This time of year - as the academic calendar begins and the
last strains of summer's song fade - the people in my
household scatter. College-aged children move into dorms.
School-aged children leave and come back and leave again
every day, making the case for a revolving door at our front
stoop. Even the boy who moved clear across the country made
his way home for a brief weekend at the end of August. And
then he left again.
It has me thinking about what "home" is in our family. What
do they envision when they are away and how do they feel when
they return? I cannot shake the memory of a grown child, at
once mournful and furious, declaring last summer that home
didn't feel like home any more. He was not altogether wrong.
His passing comment, hurled in anger the cause of which I no
longer remember, is seared into my memory. We'd lost the easy
grace extended to one another that makes a house a place
where one can be certain that love is unconditional. I've
spent the last year trying to make home feel like home again.
Now, sitting at a dining room table scarred by the blessings
of so many meals and memories, as we prepare to celebrate the
canonization of Mother Teresa, my thoughts turn to the wisdom
she had to offer mothers. A tiny nun who made her home
amongst the poorest of the poor in the squalor of India, she
speaks into my suburban maternal existence.
"Try to put in the hearts of your children a love for home.
Make them long to be with their families. So much sin could
be avoided if our people really loved their homes. Start by
making your own home a place where peace, happiness and love
abound, through your love for each member of your family and
for your neighbor."
Those are lofty words, tall orders, beautiful goals. In the
quiet of a night, I go to comfort a baby, to feed and change
a diaper and rock back to sleep. He knows he's home. I know
it, too, there in the dark, so enveloped in the same world
that his beginning and my end are indistinguishable. This is
home, a place of laying down life for a child.
The atmosphere of home grows from there, sinks its roots deep
into the care of small children where the choice to love and
the acts of love are so simple. Just feed the next meal,
bathe the next mess, soothe the next hurt. And as you do, you
create home.
Then, in the next years, the growing years, we cultivate the
community of home. I have found this requires even more
discipline on my part, nearly constant diligence. I love my
children, to be sure, and so does their father. That is not
enough. Care must be taken in the growing years to show them
how to love one another. If home is to be sustainable, if it
will still be there many years later - not a physical place,
but a state of being - our children need to learn how to love
each other well. Home is the safest community of all, or at
least we hope to be that way. If it's not, they won't return
to one another and what we built was not home at all, but a
mere house on shifting sands.
St. Teresa of Calcutta writes: "It is easy to smile at people
outside your own home. It is so easy to take care of the
people that you don't know well. It is difficult to be
thoughtful and kind and to smile and be loving to your own
family in the house day after day, especially when we are
tired and in a bad temper or bad mood. We all have these
moments and that is the time that Christ comes to us in a
distressing disguise."
Children must be taught to treat one another with respect and
with kind regard. They need to be encouraged to lay down
their lives for one another, to speak life into each other's
dark places. Brothers and sisters grow up to be husbands and
wives. What lessons have they learned at home about dignity
and decency and compassion that they will carry into their
new homes? What have they learned about how to treat the
other gender and what to expect in how they are treated? Is
there gentleness and honor in their interactions with each
other in the home of their origin?
We must be Christ to one another - tender, kind, overflowing
with mercy - if we are to create home for one another. This
is no small task. Indeed, I am quite sure it's the work of a
lifetime. Families are not accidents. They are deliberate
acts of God. I may always wonder if God calls me to one cause
or another outside my home, but I can never doubt that the
people in my family are called to one another. Home is where
love lives, and just as every living thing we know, love must
be carefully nurtured lest by its neglect it withers and home
is left lifeless.
Foss, whose website is elizabethfoss.com, is a
freelance writer from Northern Virginia.