Zeal for Your House
- Renée Roden
- 3 hours ago
- 2 min read
“Zeal for your house will consume me.”
Houses are the extensions of ourselves in the world. Houses are our sites of history, places of refuge. I think of my grandmother’s house, which was a haven to me, a magical pine-wood house in the middle of the North Carolina woods. When I moved into it to spend six months working on a book, I found myself at home in the midst of a tumultuous and difficult moment in my life. I was alone in her house, her things still splayed around me, and it was strange and new to be there without her, but I recognized her in all the habits of the place. I recognized her love for me and my belonging to her and this place in my childhood pictures on the walls. The feeling of homecoming was palpable and healing.
When I was recently visiting a college in the Midwest, a professor contrasted the “non-places” or “airspace” of our digital-nomad, rootless world. Online essayists have critiqued this loss of an authentic locality, of the adaptation of a slick, pseudo-space-age, soulless Silicon Valley aesthetic whether the café or hotel or restaurant is in Azerbaijan or London.
Two senior students noted that they and their peers were drawn to musty old wood-paneled rooms and coffee shops. That they congregated and hung out in places that had the sense of being lived-in.
A house is where we live, but it’s also a place that shapes who we are. We are shaped by the stories a households, the actions of its members, the places that have been left behind. Houses are the sites of our history, but it is also where our history is made. Homes of our ancestors hold family relics we knew nothing about, they are places where our history hangs about in the air. We are meant to live in these thick places, dense with the stories and peoples of our past, the blood that runs through our blood.
Rather than the airy rootlessness of nomadic “nonplaces,” we long for the grounded-ness of home. Today, as we bless the Lateran Basilica, as the readings recall the blessings of the Temple in Jerusalem, let us remember with gratitude the homes that have blessed us, and the lives who are the living water flowing through them, through us.
Renée Darline Roden is a journalist who serves as the co-editor of Roundtable, a newsletter of catholicworker.org. She lives at St. Martin de Porres Catholic Worker in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania.