How To Build The House Of Your Dreams
Pastor, Faith Fusion
www.nhfaithfusion.com
Home is a place for our hearts to dwell; it reflects our soul and provides a place from where to cast our lives. When your family gathers at home this holiday season, reflect on the traditions that bring you together not just once a year, but every day.
What makes a house a home is the myriad of memories: the love shared. It’s the mess and often strange combination of furniture that happened into being over time. Where did that rocking chair come from that doesn’t blend with the IKEA desk? Grandmother’s questionably colored crochet throw lies over the back of the couch, in contrast to the One Direction poster on the wall above it. And yet it all fits because it tells a story, a love story.
Love doesn’t care about time. No matter how long it’s been since you’ve lived in your parents’ home, once you do return, you move from room to room hoping that nothing has altered because each room is home to your memories. Logically, you know that time has passed and a room needs to be refreshed—new carpets laid and blinds changed—but still you hope. You want the textures and impressions of your childhood to remain, to remind you of who you are.
In Search of a New Hearth
Homes have gathered people for thousands of years, the central hearth causing people to be drawn in, with the ensuing closeness creating bonds that don’t easily become loosened. There is something about family relationships that defy logic. The conflicts in families run deep; nevertheless they are bound by invisible threads that are not easily severed. If you really didn’t care, you would simply walk away from each other. But you don’t. Life is complicated.
While the romance of hearth and home is obvious, we have to find a new way to gather our families close. Fires did indeed draw people together because realistically there was only one warm spot in the house. To leave the hearth was to be plunged into cold and darkness, and all that jostling to find a spot close to the flame necessitated a little negotiating. But the advent of central air and electricity took that incentive away, and now with a screen in every room what is left to draw people together? It’s incredible: In one home you can have six people watching six different channels, laughing at six different shows but never having the time or right moment to share their delight. On top of that, there is all the stuff that life accumulates. Did you know that 75% of people in the US report they can’t park their car in the garage because the garage simply has too much stuff in it? I’d laugh but that describes my garage.
In times gone by an average home was perhaps 70 square feet and all people owned was a chair, a bowl and a spoon. You know what that’s like, having, no doubt, visited a living history museum or watched the Discovery Channel where crazy people volunteer to live like Vikings or Pilgrims for six months. I’m trying to figure out what on earth inspires them to do that! Now we rent storage spaces bigger than these small, humble dwellings to accommodate the overflow of things we have. We have too much stuff and not enough life.
We are a people in search of a new hearth. Life never stays the same, so the essentials must morph and take on a new form. No one simply watches TV anymore. Even that is like “Leave It to Beaver.” Instead, you watch your on-line miniseries while texting someone and playing Candy Crush. Now that is not necessarily bad—it’s social evolution in real time. It’s just that we have to find where home belongs in the mix of things and how we connect not just with family but with friends. For many of us, family is on the other coast or at minimum a plane ride away and friends are a new family, for a new season in our lives. Times change, but the need for the quality of relationships found in the family is always there, drawing us in.
A Home That Is Uniquely Ours
The book of Proverbs has a little timeless wisdom to share on creating hearth and home:
By wisdom a house is built,
And by understanding, it is established;
By knowledge the rooms are filled
With rare and beautiful treasures.
(Proverbs 24: 3-4)
We need to have a conduit for wisdom to enter our lives. Reverend Dr. Sun Myung Moon emphasized the importance of gathering in the home to read and learn together. He called it Hoon Dok Hwe, but in any language it simply means that we need a spiritual hearth to draw close to as a family, gaining warmth and light. Hoon Dok Hwe is the tradition in which ideally three generations of a family start each day by reading Heaven’s words and lead a life of practicing what they read with a new heart. What makes a house a home is most fundamentally the love in the family that is inspired by the values we share. It’s how we live together in virtuous relationships that matter: relationships that honor and respect one another. The practice of Hoon Dok Hwe, or reading wisdom literature together and discussing it, allows us to shape our life and family so that we can create a home that gives warmth and light that is uniquely ours.
“Hoon Dok Hwe is my way of passing along all the treasure boxes I accumulated in my life.” —Sun Myung Moon
Being happy in a home isn’t a square-footage issue; it’s about the space we tolerate between us. I’ve been in large homes that are still not big enough, with enmity creating great divides and requiring much space. I’ve been in small homes where the harmony between people seems to push back the walls, opening up and accommodating a messy but nevertheless delightful happiness. It’s worth working on our relationships so that we can fit in our homes. What is a home without a hearth, and what is a hearth without people gathered around it? Our homes are precious because of the uniquely beautiful, albeit sometimes frustrating, eternal relationships that are nurtured in that sacred space. For a home to be a home, it has to have something that draws us in and causes us to gather, so that we can pour out our love into each other’s lives and warm our world.