures."((http://tckid.com/what-is-a-tck.html, accessed 10 March 2015.))

As is evident in The Seven Storey Mountain, this "lack" of home is no trivial matter in shaping one's identity. It has also been argued that it's no trivial matter at a societal level if one considers TCKs "the prototype citizens of the future."((Ward, Ted, "The MKs' advantage: Three Cultural Contexts," in Understanding and Nurturing the Missionary Family, edited by Pam Echerd and Alice Arathoon, Pasadena, CA: William Carey Library, 1989, 57. )) There have always been TCKs, but their prevalence and influence is greatly increasing. Just look at President Obama.

My husband and I wonder what we should do as the parents of an actual CCK, and a potential TCK. Is it irresponsible to put our child in such a limbo? Do the benefits outweigh the loss of one place that is clearly home for him? In particular, how much does religious identity contribute to a sense of "home" for a TCK?

For now, we have a few years before our son starts to build friendships or go to school to decide how we feel about these kinds of questions. There is still time to establish a sense of geographical "home" if we choose to do so. For now, remaining abroad is the path of least resistance versus the prospect of settling down with all that entails vis-à-vis immigration, housing, jobs, and more. Living abroad is also still so interesting and vibrant, and makes sense in other practical ways. We approach the possibility of our son becoming a TCK with eyes wide open, cognizant of the enormous benefits that one can reap – educationally, linguistically, socially and spiritually – as well as the various challenges that one must face – such as distance from extended family, or the lack of educational, psychological or social continuity – when forfeiting a single ‘home'.

Lastly, there is a still higher question that seems worth asking, and which perhaps Thomas Merton would want to answer if he were here today. Maybe instead of trying to find earthly compensations for a lack of home, there are blessings to be found in this sort of homelessness itself. Would Merton have plumbed such spiritual depths or produced such spiritual insight were it not for his acute sense of homelessness? Perhaps being a TCK can constitute a type of sacramental, lived experience of Jesus' words, "Foxes have holes, and birds of the air have nests; but the Son of Man has nowhere to lay his head" (Matt 8:20)? Perhaps it provides a whiff of the eternal restlessness of which St. Augustine spoke, "Thou hast made us for thyself, and our heart is restless until it finds rest in thee"?

What do you think of this article?

Write a short response. It'll get sent to our symposium editors and, if approved, added to the symposium. People who read this article will see your response immediately following, and we'll promote your contribution individually to the John Jay Institute's network.

Image above via canstockphoto.

Sanctuaries in the Shadowlands

Prefiguring heaven in our homes

Whenever I think of home, I think of Narnia. I imagine running "as fast as an arrow flies" through the dappled downs, swimming up a thundering waterfall as if "climbing up light itself,"((Lewis, C.S., The Last Battle, P. 200.)) scaling the snowcapped mountains into the Western Wild. Narnia, of course, is an imaginary country, and I live in the suburbs, but in his allegory of what Christians recognize as "the new heavens and the new earth,"((Isaiah 65:17, 2 Peter 3:13)) Lewis captures the elusive and transcendent feeling of coming home. I feel at home in Narnia because it confirms my inner conviction, universal to the human experience, that I was made for a better world.

Part of being human is desiring shelter from the relentless onslaught of sin and brokenness. Christian tradition acknowledges that longing and points to a remedy: heaven as home. The writer of Hebrews writes that pilgrims "desire a better country, that is, a heavenly one."((Hebrews 11:16)) In Scripture and Christian literature, the language that refers to heaven and home is both interchangeable and futuristic. The desire for heaven is the desire for home, and vice versa. We were made for a flawless future home, but we live in a presently fallen world. How then do we live in the tension between the hope of heaven and the immediacy of our need for it?

Christian homes should be places that intentionally enact the Christian journey through the Shadowlands of this world toward our true country. Heaven is a certain but mysterious promise and Eden is lost, so we cannot manifest the thing itself, but we can foreshadow it. Just as early believers accepted the name Christians, meaning "little Christs," we can create "little homes." Little homes are where Christians worship, work, rest, learn and love with increasing holiness. When we embrace the responsibility to reclaim our homes for the Kingdom of God, they can be sanctuaries in the Shadowlands where glory encounters fallenness, hope invites longing, grace covers sin.

These "little homes" are holy places because they invite us to the hope of heaven and also because they are where we live the ordinary lives we struggle to sanctify. Thomas Howard writes, "The family household, then, is one obvious place where we may come upon the hallows in very ordinary terms."((Howard, Thomas. Hallowed Be This House. P. 20.)) The mundane things of life are often the gateway to the transcendent, so it is the ordinariness of a Christian home that channels its consecration. We understand the needs and rhythms of home, so it becomes a metaphor for the mysteries which we cannot yet understand. Just as our homes require constant maintenance, so, too, our souls. As we wipe dusty tables and mow overgrown lawns, we remember that work is both a curse and a promise. As we irritate and disappoint those in our homes, we confront our gaping need for reciprocal forgiveness and love. These ordinary experiences, given over to grace, make us holy. Thus, home, the most ordinary place, becomes a thread weaving us into heavenly glory.

Christian homes do not aim to be heaven on earth, because perfectionism is an attempt to deny or conquer our human plight. When we construct unattainable expectations in our homes, we are more like fallen angels than redeemed souls. God thrust Lucifer from heaven because he vowed to "make myself like the Most High."((Isaiah 14:14)) To hijack the pilgrimage of grace in order to project an image of control is to mirror his arrogance. Homes are often messy, loud, disorganized and volatile. We blame our spouses when we lose our keys. We cry in the shower. We forget one another's birthdays, spill coffee on the carpet, kick the dog. We are often tempted to perceive these mundane failures through lenses of shame or rage, but the gospel transforms them into opportunities to overcome darkness, not deny it. A redeemed response to ordinary frailty is a crucial part of the journey to our true Home. Instead of forbidding messes in our "little homes," we clean them. Instead of avoiding conflict, we resolve it. Though never heaven itself, homes are signposts that can direct us toward it.

In these ways, "little homes" are the nearest terrestrial experience of heaven that we will ever have. In the Odyssey, a story about coming home, Odysseus chose the turmoil of mortal life over reclining on the beach with a goddess, because his home in Ithaca was in harmony with his nature.((Homer, The Odyssey, Book 4.)) So it is with Christians. Of course heaven is a better place. But we are not yet ready to live there. Our earthly nature is mingled dust and Breath; our earthly homes reflect this mysterious dichotomy. One day we will be remade, and our environment will reflect our redemption. We will exclaim with Jewel the Unicorn in The Last Battle, "I have come home at last! This is my real country! I belong here. This is the land I have been looking for all my life, though I never knew it till now."((Lewis, C.S. The Last Battle. P.196.)) Someday our faith will be sight, our longings satisfied, and we will arrive...Home.

What do you think of this article?

Write a short response. It'll get sent to our symposium editors and, if approved, added to the symposium. People who read this article will see your response immediately following, and we'll promote your contribution individually to the John Jay Institute's network.

Image above via Flickr Creative Commons license.

Sanctuaries in the Shadowlands

Prefiguring heaven in our homes

Whenever I think of home, I think of Narnia. I imagine running "as fast as an arrow flies" through the dappled downs, swimming up a thundering waterfall as if "climbing up light itself,"((Lewis, C.S., The Last Battle, P. 200.)) scaling the snowcapped mountains into the Western Wild. Narnia, of course, is an imaginary country, and I live in the suburbs, but in his allegory of what Christians recognize as "the new heavens and the new earth,"((Isaiah 65:17, 2 Peter 3:13)) Lewis captures the elusive and transcendent feeling of coming home. I feel at home in Narnia because it confirms my inner conviction, universal to the human experience, that I was made for a better world.

Part of being human is desiring shelter from the relentless onslaught of sin and brokenness. Christian tradition acknowledges that longing and points to a remedy: heaven as home. The writer of Hebrews writes that pilgrims "desire a better country, that is, a heavenly one."((Hebrews 11:16)) In Scripture and Christian literature, the language that refers to heaven and home is both interchangeable and futuristic. The desire for heaven is the desire for home, and vice versa. We were made for a flawless future home, but we live in a presently fallen world. How then do we live in the tension between the hope of heaven and the immediacy of our need for it?

Christian homes should be places that intentionally enact the Christian journey through the Shadowlands of this world toward our true country. Heaven is a certain but mysterious promise and Eden is lost, so we cannot manifest the thing itself, but we can foreshadow it. Just as early believers accepted the name Christians, meaning "little Christs," we can create "little homes." Little homes are where Christians worship, work, rest, learn and love with increasing holiness. When we embrace the responsibility to reclaim our homes for the Kingdom of God, they can be sanctuaries in the Shadowlands where glory encounters fallenness, hope invites longing, grace covers sin.

These "little homes" are holy places because they invite us to the hope of heaven and also because they are where we live the ordinary lives we struggle to sanctify. Thomas Howard writes, "The family household, then, is one obvious place where we may come upon the hallows in very ordinary terms."((Howard, Thomas. Hallowed Be This House. P. 20.)) The mundane things of life are often the gateway to the transcendent, so it is the ordinariness of a Christian home that channels its consecration. We understand the needs and rhythms of home, so it becomes a metaphor for the mysteries which we cannot yet understand. Just as our homes require constant maintenance, so, too, our souls. As we wipe dusty tables and mow overgrown lawns, we remember that work is both a curse and a promise. As we irritate and disappoint those in our homes, we confront our gaping need for reciprocal forgiveness and love. These ordinary experiences, given over to grace, make us holy. Thus, home, the most ordinary place, becomes a thread weaving us into heavenly glory.

Christian homes do not aim to be heaven on earth, because perfectionism is an attempt to deny or conquer our human plight. When we construct unattainable expectations in our homes, we are more like fallen angels than redeemed souls. God thrust Lucifer from heaven because he vowed to "make myself like the Most High."((Isaiah 14:14)) To hijack the pilgrimage of grace in order to project an image of control is to mirror his arrogance. Homes are often messy, loud, disorganized and volatile. We blame our spouses when we lose our keys. We cry in the shower. We forget one another's birthdays, spill coffee on the carpet, kick the dog. We are often tempted to perceive these mundane failures through lenses of shame or rage, but the gospel transforms them into opportunities to overcome darkness, not deny it. A redeemed response to ordinary frailty is a crucial part of the journey to our true Home. Instead of forbidding messes in our "little homes," we clean them. Instead of avoiding conflict, we resolve it. Though never heaven itself, homes are signposts that can direct us toward it.

In these ways, "little homes" are the nearest terrestrial experience of heaven that we will ever have. In the Odyssey, a story about coming home, Odysseus chose the turmoil of mortal life over reclining on the beach with a goddess, because his home in Ithaca was in harmony with his nature.((Homer, The Odyssey, Book 4.)) So it is with Christians. Of course heaven is a better place. But we are not yet ready to live there. Our earthly nature is mingled dust and Breath; our earthly homes reflect this mysterious dichotomy. One day we will be remade, and our environment will reflect our redemption. We will exclaim with Jewel the Unicorn in The Last Battle, "I have come home at last! This is my real country! I belong here. This is the land I have been looking for all my life, though I never knew it till now."((Lewis, C.S. The Last Battle. P.196.)) Someday our faith will be sight, our longings satisfied, and we will arrive...Home.

What do you think of this article?

Write a short response. It'll get sent to our symposium editors and, if approved, added to the symposium. People who read this article will see your response immediately following, and we'll promote your contribution individually to the John Jay Institute's network.

Image above via Flickr Creative Commons license.

Hoosier Hospitality

Why it's sometimes good to sacrifice the perfect home

Scurrying feet and dancing around each other in the kitchen were always the signs in my childhood home that company was coming. No matter how early we began dinner preparations, someone would inevitably sing out "They're here!" long before everything was on the table. Then there was the ruckus of greetings, the putting away of coats and bags, and the settling of persons in chairs or couches. This is still the rhythm of my parents' home when I visit over the holidays. We never quite manage to have the turkey done when the guests arrive, and we breathe a prayer of thanksgiving when someone calls to say they are running a bit late. I find myself doing the same at my own home now, smiling ruefully at the realization that even the tradition of dinner being behind time has been handed down to me.

I see, in fact, that most of the traditions I have carried into adult life have the kitchen at their heart. Perhaps more specifically, the kitchen table. It was there that Mom fed us hearty breakfasts every morning and Dad read Scripture or The Chronicles of Narnia to us after dinner. At that table I labored over math and physics. There my whole family rolled up their sleeves for applesauce-making days—hand-cranking that leaky press, filling jar after jar with hot, sticky goodness to cover our Saturday morning pancakes. There we shared meals and laughter with friends. Dad and I had many theological conversations around that table, our Bibles spread out before us, our voices rising in excitement or frustration. There we held hands and prayed with thanksgiving for food—and with tears for the concerns on our hearts. That inexpensive dining room set was the center of our home—not merely because it was where we left notes for one another, or because it was where my dad took off his boots after a long day of work, but because it was a place to gather and share our lives with one another, a place to go out from and come back to.

I have since gone out from that cozy home and dinner table to pioneer a home of my own; yet in many ways I come back to its practices, the lessons taught, and the memories made there. I am thankful to God and to my parents for the life-giving source our dinner table was. It sustained us bodily with eating meals, and it fed our souls and spirits, too. The "life together" aspect of the dinner table, of reading aloud as a family, of working together, and practicing hospitality—each person playing their part to ready the house and the table to welcome guests—set a theme for my life. These things painted a robust picture of home for me. I now seek to practice opening my own home to neighbors and friends, leaving the dishes until they are gone, that I might better listen to their stories and lives as they choose to share them. I find that "Hoosier hospitality" thrives around my kitchen table, even though I make my home in the heart of the mountains and not the Heartland of my childhood. More than simply a Hoosier quality, this kind of hospitality is not limited to a particular region or culture; rather, it stems from our Heavenly Father, inviting us to lean in and listen to His voice, to be fed His Word, and to be welcomed home.

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Hoosier Hospitality

Why it's sometimes good to sacrifice the perfect home

Scurrying feet and dancing around each other in the kitchen were always the signs in my childhood home that company was coming. No matter how early we began dinner preparations, someone would inevitably sing out "They're here!" long before everything was on the table. Then there was the ruckus of greetings, the putting away of coats and bags, and the settling of persons in chairs or couches. This is still the rhythm of my parents' home when I visit over the holidays. We never quite manage to have the turkey done when the guests arrive, and we breathe a prayer of thanksgiving when someone calls to say they are running a bit late. I find myself doing the same at my own home now, smiling ruefully at the realization that even the tradition of dinner being behind time has been handed down to me.

I see, in fact, that most of the traditions I have carried into adult life have the kitchen at their heart. Perhaps more specifically, the kitchen table. It was there that Mom fed us hearty breakfasts every morning and Dad read Scripture or The Chronicles of Narnia to us after dinner. At that table I labored over math and physics. There my whole family rolled up their sleeves for applesauce-making days—hand-cranking that leaky press, filling jar after jar with hot, sticky goodness to cover our Saturday morning pancakes. There we shared meals and laughter with friends. Dad and I had many theological conversations around that table, our Bibles spread out before us, our voices rising in excitement or frustration. There we held hands and prayed with thanksgiving for food—and with tears for the concerns on our hearts. That inexpensive dining room set was the center of our home—not merely because it was where we left notes for one another, or because it was where my dad took off his boots after a long day of work, but because it was a place to gather and share our lives with one another, a place to go out from and come back to.

I have since gone out from that cozy home and dinner table to pioneer a home of my own; yet in many ways I come back to its practices, the lessons taught, and the memories made there. I am thankful to God and to my parents for the life-giving source our dinner table was. It sustained us bodily with eating meals, and it fed our souls and spirits, too. The "life together" aspect of the dinner table, of reading aloud as a family, of working together, and practicing hospitality—each person playing their part to ready the house and the table to welcome guests—set a theme for my life. These things painted a robust picture of home for me. I now seek to practice opening my own home to neighbors and friends, leaving the dishes until they are gone, that I might better listen to their stories and lives as they choose to share them. I find that "Hoosier hospitality" thrives around my kitchen table, even though I make my home in the heart of the mountains and not the Heartland of my childhood. More than simply a Hoosier quality, this kind of hospitality is not limited to a particular region or culture; rather, it stems from our Heavenly Father, inviting us to lean in and listen to His voice, to be fed His Word, and to be welcomed home.

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On Death and Hillbilly Thomists

Inheritance in the South

There are, no doubt, many reasons why Southerners are stereotypically attached to the South. There is good old Southern pride. There is family. There is the beauty of the land and its familiarity. However, if you really want to understand Southern attachment to the place they call home, you must understand the sober fact that death is a real presence in the South.

People die everywhere, of course, but the South is a place where the entire community participates in the rituals surrounding death. It is a place where death truly brings the world to a halt, not only for those who are immediately affected and hurting, but also for those on the periphery. For instance, if you receive news that your neighbor two doors down has lost a member of the household, or that the elderly gentleman who sits five pews behind you at church has passed away, you clear your calendar and make a dish—usually some awful casserole—that you take to them and pay your respects. While you are visiting with the grieving, you will see a kitchen full of casseroles brought by other people, and in the time you are there you will probably encounter two to three more neighbors coming and going. It does not matter in the slightest if you were close friends with the departed and their loved ones or if you never spoke. If they were in your circle of influence, you know what to do.

In the South, if you find yourself driving down the road and you see a funeral procession, you pull over and wait for them to pass. It doesn't matter how big the highway or how important your appointment. Furthermore, if you know the procession is for a fallen police officer, fireman, or serviceman, you not only pull over, but also get out of your car, remove your hat, and place it over your heart.

Death is everywhere in the South. Many graveyards are still next to churches. As young people accept the lie that they must leave home to be successful, the rural population is becoming increasingly aged. The barns are dilapidated, the cornfields are brown, and the old veterans in their blue ball caps gather at Hardee's on Saturday morning for their biscuits and coffee. Death seems to hang in the air.

With such a somber description, you would think the South is a depressing place, but it is not. Everyone has lost someone, but everyone who has gone has left something behind. To be Southern is to have an inheritance. It is not always a good inheritance, as any conscientious Southerner knows from the shame we have collectively inherited. But each of us knows that the good we have, everything we value and that makes life worth living, was made possible by the work of someone else. Everything we have, for good or for ill, was given to us.

When asked, "why are you attached to this place, this poor backwater nowhere of a place?", Southerners know the only right answer is the one Cicero gave to the same question. Why do you tend to this place? "For the immortal gods, whose will it was that I should not merely receive these things from my ancestors, but should also hand them on to the next generation."

This is likely not what Flannery O'Connor had in mind when she came up with her famous moniker, "Hillbilly Thomist," but the name fits. St. Thomas developed, relying on Aristotle, the argument from motion. Put simply, nothing moves on its own. An outside mover must have moved whatever it is that is moving. The universe, therefore, that we see working and sustaining us in all its beauty and glory, must be moved by God's love.

Southerners know this about the everyday things. Nothing we have came to be on its own. Our grandfathers built our houses and furniture. Our grandmothers handed down our recipes, folk wisdom, and family Bibles. Those who have passed on are the movers. Outside of time and place now, it is their love that has brought us the culture and the place we value and cherish.

Death is the reason Southerners do not live amid flights of fancy. We surround the experience with rituals that ground and attach us to our place. This knowledge of death does not make us fatalists; it is an acknowledgment of the love that moves, not the heavens and the stars, but the little things here, in our place, that make life worth living.

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Write a short response. It'll get sent to our symposium editors and, if approved, added to the symposium. People who read this article will see your response immediately following, and we'll promote your contribution individually to the John Jay Institute's network.

Image above from Flickr users phillip edmondson via Flickr Creative Commons license.

On Death and Hillbilly Thomists

Inheritance in the South

There are, no doubt, many reasons why Southerners are stereotypically attached to the South. There is good old Southern pride. There is family. There is the beauty of the land and its familiarity. However, if you really want to understand Southern attachment to the place they call home, you must understand the sober fact that death is a real presence in the South.

People die everywhere, of course, but the South is a place where the entire community participates in the rituals surrounding death. It is a place where death truly brings the world to a halt, not only for those who are immediately affected and hurting, but also for those on the periphery. For instance, if you receive news that your neighbor two doors down has lost a member of the household, or that the elderly gentleman who sits five pews behind you at church has passed away, you clear your calendar and make a dish—usually some awful casserole—that you take to them and pay your respects. While you are visiting with the grieving, you will see a kitchen full of casseroles brought by other people, and in the time you are there you will probably encounter two to three more neighbors coming and going. It does not matter in the slightest if you were close friends with the departed and their loved ones or if you never spoke. If they were in your circle of influence, you know what to do.

In the South, if you find yourself driving down the road and you see a funeral procession, you pull over and wait for them to pass. It doesn't matter how big the highway or how important your appointment. Furthermore, if you know the procession is for a fallen police officer, fireman, or serviceman, you not only pull over, but also get out of your car, remove your hat, and place it over your heart.

Death is everywhere in the South. Many graveyards are still next to churches. As young people accept the lie that they must leave home to be successful, the rural population is becoming increasingly aged. The barns are dilapidated, the cornfields are brown, and the old veterans in their blue ball caps gather at Hardee's on Saturday morning for their biscuits and coffee. Death seems to hang in the air.

With such a somber description, you would think the South is a depressing place, but it is not. Everyone has lost someone, but everyone who has gone has left something behind. To be Southern is to have an inheritance. It is not always a good inheritance, as any conscientious Southerner knows from the shame we have collectively inherited. But each of us knows that the good we have, everything we value and that makes life worth living, was made possible by the work of someone else. Everything we have, for good or for ill, was given to us.

When asked, "why are you attached to this place, this poor backwater nowhere of a place?", Southerners know the only right answer is the one Cicero gave to the same question. Why do you tend to this place? "For the immortal gods, whose will it was that I should not merely receive these things from my ancestors, but should also hand them on to the next generation."

This is likely not what Flannery O'Connor had in mind when she came up with her famous moniker, "Hillbilly Thomist," but the name fits. St. Thomas developed, relying on Aristotle, the argument from motion. Put simply, nothing moves on its own. An outside mover must have moved whatever it is that is moving. The universe, therefore, that we see working and sustaining us in all its beauty and glory, must be moved by God's love.

Southerners know this about the everyday things. Nothing we have came to be on its own. Our grandfathers built our houses and furniture. Our grandmothers handed down our recipes, folk wisdom, and family Bibles. Those who have passed on are the movers. Outside of time and place now, it is their love that has brought us the culture and the place we value and cherish.

Death is the reason Southerners do not live amid flights of fancy. We surround the experience with rituals that ground and attach us to our place. This knowledge of death does not make us fatalists; it is an acknowledgment of the love that moves, not the heavens and the stars, but the little things here, in our place, that make life worth living.

What do you think of this article?

Write a short response. It'll get sent to our symposium editors and, if approved, added to the symposium. People who read this article will see your response immediately following, and we'll promote your contribution individually to the John Jay Institute's network.

Image above from Flickr users phillip edmondson via Flickr Creative Commons license.

The Weight of the Kitchen Table

Practicing liturgies around the table

We use the word home with great regularity, but we rarely think about what we mean by it. When we do pause to reflect, we often think of a physical house, or recall memories of a childhood home and loved ones. Both of these physical and emotional pictures of the home meet in one feature common to all homes—the kitchen table.

The kitchen table provides a physical locus for the liturgy of home life. Meal times infuse life with rhythm and order rooted in a place. Such liturgies serve a pedagogical function, as James K.A. Smith has argued in his Cultural Liturgies project. Gathering around the table daily teaches us to value our home community and to fight against the individualistic tendencies of modern American culture. Instead of structuring our days entirely around our personal needs and desires, we take the time to actively relate with others as we participate in the communal liturgy of sharing a meal around the table. In a very real way, through these table-centered liturgies, the kitchen table provides a space for the home community to develop an identity. This function of the kitchen table ultimately helps to give the home its distinctive character.

For example, this past fall, I had the opportunity to spend several months living in a lodge nestled in the mountains of Colorado with 35 other people. Although it was hardly a typical home, we all called it home while we were there. What made it a home was the dining room at the center of the lodge. Around the tables in the dining room, we acted out many of the key liturgies that constituted our life together. We gathered together for three daily meals, which themselves had a liturgy, beginning with singing the Doxology together and ending with a time of prayer. We ate the same food, shared stories and laughs, posed deep questions, and wrestled to find answers. Many of the inside jokes that contributed to the group’s communal identity developed over meals. In essence, community happened around those dining room tables, and as a result, the lodge developed a homely quality.

This all goes to show that even in unorthodox settings, the tables around which we dine can make a building into a home. As we participate in the liturgies of the table, we are drawn together with the other members in the home both physically, as we partake of the same food, and emotionally, as we bond through conversation and laughter. As our lives are thus woven together around the table, community forms, and a building becomes a home.

What do you think of this article?

Write a short response. It'll get sent to our symposium editors and, if approved, added to the symposium. People who read this article will see your response immediately following, and we'll promote your contribution individually to the John Jay Institute's network.

Image above from Flickr user chefranden via Flickr Creative Commons license.

The Weight of the Kitchen Table

Practicing liturgies around the table

We use the word home with great regularity, but we rarely think about what we mean by it. When we do pause to reflect, we often think of a physical house, or recall memories of a childhood home and loved ones. Both of these physical and emotional pictures of the home meet in one feature common to all homes—the kitchen table.

The kitchen table provides a physical locus for the liturgy of home life. Meal times infuse life with rhythm and order rooted in a place. Such liturgies serve a pedagogical function, as James K.A. Smith has argued in his Cultural Liturgies project. Gathering around the table daily teaches us to value our home community and to fight against the individualistic tendencies of modern American culture. Instead of structuring our days entirely around our personal needs and desires, we take the time to actively relate with others as we participate in the communal liturgy of sharing a meal around the table. In a very real way, through these table-centered liturgies, the kitchen table provides a space for the home community to develop an identity. This function of the kitchen table ultimately helps to give the home its distinctive character.

For example, this past fall, I had the opportunity to spend several months living in a lodge nestled in the mountains of Colorado with 35 other people. Although it was hardly a typical home, we all called it home while we were there. What made it a home was the dining room at the center of the lodge. Around the tables in the dining room, we acted out many of the key liturgies that constituted our life together. We gathered together for three daily meals, which themselves had a liturgy, beginning with singing the Doxology together and ending with a time of prayer. We ate the same food, shared stories and laughs, posed deep questions, and wrestled to find answers. Many of the inside jokes that contributed to the group’s communal identity developed over meals. In essence, community happened around those dining room tables, and as a result, the lodge developed a homely quality.

This all goes to show that even in unorthodox settings, the tables around which we dine can make a building into a home. As we participate in the liturgies of the table, we are drawn together with the other members in the home both physically, as we partake of the same food, and emotionally, as we bond through conversation and laughter. As our lives are thus woven together around the table, community forms, and a building becomes a home.

What do you think of this article?

Write a short response. It'll get sent to our symposium editors and, if approved, added to the symposium. People who read this article will see your response immediately following, and we'll promote your contribution individually to the John Jay Institute's network.

Image above from Flickr user chefranden via Flickr Creative Commons license.

Discordant Living

What we can learn about home life from Anna Karenina

When Bilbo thought of home during his wilderness journeys in The Hobbit, we know he pictured steaming pots, warm blankets, and perhaps a pipe and pint at a crowded table. Tolkien's Shire shines in the imagination as a simple but wholesome image of home. We long for such a haven amidst the storms of the world. But what about those whose lives at home are stormier than anything they can imagine outside?

In spite of our dreams of domestic bliss, real family is often dysfunctional. I look back on my childhood years in a family of five children as a period filled with at least as much discord as communion. Speaking with young married friends of mine, I have recently been learning how many ordinary marriages sputter along with wells of pain beneath the surface.

Home is the place where you can't escape the people whom you wound, and who in turn wound you. There is a special kind of pain that comes when you see your own brokenness mirrored in another's brokenness, and realize that you can't look away. Of course, people try to look away - through busyness, absence, moving, or divorce. But these are never real solutions. If you close your eyes at home, how will you learn to see anywhere else?

It would seem that discord is an inevitable part of home this side of heaven. If you ever hope to know home as a haven, you must first learn to weather the tempests inside your home and even grow through them. Anna Karenina,((Tolstoy, Leo. Anna Karenina. Trans. Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky. New York: Penguin Group, 2000.)) Tolstoy's novel about messy relationships, suggests that in order to navigate home life, you need a better way of seeing both the home environment and the people who inhabit it with you. The secret to domestic peace is not better communication skills, but new eyes.

Tolstoy describes Anna's downfall with a metaphor of failing sight. Early on, as she agonizes over leaving her husband and son for Vronsky, she feels that "everything was beginning to go double in her soul, as an object sometimes goes double in tired eyes" (288). By the end, as she and Vronsky grow steadily colder toward one another, her vision is subsumed by cynicism, in which she believes that she has seen through the falseness of all human loves. Anna "saw it clearly in that piercing light which now revealed to her the meaning of life and of people's relations. . . . Aren't we all thrown into the world only in order to hate each other and so to torment ourselves and others" (763-64).

The marriage of Kitty and Levin, a foil to Anna's illicit relationship, is punctuated by regular quarrels and fits of anger and jealousy. And yet their turmoil always subsides into happy communion. Early in their marriage, both Kitty and Levin learn what it means to see through one another's eyes. On the day of his proposal, Levin tells Kitty his theory that

"...sometimes during an argument you would understand what your opponent loves, and suddenly come to love the same thing yourself, and agree all at once, and then all reasonings would fall away as superfluous; and sometimes it was the other way round: you would finally say what you yourself love, for the sake of which you are inventing your reasonings, and if you happened to say it well and sincerely, the opponent would suddenly agree and stop arguing."

Throughout the novel, Levin is gradually discovering a way of interpreting his marriage and the world that is truer and fuller than the light of dispassionate reason. In stormy arguments—when newlywed Kitty is angry that her husband is home late, or when Levin becomes hopelessly jealous of a male visitor—the argument ends when each suddenly recognizes what is important to the other person and accepts the other's way of feeling and seeing.

Kitty and Levin are developing humility. During the tumultuous period before and immediately after their marriage, both are reshaping their expectations of love and home life. Levin notes with surprise that he is continually finding "disenchantment with his old dream and a new, unexpected enchantment" (481). His wife's housekeeping and his own care of his lands, entertaining guests and caring for the new baby, their quarrels and resolutions: the prosaic details that make up domestic life bring a strange new satisfaction for the intellectual Levin. Levin observes that his home life is "formed entirely of those insignificant trifles he had scorned so much before, but which now, against his will, acquired an extraordinary and irrefutable significance" (480).

Fascinating though it is, Anna's passionate pride and thirst for excitement cannot sustain a relationship. Harmonious family life, on the other hand, looks boring to an outsider. As the novel's opening foretells, "All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way." Those who hunt for excitement and novelty pay for it with unhappiness; but happy families know how to see beauty in the shared rhythms of everyday life.

For the troubled souls of our world who are tempted to despair of ever finding community, Anna Karenina offers hope that deep human communion is possible. But it also sounds a warning in the form of Anna's fatal cynicism, which spreads out from her intimate relationship and infects her whole life. A home offers a miniature slice of the variety we find in the wider world, with a mixture of genders, personality types, and generations gathered in close quarters. If meaningful human connections are to be possible anywhere, we must first believe they are possible at home and start working to build them with the people we can't escape—with children, siblings, spouses, and in-laws. Once our home life has become a constant exercise in re-envisioning, then perhaps we will find that we have re-enchanted not only our homes but also all of our human interactions.

What do you think of this article?

Write a short response. It'll get sent to our symposium editors and, if approved, added to the symposium. People who read this article will see your response immediately following, and we'll promote your contribution individually to the John Jay Institute's network.

Image above from Flickr user milton.guerrero via Flickr Creative Commons license. Image used for identification purposes.

Discordant Living

What we can learn about home life from Anna Karenina

When Bilbo thought of home during his wilderness journeys in The Hobbit, we know he pictured steaming pots, warm blankets, and perhaps a pipe and pint at a crowded table. Tolkien's Shire shines in the imagination as a simple but wholesome image of home. We long for such a haven amidst the storms of the world. But what about those whose lives at home are stormier than anything they can imagine outside?

In spite of our dreams of domestic bliss, real family is often dysfunctional. I look back on my childhood years in a family of five children as a period filled with at least as much discord as communion. Speaking with young married friends of mine, I have recently been learning how many ordinary marriages sputter along with wells of pain beneath the surface.

Home is the place where you can't escape the people whom you wound, and who in turn wound you. There is a special kind of pain that comes when you see your own brokenness mirrored in another's brokenness, and realize that you can't look away. Of course, people try to look away - through busyness, absence, moving, or divorce. But these are never real solutions. If you close your eyes at home, how will you learn to see anywhere else?

It would seem that discord is an inevitable part of home this side of heaven. If you ever hope to know home as a haven, you must first learn to weather the tempests inside your home and even grow through them. Anna Karenina,((Tolstoy, Leo. Anna Karenina. Trans. Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky. New York: Penguin Group, 2000.)) Tolstoy's novel about messy relationships, suggests that in order to navigate home life, you need a better way of seeing both the home environment and the people who inhabit it with you. The secret to domestic peace is not better communication skills, but new eyes.

Tolstoy describes Anna's downfall with a metaphor of failing sight. Early on, as she agonizes over leaving her husband and son for Vronsky, she feels that "everything was beginning to go double in her soul, as an object sometimes goes double in tired eyes" (288). By the end, as she and Vronsky grow steadily colder toward one another, her vision is subsumed by cynicism, in which she believes that she has seen through the falseness of all human loves. Anna "saw it clearly in that piercing light which now revealed to her the meaning of life and of people's relations. . . . Aren't we all thrown into the world only in order to hate each other and so to torment ourselves and others" (763-64).

The marriage of Kitty and Levin, a foil to Anna's illicit relationship, is punctuated by regular quarrels and fits of anger and jealousy. And yet their turmoil always subsides into happy communion. Early in their marriage, both Kitty and Levin learn what it means to see through one another's eyes. On the day of his proposal, Levin tells Kitty his theory that

"...sometimes during an argument you would understand what your opponent loves, and suddenly come to love the same thing yourself, and agree all at once, and then all reasonings would fall away as superfluous; and sometimes it was the other way round: you would finally say what you yourself love, for the sake of which you are inventing your reasonings, and if you happened to say it well and sincerely, the opponent would suddenly agree and stop arguing."

Throughout the novel, Levin is gradually discovering a way of interpreting his marriage and the world that is truer and fuller than the light of dispassionate reason. In stormy arguments—when newlywed Kitty is angry that her husband is home late, or when Levin becomes hopelessly jealous of a male visitor—the argument ends when each suddenly recognizes what is important to the other person and accepts the other's way of feeling and seeing.

Kitty and Levin are developing humility. During the tumultuous period before and immediately after their marriage, both are reshaping their expectations of love and home life. Levin notes with surprise that he is continually finding "disenchantment with his old dream and a new, unexpected enchantment" (481). His wife's housekeeping and his own care of his lands, entertaining guests and caring for the new baby, their quarrels and resolutions: the prosaic details that make up domestic life bring a strange new satisfaction for the intellectual Levin. Levin observes that his home life is "formed entirely of those insignificant trifles he had scorned so much before, but which now, against his will, acquired an extraordinary and irrefutable significance" (480).

Fascinating though it is, Anna's passionate pride and thirst for excitement cannot sustain a relationship. Harmonious family life, on the other hand, looks boring to an outsider. As the novel's opening foretells, "All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way." Those who hunt for excitement and novelty pay for it with unhappiness; but happy families know how to see beauty in the shared rhythms of everyday life.

For the troubled souls of our world who are tempted to despair of ever finding community, Anna Karenina offers hope that deep human communion is possible. But it also sounds a warning in the form of Anna's fatal cynicism, which spreads out from her intimate relationship and infects her whole life. A home offers a miniature slice of the variety we find in the wider world, with a mixture of genders, personality types, and generations gathered in close quarters. If meaningful human connections are to be possible anywhere, we must first believe they are possible at home and start working to build them with the people we can't escape—with children, siblings, spouses, and in-laws. Once our home life has become a constant exercise in re-envisioning, then perhaps we will find that we have re-enchanted not only our homes but also all of our human interactions.

What do you think of this article?

Write a short response. It'll get sent to our symposium editors and, if approved, added to the symposium. People who read this article will see your response immediately following, and we'll promote your contribution individually to the John Jay Institute's network.

Image above from Flickr user milton.guerrero via Flickr Creative Commons license. Image used for identification purposes.