What is it to have home, to be at home? It’s one of those things that everyone, or almost everyone, knows. But it’s also elusive. No one can quite say why or how they know they feel at home. Yet when they know, they know. It’s a mystery. Theology, the discipline I spend most of my time trying to work within, is eager to noodle around in mysteries like this. Theology thrives at the edges where knowing meets not-knowing.
So I’ll propose a thesis, just to get the mystery on the table so we can prod and poke at it. How about this: a home is place where we experience belonging, comfort and delight. Let’s think about those last key terms in turn, and see how our thesis fares.
Belonging
In Robert Frost’s poem “Death of the Hired Man” a farm couple is debating what to do with their ailing former hired hand who has come back and knocked on their door asking for help. He left, we are made to understand, under some unsavory conditions, and now he is in need. The husband says the fellow ought to go instead to his brother’s house, not so many miles away. After all the brother is rich, “a director in the bank...” But the farmer’s wife protests and says “he has come home to die.” The husband mocks this idea, but is told, “Home is the place where, when you go there, they have to take you in.”
That’s a powerful way to think about the social aspects of home, certainly. “Home” has a “they” who take you in. A friend of mine recently wrote a book called The Comforts of Home. For her, “home” means forming attachments with other people in a way that makes you feel (and be!) safe and secure. She grew up in Romania during the terrible upheavals they experienced at the end of the Cold War. She has migrants and refugees in mind when she considers home. So “home” is about relationships, and thus a sense of belonging. I came to feel at home at Wabash College, in Crawfordsville, in Indiana, when I formed attachments with people who knew more about the place than I did and were very different from me, yet found ways to connect with me. To “belong” to something is both active and passive; I can actively sign up to be a part of a club or team or organization, but a sense of belonging is something that I also undergo, when others accept me as their peer.
Comfort
So home is a social concept, to be sure. It requires and deepens a sense of belonging. But when I think of “home” it has a place, a space. Yes, people and pets and various social “others” are there, too. But we have other words for that, like family, or community. Home is walls, floor, and a roof. And it exists for our comfort. Like belonging, comfort is a term that has many different registers. Once I move into a new house or apartment, it might feel like a glorified hotel room until I start to know it better, and thus get more comfortable there. I learn how to control the temperature, I fix the broken screen door hinge, and a in a thousand other ways make the place more comfortable.
Etymologically, “comfort” comes from Latin “con-fortare” which means to make stronger. When I go to my home after a long day of work at Wabash College, I am strengthened for other activities, including working the next day. Were I to leave my place of work to a broken home, one where I could not feel safe or be comforted, then I would be accordingly less able to do my work, to pursue my interests, to extend myself into the world and use what gifts I have. In that sense, “home” is both a descriptive and a normative idea. It describes places where we go to sleep, eat, and share life with others. But intrinsic to it is a notion of what a good home is, one where others accept me, and where I can be comforted, strengthened, for the work ahead. And it is tied to the theological notion of vocation, about which Bill Placher wrote so beautifully and so often. A good home strengthens you for some purpose, some activity, and that purpose is your vocation, your calling.
Last year I spoke to the faculty of theology at Copenhagen University on the idea of “dwelling.” Sometimes the Bible speaks of Jesus as abiding or dwelling with the believer in faith, and I was pushing that to explore texts where it’s as though the incarnation was God “dwelling” in Jesus of Nazareth. A student asked a pointed question: “Can a prison be a home?” He works as a prison chaplain and had been mulling it over during my lecture. I didn’t know how to respond, and even now I don’t quite know. Surely there are places in a prison where one can (or should be able to) feel safe, and be strengthened to face another day. Surely there are friendships and a sense of community, no matter how imperfect or tenuous. But home is also something you can and should leave. In Genesis (quoted again in Matthew and Ephesians) we read “For this reason, a man leaves his father and his mother and clings to his wife, and they become one flesh.” You leave home to become an adult. Put another way, homes are for sending, not just for staying comfortable. If you have to stay there, it isn’t a home, not quite.
Perhaps this aspect of home has taken on a special relevance during the Covid-19 pandemic. So many were forced to stay home, and many others were desperate to be safe at home but could not be because their calling was to work in hospitals or essential services. Home means something different now to the telecommuter. You’re always around your work if your living room is your office. Walking past the table to get a bowl of nighttime ice cream you notice that stack of papers you haven’t taken care of. Or desperate for elbow room you begin to resent the others around you. Or you crave the commute you used to have and the chance it gave you to decompress. Still others were finally motivated to get their homes in better shape. The pandemic made us think about the comforts of home differently in all kinds of ways.
Delight
That leaves delight. Delight means that it feels good, feels right, to be in this place, among these people with these things. But delight isn’t something we can control. Delight happens. There is a surprise element to delight, like when a loved one brings home dessert unexpectedly or the light comes in the East window just right as you drink your morning coffee. Being around things of beauty, such as for instance lovely furniture that I might have made, seeing a sun I didn’t make set over a forest I didn’t plant—that’s delight. We feel most at home when this is happening.
A German thinker whose ideas I think are extremely powerful and timely is a sociologist and philosopher named Hartmut Rosa. He talks about resonance, by which he means, in an admittedly Germanic definition, “a form of world-relation in which subject and world encounter each other and are mutually transformed.” Resonance happens when you, the experiencing subject, can’t merely control the world you’re relating to. It’s the difference between, for example, seeing a wild animal in its own habitat when you're on a walk and seeing one in a controlled environment at a zoo. Or between a genuinely pleasurable conversation among friends and a staged political debate between opponents. The conversation features people deeply listening to each other and then responding after having been affected by those spoken thoughts. The debate involves the same pattern of one person speaking, and then another, but each is seeking to control the outcome, and this is not resonant.
A resonant experience is something like what I’m calling delight. When I hike on a mountainside, thoughts come to me, and I’m surprised by them. I might end up solving a problem I’ve been worrying over, or suddenly understand an argument I had with a coworker. That’s resonance. It’s not being in control, but rather being open to be changed. Rosa notes that many technological advances we depend on to control the world have a dark side. It’s nice to have a camera and email and a stock-market report on my phone, but when I do it’s harder to relax at home or simply take in a show. Our technological advances open up the world for us by helping us control it, but they also capture us. Rosa talks about the snow day, when plans get canceled and we just sit in wonder. That’s delight.
Being at home in your body, your dwelling, and your community happens when you resonate with the world, when your home speaks to you, tells you who-you-are, where-you-are, why-you-are. It’s when you desire the real material, the real thing. Ash floor. Stone table. Poplar beam. Good homes are full of delight because they contain elements of beauty, whether it is a picture of a beaming kid on her first day of school, or a treasured antique hope chest. There is, in fact, a kind of miracle that happens when a house becomes a home. We contribute to that by our living, but mostly we undergo it, receive it, experience its beauty. So delight, as well as comfort, lives in this fascinating tension between activity and passivity, between work and grace.
Home on My Mind
For two reasons this notion of “home” has been on my mind recently. One is personal, the other academic. On a personal note, I did something kind of crazy as my own pandemic project. I built a small house on our property, and furnished it with homemade things. And this got me thinking about the environmental impacts of the way we build and live in our dwellings, as well as the theological implications of the idea of home. So I hosted an academic conference at Wabash in May 2022 called “What Is It to Have a Home? Creation Theology and Domestic Life.”
The house is small and green, and is intended as an experiment in green home design, so it’s called The Evergreen (also, my wife is from and terribly misses the Pacific Northwest!). It is a timber frame. That means it is not built from dimensional lumber like 2x4s and 2x8s, but rather by large posts and beams. But unlike “post and beam” construction, there are no metal fasteners in the frame. Everything hangs together by tenons fitting into mortises, and the joints are then pegged together with wooden dowels. The walls are SIPS—structural insulated panels. They’re like huge sandwiches of 1/2 plywood on either side of foam insulation. They simply are lag screwed to the frame. So, the whole house can be taken apart and reused somewhere else, or reconfigured in place. What’s more, this kind of design adds centuries to the life-expectancy of a house. It also has a continuous cloak of insulation around the home, so heat loss (or in the summer, heat gain) is negligible.
The furnishings were all made with environmental design and simple beauty in mind. Local woods from appropriate species make up the floor, ceiling, cabinets and furniture. Long-lasting products were chosen whenever possible: concrete countertops, a deck from 99% recycled post-consumer waste, fiber-cement siding rather than vinyl, and so on. The goals were to build something that could last for 250 years (i.e., the opposite of “disposable, single use!”), was 500 square feet or more, cost $25,000 or less, and could be taken apart easily to be moved or repurposed. I think I hit all my goals, but we'll have to wait and see how long it lasts!
The conference on home brought together theologians from Scandinavia and North America. The symbol most often used in the Bible to name God's relation to the world is, admittedly, “kingdom.” This presents some problems in the contemporary day. I am more or less morally opposed to monarchies actually governing countries. There is a maleness to “kingdom” that the Greek biblical word basileia, which it translates, does not have. But most important is the kind of subjectivity the term evokes. In a kingdom, there is little for us non-kings to do except obey.
Another symbol used in the Bible for God’s presence on Earth is that of home. One of the two oral sources behind the Creation stories in Genesis, the so-called “Priestly” document, maintains literary integrity all the way up to the end of Exodus when the Israelites build the tabernacle. In other words, the creation of the world is not completed until there is a symbolic dwelling place for God. Then there are the texts in John about God “dwelling” with humans, that “the word was made flesh and dwelled among us.” And going right to the end of the Bible, the voice from the throne in the heavenly city in Revelation says, “Surely the home of God is among mortals...” If ever you'd expect “kingdom” language, it would be from a throne! But “home” or “dwelling place” is what we get instead. What's more, the subjectivity evoked by “home” is so rich. I have some privacy in a home, some autonomy. But I also know there are house rules to be followed. House rules are different than a king’s laws. They’re more likely to be tied to my own well-being, and less about a ruler’s whim. The kinds of things we do in homes are different than we do in public, in a government. So, focusing on a different symbol can lead to a quite radical re-thinking of religious themes that may have become so familiar they’re stale.
I put these two experiences of home together by writing a short documentary film. SALT Productions, an Emmy-award winning video production company, shot the film over a week in June. The result was a ten-minute film called “Framing House and Home.” I normally work with centuries-old texts and wind them into rational, written arguments. To have to think visually, in an evocative rather than persuasive way, was a welcome challenge. If you’d like to see how I put these two ideas together—the timber frame of an eco-friendly house along with the conceptual, theological framing of what it means to have a home, I hope you will enjoy the film, which you can find at www.attemptedjoinery.com
Derek Nelson ’99 is the director of the coordination program of the Early Career Pastoral Leadership Development Programs Initiative and professor of religion, Stephen S. Bowen Professor of the Liberal Arts at Wabash College.