Rediscovering Our Home and Eight Principles for Reclaiming It

What is most truly valuable is often underrated.
 — Aesop

IT STARTS AT HOME. 

Our problems stem from our homelife—or rather, from the lack of it. We feel this at a gut level. And yet we talk and act as though what has happened to our homes is no big deal, or even an instance of progress, if with some unfortunate consequences. The evolution of our homes has come so far and the public discourse and common language surrounding it has been so overhauled that we hardly know how to think about or discuss it. 

We crossed the threshold into crisis some time ago. Our life is characterized by unrest, confusion, and even chaos—in our nation, our towns, our communities, our work, and our homes. Perhaps especially in our hearts. 

The most obvious evidence of this crisis is staring us in the face: our children, often even those from ostensibly “good” families. They are isolated from things that matter most, even as they are relentlessly peddled things that matter little, which often come to dominate their lives. Not only are they not thriving; they are unhappy, lonesome, confused, and despairing at an epidemic level. We do not need statistics. Only someone out of touch with actual people could think otherwise. 

The other obvious example is how we treat the elderly. As a rule we have turned over their care to professionals. A simple fact with profound import at both societal and individual levels is captured in four words: We are too busy. We are too busy to care for our aging, which of course goes hand in hand with being too busy to care for our children. As if somehow they get in the way. Of life. Perhaps most hidden and deadly of all is that we are too busy to care for ourselves, or in other words, to choose a way of life that speaks to our own deepest needs and which, it turns out, would also fulfill the needs of our young and our old. 

But how has this happened? For some generations we have rejected the cornerstone of society and indeed of human life itself. This is so fundamental it is easy to overlook. Even deeply religious communities have failed to recognize and address the problem, though it erodes the very ground of religion itself. 

With strong forces still acting to dismantle our home life, many who want something different feel discouraged or powerless. But some, sensing the problem, are recognizing that it is never too late to rediscover and renew our life in the home. 

An Honest Assessment

[They] exchange the hearth they love for banishment, and seek a home in lands beneath an alien sun. — Virgil, The Georgics 

More and more we do not really live in our homes. Yes, our home address is probably the answer to the question “Where do you live?” But we need to take a closer look at what live means. 

A person really lives where he spends most of his time and attention. If we say a man “lives in his office,” we do not mean he sleeps, has morning coffee, and receives mail there. We mean it is where he focuses his energy and invests his heart. He expends his lifeblood there. We have largely ceased to live in our homes since, in varying degrees, our time, attention, and energy are elsewhere. Those whose focus is at home commonly experience themselves as out of step with those around them, or worse, as manning a sinking ship. 

But how did this come to be? The shift away from living at home was not a direct rejection of the family and household of old, as though one day we said, “This whole Ma and Pa and Granny and Grandpa thing has got to go!” Rather it was part of a widespread shift in priorities. Somehow, we reconceived life such that raising children and caring for (and learning from!) the aging are now peripheral. While any broad stroke risks oversimplification, for some time we have moved away from the key principle that people have priority over things. 

This conception and the accompanying practice take many forms and defy precise articulation or enumeration. In short when people prioritize economic success, wealth, bodily health, social status, comfort, luxury, and other such external goods, the goods of character: honorable living, generosity, service, relationship, and community tend to take a back seat. The marginalization of the young and old, then, is less a deliberate choice than a by-product of seeing success or happiness in terms of accumulating external achievements rather than becoming a certain kind of person.

On the other hand, a worldview that prioritizes people necessarily makes rearing the young and caring for the old integral to life. Why? This is a subtle but crucial point. All animals care for their young, with a view to preserving the species. Only humans form their young in view of principles that far transcend the issue of survival. And only humans care for and honor and learn from our elderly community members, right up to the point of death. Herein is a critical sign and expression of the human difference and identity: A real prioritizing of people stems from seeing human flourishing as a matter of character and rich relationships. These two always go together. Growing in character means becoming a certain kind of person. And it is precisely this kind of person who prioritizes and becomes capable of meaningful, rich relationships. Indeed, a central feature of good character is a willingness to serve, and to receive from, others.

Another major feature of human life is leisure, and how we work is deeply intertwined with how we use our non-working time. How we prioritize between people and things manifests in our practice of both work and leisure. Before the dawn of our postindustrial households, work and leisure belonged especially to homelife.
     This is significant, because even if with notable exceptions, homelife naturally tends to be people-centered. If anyone intuitively grasps the priority of people over things, it is a husband and wife; even more so when they become father and mother. Marriage and homelife tend to highlight that life is primarily about people, their flourishing, and their relationships, and that all things have their importance in serving that flourishing. 

Forming truly rich relationships calls for putting people first. “People first” is not just an abstract attitude. It begins with and focuses on certain people in our life. It should begin at home. But what if there is often nobody at home? 

The patterns of life today betray relationships at home as peripheral, even at stages when they should be most central, such as when children’s needs—especially for connection with parents—are most pressing. Then ironically but not surprisingly at the age when parents discover a growing need and desire for their children, the latter are nowhere to be found. Across all segments of society, we have an epidemic of unhappy and lonely elderly, unhappy and lonely youth, and unhappy and lonely adults living in the busy distraction of the intervening years. 

These three age groups need one another. The household is where children can discover their place in life, the elderly experience their ongoing belonging and usefulness, and adults find purpose in relating to one another and the young and the elderly, as all make a life together. 

Clearly the notion of “putting people first” speaks to something broadly experienced today as missing. It has become a slogan of politicians seeking election and businesses trying to boost their bottom line. Yet the household, the community that by its structure should put people first in a real, tangible, daily way has been set aside, undermined, and relegated to the dustbin of history. 

A Pressing Question

I invite you to join me in an exercise of “what if” that could have dramatic implications. What if the household is the central stage of living a good human life—and of passing it on? 

If the answer is yes, then the demise of the household is a key to our unhappiness, and restoring our households is a central need of our age. 

The history of the household—as well as something deep in our hearts—demands that we look again and reevaluate homelife today. A thriving household was a real ideal—even if often “honored in the breach”—that gave form to every aspect of human life. Today, for whatever complex reasons, many people and whole societies have lost the conviction of the possibility and desirability of the historical ideal of the household. 

But what if, despite some dramatic shortcomings in the “old” approach— if not in theory certainly in practice— the household is the natural context for doing, sharing, and passing on a good life? And what if the all-too-familiar failures that can plague any human association, and which can be especially painful and heinous in the close quarters of home, have kept us from perceiving what a household really is—and still can be? 

A fair reevaluation, however, will be harder than we think: There is nothing unusual in the fact that many of us have little experience or imagination of things outside our own culture. But we need to recognize that what comes to our mind on hearing the word “household” is different from any other time in recorded history, up until our great-grandparents or so. To picture the household as stripped of honor and emptied of intense daily existence requires no imagination. It is what we see outside our window. And probably inside it too. This is the reality of contemporary households. Even those intent on doing something “old fashioned” or “traditional” find it very difficult to picture and enact something different. 

Yet I have seen with my own eyes a reawakening in young adults across all economic, cultural, and religious backgrounds. These people want to get married and have a family. And more, they want to build something very different in their homes. Many have not seen it done, and they are told in the strongest terms that it cannot be or should not be attempted. Yet they intuit it and want it, and can almost taste it—the intentional household of today

My Approach

At issue is not a political agenda or a theoretical argument. At issue is human life, lived in a unique and irreplaceable community suited to the fulfillment of our deepest desires. We cannot ignore the failures of the past. But if it was worth experimenting with alternative social arrangements, then that experiment has already yielded its disastrous results. Now we can realize the importance of households in a way that only their collapse could have shown us. We need but open our eyes to see what chaos this collapse has created. 

A time for decision is at hand. We can accept and cooperate with the ongoing dismantling, or we can make a choice to do something different. Again, my focus is not political; it is people. Each of us must decide whether we are going to seek to create what actually answers to the name and reality of household—or not. Each of us must decide if we are going to put people first in a truly meaningful, specific, and concrete way, convinced that therein is the better measure of human life. 

At issue now is building something for which the know-how and the plans have been progressively lost to the mainstream. Those who desire to create a household might feel isolated and confused, if not also rejected, ridiculed, and opposed. 

But the plans have not been destroyed. They cannot be, since their outline is etched in the very stone of human existence, historical and present. The key to the outline is that it is always about persons and their relationships, and how they live together as embodied spirits every day. The basic features of the project are discernable in history and more importantly in the human heart. We do not need to reinvent the wheel; we simply need to rediscover how to shape a good one and then give it a uniquely contemporary spin.

As an exercise in why and how to craft an intentional household, this reflection is for men and women, since a vibrant homelife calls for the full engagement of both. It has special relevance for men who have been told in countless ways that home is not really their place.

A human household today will be both old and new. The most enduring realities can and sometimes must reemerge in exciting new forms. Given the extent to which common practice has separated our lives from our homes, most of us need to rethink basic patterns and structures of our daily existence. It is not easy.

Today’s household will necessarily be an intentional household. It begins with choosing to make home a center and hub of life, for the sake of people. Then this decision has implications, starting with concrete activities that give flesh and color to life. As Wendell Berry sagely noted, human life, as any life, calls for a congenial context.  The challenge of the intentional household-maker is precisely to discern and craft such a context today, even as many around us continue their flight from the home.

I cannot think of anything more pressing, challenging, and worthwhile. 

Eight Principles for Reclaiming the Household

Despite the obstacles, we can still craft our home into a household: a community of life that answers the desires of the human heart, where people and relationships thrive because we put them first, concretely, every day. But we need the right principles to know how to do it. This know-how transcends all others and is the ultimate self-help. While there is no set number of principles about the household, this basic lineup has stood the test of time. These eight both transcend any age and speak to ours in a powerful way. They express basic truths about human life and give concrete direction for today.

A principle is nothing but what its name implies: a place to begin—not so much something against which to judge our lives, as a starting point for thinking more clearly about them. Rather than assume that our situation will never be what it should be, we can discover how we might move closer to where we could be, starting with these principles. 

Here are the eight principles: 

1. Make household-making a priority. 
2. Take responsibility for life in your home. 
3. Make good work in and of the home the context for mutual belonging and living responsibly together. 
4. Enact real leisure as the heart of life in the home. 
5. Channel technology to the real good of the household. 
6. When possible, ground the life of the household in the permanent commitment, love, and friendship of spouses. 
7. When possible, give focus and completion to the household by rearing children toward maturity and happiness. 
8. Make the life and final years of the aging integral to life in the home.

In examining and reflecting on the reality of the household, I quote from a diverse cast of people, many of them ancient, some of them philosophers, all of them astute observers of human life. None of these thinkers understood things perfectly or were always right, yet they are powerful guides, bearing testimony to millennia of human experience and insight. They can prove invaluable in helping us step back and see the challenge and the gift that stands before us: to forge an intentional household today.