Home is Where the Heart Is

The Purpose of the Home

Good morning. I’m delighted to be with you today and find it especially fitting to talk about home on the feast day of the parents of Our Lady, who surely made a wonderful home for her.

There might be few places more evocative for us than the memory of our childhood home: the smell when you walked inside, the sound of the doorbell, a particular tree, and your father’s favorite chair. The backyard and summers spent playing, digging, daydreaming—maybe fighting with our siblings—and then the relief of laughter when all was better again. A terrible argument in the kitchen. The sound of your mother singing. Your favorite dish at Christmas. And the feeling of returning home after a long trip.

Home felt as familiar as your name. You didn’t question it—it was just who you were, this place where you lived. It’s strange how a structure can take on the persona of its inhabitants.

We sense that our homes are not meant to be like other places. Even though we can engage in similar activities elsewhere—we can have a family meal at a restaurant, we can sleep well at a motel, or even better, a beautiful hotel such as this—neither are meant to be home.

In fact, if we treat home as a restaurant or a hotel, we are mistreating it. It’s not meant to be a filling station, nor a place of disaffiliated borders. One of the most trackable metrics as far as how home life is going is whether or not there’s some consistency of family meals—or if all members are scurrying off to eat separately or in front of a screen and not prioritizing time together.

Home is meant to be communal, and family meals incarnate that reality of what we are and who we are. The time around the table is certainly central, but also important is the work of home—the sometimes chaotic preparation of the meal, the crumbs, the spills and cleanup after. We are learning not just to be together but to serve one another in a productive home economy animated by a currency of love.

The Home as a Living Body

Like the Body of the Church, the home can be thought of like the body of the family—making the inhabitants cohesive and ordered toward a common good. There’s a very outmoded word that people used to use. The word is homewrecker.

I bring it up not to relitigate its usage—I’m glad it’s passé—but there’s something fascinating that we called it a homewrecker, not a marriage wrecker or a family wrecker. It speaks to something very real: that the breakup of a marriage or a family can feel like the home itself has been attacked. That the home—the memories, the safety, the innocence nurtured within this body holding us all together—has been bombed, leaving each member adrift, laden with shrapnel and seeking reconstitution.

But even in the best of cases, when home life is near-idyllic, it’s not meant to be eternal—despite the fact that it gives us a sense of permanence. Children grow and launch into the world and start anew. And there’s a real melancholy that can puncture the nostalgia of home in that, at some point, it will be a place of loss—death, major life changes, the ghosts of your kids’ feet when they first started toddling around, their first steps—even though the nest has long since been emptied.

All of these serve as reminders that we yearn for and are made for a permanent familial love and are pilgrims on our way to a home that cannot be broken. The two homes—the one in this life and the one in the next—are intimately connected. One is not a mere waystation, biding our time awaiting the next. Our homes here are meant to be a formation and a preparation for our eternal home.

The very everydayness of home—what the modern mind interprets as perhaps banal—builds the sort of intimacy that leads to finding our true identity as sons and daughters of a good and loving Father, whose will we can trust.

As a child, I really reverenced my own father, and I knew that he deeply loved me and delighted in me. And in that combination of reverence and deep personal love, somehow I made the next step very easily—that God was not an arbitrary, distant lawgiver, but rather a Father who called me and us by name.

The Three Stages of Home Life

For generations throughout history, most people’s lives could be expected to be pivotally marked with three stages of home life.

First, there is our childhood home—not necessarily just one building (some families move from place to place)—but generally the home you came from.

Second, there is that moment when home becomes a person. When we find, fall in love, and home shifts from a place to a person.

And third, there is the home and family that the two are then inspired to build together.

I’m identifying these stages in broad strokes. Individual lives follow different trajectories, but generally speaking, these three stages of home are what have moved along the human species for millennia. This process, repeated throughout generations, is indeed the very engine of generation—generative, referring to people begetting people, who in turn beget people, and on and on.

But something has interrupted this ordinary cyclical life progression. At each stage of home, we now see dramatic and unprecedented destabilization.

First, in our homes of origin—children today experience perhaps more instability in the home than at any period heretofore. Dismal statistics abound: abusive homes, broken homes, fatherless homes—and the resulting economic, emotional, and psychological instability need not be recited.

I think we are just seeing the tip of the iceberg with the wounds and pathologies that are rendering our society not only angry and despairing, but stagnant and sterile—metaphorically and literally.

Disruption of Marriage and Young Adulthood

And what of the disruption to the second stage—of young adults finding home in one another, in the vocation of marriage? I remember this stage very clearly. The last Christmas I spent before marriage was with my parents, and it was lovely. But I remember feeling it was wrong to be apart from my soon-to-be husband. He had, in a very real way, become my home. And the shift was palpable.

But for many young adults, gone—or perhaps suppressed—is the impulse to fall in love and to find the rest of their lives in each other. Often now, marriage is dismissed with a shrug or even with derision. Why would it be on the radar of 20-some-year-olds today? Hookups are not for the sake of forever. The hookup is for the sake of the for-right-now… and then for the next.

Compounding the peer and pop culture influences inclining young adults away from marriage is also the deeper issue that, for many, marriage was not modeled in a healthy way—leading them to recoil at the prospect of it as adults.

Cultural Influences Undermining Marriage

This message of the futile and fraught nature of marriage is also delivered to the masses online by provocateurs such as Andrew Tate and Pearl, who remind their audiences over and again what a bad deal marriage is.

Adding to this cacophony are various viral videos watched by millions on TikTok, showing young women playing out some version of about to receive a ring and accept a marriage proposal. Then their imagination plays out what the rest of their life will look like—the endless stream of banality of housekeeping, childbearing, childcaring.

Such videos end with a resolute no to the ring and to any potential suitor. And the idea is that she avoided—she has a near escape—in rejecting the proposal.

And what about the third stage of home—building home and family together? If that stage is achieved at all now, it is most often after a history of broken intimacies and past relationships, and approached with contraceptives and escape hatches, leaving many couples building a home on very unstable ground, to say the least.

And even for those that escape the hookup hellscape and form families in good faith and in the faith, there are many cards stacked against them. Now, in part because the institutions that used to reinforce the importance of home are now often hostile to it.

In touring the country over the last four years to talk about the woke movement, the inevitable comment I hear every single time is of parents—grandparents—who raised their kids well and in the faith, only to watch them get woke and turn around and disdain them and how they were raised.

Strain—and often estrangement—follow. And there’s a real sea of heartbreak and heartache out there because of this.

The result of all this disruption at all three pivotal stages of home reverberates beyond the individuals and families’ lives claimed. Home life is the engine of transmission of the faith and of civilization—unmatched among rivals. What is learned in the home can and should be supported outside of it, but it cannot be easily replicated without it.

There simply is no place like it.

The Cultural Crisis and Hope for Renewal

Against this landscape of generational breakdown, it is no wonder that we have a rise of the nones (N-O-N-E-S), a birth rate collapse, loneliness, civic chaos, and narcissistic revolutionary ideologies running rampant.

There’s a good reason why every revolutionary—from Marx to Mao to Marcuse—targeted home life and also fatherhood in particular. Both are deeply stabilizing for society, and stability is the enemy of cultural revolutions.

We can look at this landscape and the scope of the work to be done and feel a weight of discouragement—or we can look at it with a great sense of purpose, in renewed hope and trust in God’s great love and mercy for His children.

So what is the source of our optimism amid such a bleak and barren reality? It is simply that we know that God wills it be transformed, and entrusts us with a humbling and ennobling mission of personal holiness and cultural renewal. Our homes are an irreplaceably powerful force in both endeavors.

Another source of our optimism is the reality that lies are only compelling by way of coercion. And amidst a sea of lies, the truth is uniquely compelling. Lies eventually tell on themselves. A hookup lifestyle does not age well. And I do think we’re at the point where the lies are telling on themselves on a massive scale.

What we need, then, is to be ready—not just to help expose them—but also to present a vision: something true, good, and beautiful. An ordered and stable way of life that so many are starving for.

I would also add that when the lies are so outlandish and bizarre as they are now—men as women, women as men, persons as cats or furries—when the lies are this bizarre.

The Ordinary Power of Home and Where the Heart Is

We need to present the ordinary embodied in the everyday. Home speaks powerfully to what it means to be a human: that we are rooted in lineage with a history and an author, that we are made for one another, and that we are made with a purpose and a mission. In a time of great disorientation, home orients us by rooting us in the past, pointing us toward the future, and inclining us to one another.

Bookending these three stages of home are two less seen but no less real homes—our first home in the womb and our final home in eternity. Getting home wrong here easily leads us to getting home wrong there.

In a post-Dobbs world, it is painfully clear that wins in law and policy must be accompanied by cultural wins of hearts and minds. The stability of the home and the womb relies on a people who understand what human dignity is and what it demands of us.

And if we are unmoored and atomized because our home here is unstable and unmeaningful, it is much easier to believe that we are utterly autonomous, made by no one and for no one. And likewise, if we are made by no one and made for no one, we hardly know what sort of thing we are—much less whose we are. And hence, our eternal home becomes an inconceivable abstraction.

But getting home wrong here also carries significant consequences for our civic life. Venerable Fulton Sheen wrote presciently over 70 years ago: once sacrifice is separated from the home, sacrifice is separated from the nation.

The Lie of Externalized Blame

To connect the dots of our civic life and our home—one of the greatest obstacles to mature, sacrificial, self-governing society is the now rampant lie that our problems in life lie primarily outside of our own self. And I would argue that an ordered home makes it close to impossible for its inhabitants to partake in that lie.

Home facilitates a sort of intimacy that is horrible and beautiful. It’s horrible because you are constantly confronted with your faults—either mirrored in your children or through the eyes of your spouse. But beautiful because you get to contend with those faults day in and day out with the exact sort of persevering everydayness that effectively can purge our egos and self-absorption and habituate us towards service and virtue.

How Education Undermines Formation

I’m going to share one concrete example of how this effort in the home—of self-knowledge and growth in virtue—is not only unsupported but contradicted very aggressively today.

In my research and staying up to date on the woke movement, I’ve been reading a lot of the curriculum for a program called Social Emotional Learning, or SEL. It’s pretty ubiquitous now in the K–12 public schools.

One of the curriculums targeted at middle schoolers is that they are prompted to keep what they call a “problem diary,” wherein they are told to log their trigger situations. And the prompts that the students are offered of possible triggers are things like:
– What was the last time you felt left out?
– Where were your parents not there for you at an important moment?
– Who treated you unfairly today?

This is an exercise that might seem innocuous enough. But consider how the habit of identifying areas of personal grievance shapes our patterns of thoughts and minds. A school program that asks students to identify instances of emotional injury effectively trains them to scan their environment for opportunities to claim emotional injury.

The Family Dinner Table vs. Grievance Culture

And then consider in contrast what happens at a normal family dinner table. Likely, the questions your parents asked you, or the ones you ask your children—the ones I ask mine—are:
– What did you learn today?
– Did you include that new student today?
– Were you a good friend?
– Did you help around the house?

Now imagine instead, at the family dinner table, the questions each evening were:
– Who hurt you today?
– How were you made to feel left out today?

This would become a perverse examination of conscience, wherein we are asking our children to habitually examine everyone else’s conscience and never their own.

All people start out life rightly consumed by their needs and desires. Babies are utterly helpless. It is in home that we can consistently coax kids outside of themselves at each stage of development, encouraging them to set aside their absorption with their wants, their needs, their hurts, their hungers, and begin to examine their duties, their mission, their indebtedness, and their gratitude.

If we want someone to fail—or an entire society to fail—teach people to adopt a grievance mindset. If we want someone to succeed—or if we want our whole nation to succeed—we need to fortify it on the cellular level of the home.

Evangelization with Home is Where the Heart Is

Not only will this lead to better citizens, it can also lead to more Christians. Our homes have the capacity to be a powerful force of evangelization. The language of home is not lofty, requires no training in theology or Scripture. It’s a universal language that most everyone speaks intuitively.

This conviction is the driving force behind the Theology of Home project that Carrie Gress and I started over six years ago with our books and our lifestyle brand.

The culture is already deeply invested in the things of home: home décor, television shows, works, magazines, the resurgence in domestic arts—from keeping chickens to backyard gardens to knitting to making broth. This speaks to a common longing that we ought not dismiss.

Home is a powerfully compelling access point to the minds and hearts of the people we want to reach. In the same way that many women became radicalized through things like television shows and magazines with progressive lifestyle brands, we believe Catholic media can and should aid in connecting the dots between the longings for all things home to the stability and community—both natural and supernatural—from which these more surface desires emanate.

Paul’s Conversion Through Family Life

Home is a language that people understand. The everyday, ordinary message of home is compelling for men as well.

I have a friend named Paul—36-year-old professional, smart, educated. He had a very rough home life as a child, by any measure, with verbal and emotional abuse, a lot of isolation, not much community. Though baptized, the faith was only presented in a very disordered and limited way.

Eager to escape, Paul pursued college, then grad school. He admired his professors deeply and took as gospel the political ideology woven throughout his texts. So deeply did he absorb it that he began to go through his life deconstructing it—cynically identifying the power dynamics at play in everything: in his relationships, in his friendships, in literature, in the Church—until he had deconstructed all possible sources of meaning.

This left him staring into a void, racked with despair, and eventually suicidal.

At the time, he was working a high-prestige career in Washington, D.C., and confided in a coworker who he knew was a man of faith. His coworker invited Paul to church that Sunday, and then afterward to his sister and her husband and their children’s home for dinner.

And that Sunday, something miraculous happened. You might be guessing it was that he went to church. Not exactly. He did go to church. But it was the dinner after—with his friend’s family and their young children—that marked the dramatic change in his life.

It was not necessarily the dinner—there was bagged salad and take-out pizza. It was seeing the interaction of an imperfect but happy family in the intimacy of their home life. Dad and mom were playful with one another, tender with their small children, and easygoing rather than tense when small contradictions arose.

The next week he went back to church. But he did not give a wit about going to church—he just wanted to get to that home after, and be with that family.

And so it went, Sunday after Sunday. And I’m delighted to report he is now a practicing Catholic, dating seriously for marriage, and hoping for a family—all things he swore he’d never want in life.

Though he is an intellectual, it was not an intellectual discussion nor any extraordinary encounter that pierced through to Paul’s heart. It was the ordinary, everydayness of a family home.

The Evangelical Power of the Ordinary

Every moment in time has some particular evangelical emphasis. In the 1990s, I think it was apologetics. I remember because that was very pivotal for me in my reversion.

Many have since said that now it’s beauty—that in a post-rational world, beauty will pierce through the human heart. I think both are essential. I’d also add that in this moment in time, I think that we are called especially to emphasize something easily overlooked but needed now more than ever: the ordinary.

The ordinary, injected with love, gives us a real window into the eternal. And into the Eternal is our eternal home with Him, for which each soul longs.

Everyday family life is simply not everyday anymore for far too many people. In fact, I think it’s fair to say that the home is a cultural renewal machine.

As we say in Theology of Home I: we cannot always get our friends to go to Mass with us, but we can usually get them over for a cup of coffee or a family meal.

Rebuilding the culture in a way that is effective because it’s capitalizing on the language that people are already captured by.

Making Home where the Heart is Amid Cultural Revolutions

Cultural revolutions tend to attack what it means to be a human in a couple of ways. One, it makes each member of the human family into his opposite. Men tend to become soft. Women tend to become hardened. And children become targeted in their innocence.

But the other thing that cultural revolutions do that is dehumanizing is it makes us very, very boring.

Masculinity and femininity become stupid, reductive, menacing even—tropes. Children are reduced to burdensome annoyances. The home is little more than a series of rote chores, every day the same, banal and beige.

Yes, it is true that home life at the three stages of home are all very ordinary and repeated in countless individual lives for generations throughout millennia. But it is not at all ordinary to any given person.

Think of when you first fell in love, proposed, had babies. Surely you did not think, “Well, this has happened to a million other people every day throughout the millennia.” You rightly thought that it was monumental, deeply personal, irreplaceable—because it was happening to unrepeatable, personal, irreplaceable human beings.

These everyday experiences are nothing less than windows into eternity.

What actually is boring is the relentless celebration of the self. The relentless celebration of transgressive behavior, which is by nature always escalating, only consumes us, never satisfies us.

No wonder people are exhausted and feeling lost.

And what the lost person wants is home. To have a true identity of being named and known. So that we might know Him and His inexhaustible love. And there, we might find the freedom to abandon ourselves to Him, who will never abandon us.

Thank you.