#39. Overflowing Home
Home is meant to be the central place from which we worship and train up worshipers. It is naturally the locus of our maternal responsibilities. It won’t be the only place where responsibility and influence happens, but it is the basic place. We can’t leap over it. This is a bland thought if we’ve not known what it’s like to be in a home full of vitality; if we’re still trying to grow out of our boredom. To say that home is where we are primarily responsible and most influential can be insulting, or at least bewildering, if we have a purely functional view of the home. I’ve written in article #11 about how the instruction to ‘be busy at home’ is calling us to more, not less, than we imagine. The problem isn’t so much with home, but with its unrealised potential. We underestimate the influence we wield through it.
Across most of history, humans couldn’t help but stick close to their homes and families (or carry their homes and families with them). We live in a strange and estranged era, where we can spend seasons of our life imagining our existence apart from home and family. We’re in a society where relationships, education, paid work, caring, culture have all been pieced out to experts in other places. Commonly, homes are relational and cultural voids. Dormant and passive, the landing spot to eat, bathe, watch tv and sleep before we head out somewhere else to do more interesting things. It’s no wonder we struggle to be at home with young children. In extended lockdowns homes needed to be the headquarters for every part of our life and we weren’t used to it. Some discovered home could become more interesting, more lively and generative. For others, it remained a dead-end.
The way God has ordered reality means that young children’s needs are tied to home and family. The formation of young children happens by parents being with them a lot. It’s not designed to be done by remote or proxy. And the way God created our bodies means that young children are dependent on mothers in a special way. Reality drives us home, whether we like it or not.
But merely being there, having more home-based time, is not the whole. It’s possible to be home and yet to be aloof, adrift, idle. To be burdened by the absence of things to do. Troubled by the cavernous echoes bouncing off blank walls. Long gaping spaces don’t bring out the best in ourselves or our children, which reinforces the story that home is actually bad for our mental health and a place we need to escape from. But maybe we’d experience our homes—and motherhood—differently if we learned different ways to be at home?
Home is bland when we lack imagination for what might be, when we only measure its potential by our past experiences. Or the blankness can loom, not because we lack of a better picture, but because we’ve not learned the skills to grow into it. Cultivating domestic space and ordering our own time are two sets of skills which most of us haven’t been taught. They’re intuitive to some people, but for most of us, they need to be learned. They can be learned.
If we’re not instinctively good at being home, we underestimate our ability to learn the skills of growing in barren spaces. In a space where we’re used to being passive, it’s a real shift to start taking charge; to take initiative, to generate something new. We can find ourselves looking around, waiting for someone to tell us what to do (like a school assignment). Or we fill the void watching other people’s digitised lives. Or we find a way back into the outsourced existence, away from home. Escape brings a bit of relief, but by leaving these empty spaces, we miss a great bounty of comfort.
We need to work out how to garden our own spaces. How to tend them from sterility into a rich ecosystem. With tending, spaces that are hard to fill become too small to hold the verdure. In time, the challenge moves from filling emptiness to managing overflow. We were created and redeemed to fill and subdue the common spaces. It is part of how we worship God in his world. The comfort grows, nourishing ourselves, our children, our husbands, our neighbours, our churches, unknown spaces into the future.
What are we to fill homes and time with? In traditions which prize only Bible study and evangelism, we’re inclined to think that a thing gains value only if it has a Bible verse taped on, or if it is directly tied to gospel proclamation. I’ve been making a case at Light Duties that Jesus makes everything matter more, that there is not only value in doing the ordinary things, but an imperative to do them. The filling of spaces, doing the common things for Jesus, is basic to Christian faithfulness.
As we draw the various threads together, we see that home becomes a place to be filled with interest and variety: beauty, truth, ideas, knowing. A place where we and our children form relationships with the many and varied things which God has created as good. A place where we gather wonders, learning to notice and be interested. A place where we have our senses sharpened rather than dulled. A place where we collect things worth seeing, hearing, saying, feeling. A place alive with inner and outer motion, fragrant with the beauty of Christ—not just the beauty revealed in the Bible, but the beauty infused into all things which he has made and sustains and is reconciling to himself.
Homes are where the gospel is not only spoken and heard, but sensed. Homes are where we distill all that is beautiful and good, and point to the God who makes things so. Homes are where we live out the Lord’s prayer, conforming small pockets of earth to the way things are in heaven. Filled homes hint at the coming kingdom when the whole earth will be full of God’s glory and everyone knows it. Homes are where people breathe in a waft of the new creation as it breaks into relationships, work and aesthetics now. Our homes become centres of relationship, knowing and culture.
We are trusted to fill these empty spaces. As we do, Jesus makes homes overflow.
PS. The best help I’ve had in learning how to fill time and space has come from reading a voice from the past, Charlotte Mason. If you haven’t heard of her, or the help she gave parents, then you can get a good introduction from my friends at A Delectable Education. The first ten episodes of their podcast will be a good start. And don’t be alarmed, although homeschoolers are the ones to rediscover Miss Mason, her ambition was far broader than our modern homeschool movement. She was talking to all parents and educators, anyone who had some responsibility for children.
