Home as Gift

Home as Gift

Speech given at New Christendom Press Conference 2025

Stephen Wolfe

Our nation’s most revered philosopher once said, “home is where your rump rests.” That’s Pumba, of course, our favorite warthog. Another great philosopher comes from across the pond. A river rat and a mole were walking along a river, and Mole began to sense something. He looked up and shouted,

Home! That was what they meant, those caressing appeals, those soft touches wafted through the air, those invisible little hands pulling and tugging, all one way!…Now, with a rush of old memories, how clearly it stood up before him, in the darkness! Shabby indeed, and small and poorly furnished, and yet his, the home he had made for himself, the home he had been so happy to get back to after his day's work. And the home had been happy with him, too, evidently, and was missing him, and wanted him back, and was telling him so, through his nose, sorrowfully, reproachfully, but with no bitterness or anger; only with plaintive reminder that it was there, and wanted him

That’s from Wind in the Willows.

My talk this morning is about home. No, I’m not going to rehearse for you all the domestic duties of husband and wife. I want to talk about the experience of home and what it means to make a place your home.

We are home-making creatures. We have houses that are homes. We have hometowns, homelands, home baseball parks, and many others. What does it mean to say this is home, or better put this is my home? How does a structure of wood, with walls and windows over time become home. Why do we cherish our hometown? Or cheer the home team? Why do we fight, suffer, and even die for our homeland? These are sorts of questions I’ll try to answer today.

The ancients spoke often of “home”, fatherland, or native land. τὴν πατρίδα σῴζειν - “to save the fatherland,” was a common expression of Ancient Greece. Ancient literature is filled with figures longing and seeking home. The most famous is Homer’s The Odyssey in which Odysseus wanders for ten years seeking his πατρίς, the “shining Island” of Ithaca, as he calls it. Aeneas, the Trojan hero of Virgil’s Aenead, flees his patria to found a new one by divine promise, taking with him in his ships “his gods of hearth and home”. The Aeneid is a story of homecoming. Not only was he returning to the land of the Trojan ancestors. He was seeking a better home, one of divine promise that would far exceed the glories of Troy.

Apart from the epic lives of heroes, the everyday man of pre-christian civilization had a clear sense of home. The fatherland was the land where one’s fathers were buried. Being driven to idolatry, they held ancestral worship. They maintained the hearth fire and even gave reverence to it when passing in and out of their dwelling. There was an enduring presence of one’s ancestors, a connection to the place, rooted in natural affection. It was of supreme importance for Aeneas, for example, to keep close the images and things of his hearth gods, as he wandered around the Mediterranean, ultimately to implant them in their Italian home.

Marriage of the ancients involved the bride receiving the gods and ancestors of her groom. When Ruth said, “Your people shall be my people, and your God my God.” She was, by God’s grace, receiving the only true God and God’s people, but the expression itself was fairly standard practice among pagans. In this act, the children of the marriage would not be torn between the hearth gods of their father’s and mother’s families. She was grafted into her new family’s ancestral duties of piety. Marriage was not merely a union of man and wife, but the full receiving of the woman into new objects of veneration and piety.

The spiritual connection of people and place among the pagans had a certain advantage. The particular place took on a sacred status, as loved one’s long-dead enlivened it with obligation. The dead, living, and unborn are connected. Homecoming for the ancients is not akin to the sentimentalism of modern man. It was the place of blessing, sacrifice, and intergenerational communion. The natural affection of loved ones across generations is extended to the very place of dwelling, creating a spiritual connection of people and place. And being a matter of obligation and piety, they were fully conscious of ancestral presence.

Now, we ought to reject the practice of idolatry, as false worship. We know this from revelation. There is no command to keep a hearth fire, nor to pray to ancestors, nor to venerate relics. We can see how the Roman church has exploited this tendency of fallen man, to be factories of idols, and to satisfy the fanciful notions of sinful man.

But must we reject the fundamental impulse behind this idolatry? Why do nearly all of pre-Christian mankind come to offer reverence and devise rites to ancestors, and to give worship to the places of their life, death, and burial? I want to submit that the fundamental principle (not its application and expression) is good and natural to man as man. Not the deification, not the spiritual presence, not the rites, but the civic piety towards them and, more specifically, to those traces of ancestors that endure in the places where they dwelled and died. By trace, I do not mean ghosts or spirits or some localized, conscious presence. I mean that the things and places that endure past their death retain, through memory and story, a trace of them in our experience and actions. These things and places take on a meaning beyond the physical and material. They leave behind a world that we experience, too often unconsciously in our day, as gift.

Again, for the ancients, this gift was conscious to them, since they had a system of rites and duties that made it so. For us, however, since these are idolatrous, experiencing the world as gift from the past is easily suppressed, forgotten, and lost. It requires remembrance and articulation.

Since God is one and is the God of all, there are no localized or familial gods. There cannot be a real divinized connection of people and place, made conscious around set of mysterious rites. But this leads to a problem. If it is good and natural for man to connect in some way with ancestors via a particular place, how is this accomplished given true religion? This talk seeks to give an answer.

Let’s begin with something small. Consider how we treat family heirlooms, such as a pocket watch or furniture or perhaps military discharge papers. Many of these things have little to no market value, and yet we cherish them, and even plan to pass them down to our children. Around them is a story, and telling their story transfers their significance to the hearer. It’s the story that sends the object out of immanence and into transcendence and thereby takes it out of the market or monetary value and makes it an object of love across time. You don’t worship it, nor do you worship your family through it. But you experience it as signifying an in-the-world connection of something not in this world. It has, in other words, a trace of your loved ones imprinted on it. And though we bring memory to it, it brings memory to us. It serves as a call to conscience, to act for the good of ourselves and our posterity.

Our tendency nowadays is to downplay such experience. Modern life is a throw-away culture and one of consumption. Theology, for its part, is wielded by the modern theologian to drive our minds to abstract notions of justice, to equalize all affections, to distrust all experience, and to follow only adventitious divine commands. It’s as if our fallenness has turned the world into only bare, meaningless material, or filled only with devilish spirits. When one says “this world is not our home,” they too often mean that we cannot make any semblance or sentiment of home in it, that we cannot mix our labor with it and leave something that endures, and that we cannot leave behind conduits of love to loved ones across generations. “This world is not our home” not only communicates carelessness that leads to destruction; it requires that everything is instrumental, that nothing matters beyond market value, and that, in the end, everything is bare, meaningless material. Nothing takes on meaning with story and memory, because in the end, everything will burn.

But that violates the very sort of creature we are. We make meaning through actions, and the natural love we have for our people is embodied in things and places. Our world is enlivened by us. We find and experience home in this world through the gift of home from loved ones.

In Napa, California, where I grew up, there is a place known as the the “Wolfe Ranch.” It was my grandparents’ home. I spent countless hours there. As you approach it, on Third Avenue—after you wind through a few vineyards—you’ll see a metal cut-out of a rather cartoonish wolf standing on a wagon hitched to a star. My uncle made it. Turing there, you’ll go up a long drive way to the house. My father would drive me here, and I remember the excited anticipation of reaching the house, moving along that drive-way. Perhaps, I would see my cousins, or jump in the pool, or find some adventure in the garden. Perhaps I would just sit in the backyard talking with my father. Every part of that place is in memory. My childhood is lodged there, unshaken. Many of you know exactly what I’m talking about.

As things go in this world, that property is no longer owned by my family. Recently, I took my kids to the edge of that drive-way, next to the old Wolfe sign, which still stands. I desperately wanted to drive my kids up that drive-way, to relate everything I experienced in that place, to transfer that love of place to them. But I couldn’t. The best I could do is get a picture with them next to that sign. We live in a fallen world. But what would be best? Not that I could bore my children with my rather mundane memories, but that they could form their own memories in that place on top of mine. Few of us will get that opportunity today, something that was once common. I can’t help but think that people who constantly repeat “this world is not our home”  have cold hearts and deficient memory. They’ve accepted the cold, darkened universe of modern science and allowed theology to freeze their hearts. But this is not human; it is not Christian.

Just think of the soldiers longing for home. Odysseus said,

“Yet, it is true, each day

I long for home, long for the sight of home.

If some god shakes me again on the wine-dark sea,

I will endure it, having in my breast a heart that endures affliction.”

Xenophon’s Ten Thousand, who spent months being hounded by the Persians, cried, (THAlatta! THAlatta!) or “the sea, the sea” when they finally made it to the Black Sea, their ticket home to Greece.

There’s the old World War I folk song,

“Keep the home fires burning,

While your hearts are yearning,

Though your lads are far away,

They dream of home.”

Or think of our favorite Hobbits, as they sat exhausted and cold. Now, this is in the movie version, so forgive me: Sam says to Frodo:

“Do you remember the Shire, Mr. Frodo? It'll be spring soon. And the orchards will be in blossom. And the birds will be nesting in the hazel thicket. And they'll be sowing the summer barley in the lower fields... and eating the first of the strawberries with cream. Do you remember the taste of strawberries?”

When you think about it, home is a rather strange thing. We humans occupy a space, conduct our mundane activity—sweeping the floors of the dining room, go to the downtown grocery store, maybe have a beer at the local pub—and without any intention come to belong there. We do not will home into existence. We do not choose home. It happens; it happens to us, simply as a result of everyday life.

As I said, I am from Napa, California. I moved to New York for college, and then spent 5 years in the Army and then graduate school in Louisiana. I now live in North Carolina, because moving back to California after all those years was simply not possible. But no matter how long I live in North Carolina—and God willing I’ll die there—I can’t shake the reality that Napa is my hometown. I can’t by sheer will transfer that sentiment to central North Carolina. Sure, I love where I live—the people, the culture, and the landscape. But Napa is home. For twenty years I lived there. I grew up there. Nearly every part of it is familiar, filled with deposits of memory with my grandparents, father, mother, sister, and friends; with memories of my high school graduation, my first and only Little League home-run, and the restaurant where my wife and I had our first date. (She’s from the same town). But now when I visit—my 97 y/o grandmother still lives there—I don’t need to recall those memories to feel home. I know the streets, the places by shear habit—in a word, I’m well-oriented.

Frankly, I doubt that if I live another 40 years in my current town that it will rival that feeling. Though perhaps, through my children it will. But again I can’t simply will or decide to feel home. But this place will be the hometown of my children, and for them (just like me) it is not by decision or will. It is through their everyday life, their mundane activity.  We don’t think “home”; we do life and it happens. In modern life, we think that everything is a matter of choice. But actually many things that matter most to us were not due to choice at all.

My own experience of moving away from my hometown, and my periodic visits, is why I know so well why immigration has to be done with care. Immigrants do not touch magic dirt and become Americans. Their bodies might reside here but their hearts remain somewhere else. They might affirm all the propositions, but their first love is a land far away. Only a few immigrants will know themselves and suppress that first love, knowing that their obligation is to assimilate as best they can and see to it that their children and grandchildren become Americans in heart. More on immigration later.

As some of you know I am slowly writing a book on home for New Christendom Press. As with many of my writing projects, I provide a real definition, one that goes beyond what one might find in the dictionary. I gave you some sentimental stories to prepare for a philosophy lecture, so stay with me here

My tentative definition goes something like this (I choose each word carefully):

Home is a place of complacent delight, generated by the activity of loved ones, which adorns space with intimate familiarity across generations, in order to perfect the union of particular people and to foreshadow the union in the world to come.

Now, there’s a lot there. So let’s walk through it. If your kids are in a classical school and in the logic phase, they might pick up that the definition contains the four causes: form, material, efficient, and final. Those make a complete definition of a thing.

The form is “a place of complacent delight”. I say “place” instead of site or space, because place is some geographic space with additional human meaning, like my grandparent’s house. It is not merely a house among others houses. Our built world is a placial world; we relate to space in various, meaningful ways. Even a street is a sort of place—a slab of asphalt that is for something, namely vehicle traffic, and pedestrians relate to it as a space of caution. Parenting young children is largely instruction in how to relate to and be in various places, from caution towards streets, quietness in libraries, and attentiveness in churches. In a way, we are placializing our children’s world, assigning meaning to various spaces. We don’t realize what we’re doing that; but that’s what we’re doing.

The home is a sort of place—a place of “complacent delight”. Complacent might seem like an odd term to use, but it’s Latin root is complacentia, which means satisfaction or pleasing and sometimes with the sense of “disposition to please”. Old theologians would speak of the “complacent love” that God has for the church through Christ. That is, God delights in his church. The scholastics would speak of three types of loves: benevolence (or well-wishing), beneficence (well-doing), and complacence (delighting). The former two entail a more conscious, willed love, whereas “complacent love” can be more passive or responsive. One might have a complacent smile at the sight of a loved one. A mother has complacent delight in her children. You experience complacent love by simply being with a friend. That is, after all, the highest form of friendship: you don’t seek to use your friends but simply delight in being with them. The being-with is an end in itself.

Adding “delight” might seem rather redundant, but it completes the meaning, since “delightful” things have a sort of allure to them. Recall Mole’s response in Wind in the Willows: “the home had been happy with him, too, evidently, and was missing him, and wanted him back, and was telling him so, through his nose, sorrowfully, reproachfully, but with no bitterness or anger; only with plaintive reminder that it was there, and wanted him.” The home is indeed “a place of complacent delight.” Imagine Samwise Gamgee, after that long arduous adventure and his sad farewell: Tolkien says that “Rose drew him in, and set him in his chair, and put little Elanor upon his lap. He drew a deep breath. ‘Well, I’m back.’” Quiet, simple, and moving—a release into the delight and rest of home.

So that’s the form: it applies to the house-as-home, the hometown, the homeland, and other types of home. It reveals to us even more the sorrow expressed in Psalm 137: “By the rivers of Babylon, there we sat down, yea, we wept, when we remembered Zion.”

Efficient

But how does home come about? As our definition states, “by the activity of loved ones.” It comes by our being in the world; as I said, it simply happens—by mundane things of life, by the milestones of our youth, and by the great acts of our fellows. The facade of hometown buildings take on a certain smile, a sentiment of mutual belonging. Being in home is the experience of fittingness. Your house becomes, for yourself and others, the embodiment and the manifestation of your care, your openness to friends, and your life in the world. The flowers you plant in public view expresses to others that this is your home and theirs. That is, your will to live and live well is imprinted on the world, and this will to live is not merely for yourself but for others, most intensely for those whom you love.

That imprint of your activity endures, even past your death, as a conduit of love to those who remain. In Napa, there’s an old large building where my grandfather and uncle ran for decades a furniture business, the site of my first job. There’s the downtown restaurant where I would sneak off during lunch in high school to eat with friends. There’s the old Napa High School, where my father and mother went to school. There are the rolling hills where my father would ride horses with his brother. Countless places, all lodged with meaning and story Natural affections exuding from the walls and grassy hills my natural affection. I’m united to it all because of them.

One analogy that might help is music—the relation of melody to its notes A melody, broken into parts, is simply a series of notes. The melody, as we hear it, is not on the music sheet. We find on the page a succession of notes of varying lengths, and we even hear a succession. But in that succession, we hear something else—something that, in a way, is not there. The melody emerges in experience from the notes, evoking various emotions, but it is not reducible to their simple succession. Likewise, home emerges from the structures, objects, and people of our world. Home depends upon them but is something that emerges from them in experience.

A word of clarification. I’m not saying that if you do not experience this constant, conscious delight in your home that you’re doing something wrong, nor am I saying that you need to gin up some feelings all the time to be truly human. The experience of home is so ordinary that this delight I’m speaking of is largely in the background of experience. But there ought to be the occasional moment when you reflect on home, and see your loved ones in it and say this is my home.

Country songs

No other cultural art form expresses home better than country music. Of course, we all know John Denver’s

Country roads, take me home
To the place I belong
West Virginia, mountain mama
Take me home, country roads

But may you haven’t heard Alan Jackson’s song “Home.” He wrote it as thought about his parents back in Georgia. He reflected on their history, as a young marriage couple, who turned a tool shed, build by Alan’s grandfather, into a house.

It goes like this here:

And they made their house from a tool shed

Granddaddy rolled down on two logs

And they built walls all around it

And they made that house a home

And they taught us about good living

They taught us right from wrong

Lord, there'll never be another place

In this world that I'll call home

There’s another great country song by the band Lonestar called My Front Porch Looking In.

I've traveled here and everywhere

Following my job

I've seen the paintings from the air

Brushed by the hand of God

The mountains and the canyons reach from sea to shining sea

But I can't wait to get back home

To the one he made for me

It's anywhere I'll ever go and everywhere I've been

Nothing takes my breath away

Like my front porch looking in

There's a carrot top who can barely walk

With a sippy cup of milk

A little blue eyed blonde with shoes on wrong

'Cause she likes to dress herself

And the most beautiful girl holding both of them

Yeah the view I love the most

Is my front porch looking in.

Now, there’s more to home than the present view. Home is where the past endures through memory, making that space more valuable than what the market can offer.

Our last song is a recent one by Cody Johnson. The title is Dirt Cheap.

They came in thinkin' top dollar

To that old cotton crop farmer

They knocked on his screen door, and he said

"Lord, what you need, boys, " and they said

"You know all the others went and cashed out

We got the subdivision all mapped out

It'll sit right here on this land

And you can leave town a rich man"

And he said, "Boys, whatever you're offerin', it won't be enough

'Cause I got a little girl that used to swing right there

I still see her pink bow in her brown hair

She's in the big city, but she still calls home

What's she gonna do if she comes back, and we're gone?

And over there, under that wide oak tree

Beneath the cross is where my best buddy's buried

Lasted 13 huntin' season runnin' strong

Keep your money 'cause a man can't leave his dog

And over there is where I got down on one knee

You can't buy that kind of dirt cheap"

One man smiled and he kinda looked away

The other said, "Before we go, I gotta know one thing

Between the droughts and the floods through all the years

What in the world got you through? How the hell'd you get here?"

And he said "That little girl that used to swing right there

I still see her pink bow in her brown hair

Runnin' up after one of them long days

A big smile makin' every little worry fade

And over there, under that wide oak tree

Beneath the cross, where my best buddy's buried

All them huntin' seasons freezin' in a Jon boat

Me and him, double-barrel and a two-stroke

And that woman that said yes when I got down on one knee

Yeah, you can't buy that kind of dirt cheap"

No, it ain't somethin' you fall into

It's somethin' God gives you

And you hold on to.

It’s all mundane, it’s all simple. Home doesn’t require anything special. The old cotton farmer gets it. He states it better than any philosopher.

I’ll leave country music now, but I suggest listening to Miranda Lambert’s “The House that Built Me”. I could also quote songs that speak to memories and stories attached to things, such as David Bell’s “Riding with Private Malone” or Lee Brice’s “I Drive your Truck” or Johnny Cash’s “Ragged Old Flag”.  And many you out there have your own suggestions.

None of this it sentimentality, nor simply some human passion that we might degrade or suppress. Nor is it a thing merely in the mind. We’re speaking about something real in the world. Our world is the lofty meaning our actions bring and impress upon it. That swing is the place of your young daughter’s swinging, even if she has grown up. The Wolfe Ranch is the place of my grandparents and so much of my childhood, even if someone else now owns it. We must resist the modern tendency to relegate these to purely, in-your-brain, mental sentiment. We shape the world and it shapes us. Our world reflects the life lived on it. Our self is not some first-person “I” in our mind or brain, but made up of the meaning lodged in places.

Material Cause

Returning to our definition, we can understand then that the stuff of home (or the material cause) is the adornment of space with intimate familiarity. I use “adornment”, because the house remains a house, just as the clothed person remains a person. But the house adorned with home is, nevertheless, profoundly elevated. Edmund Burke used the metaphor of “drapery” to describe English social customs.  He called them “superadded ideas, furnished from the wardrobe of a moral imagination, which the heart owns, and the understanding ratifies, as necessary to cover the defects of our naked shivering nature, and to raise it to dignity.” Social customs raise a people from bare humanity and to dignity; that is, it makes a country delightful. Likewise, a heart-owned moral imagination elevates the house, or town, or land into places of delight. Put more scholastically, the home is the house perfected, for the very end of the house is that it becomes a home.

Now, it is important to see that the “familiarity” is particular, not universal. We can all look at a house and say “that house is a home”. But saying “that house is my home” is much different. You experience the home-ness of the house. You have the memory, the sense of belonging, the sense of obligation. You feel the demand of sacrifice. Rat—the river rate of Wind in the Willows— who was walking next to Mole, did not get a whiff of home, but Mole did. The Rat did not feel the allure to the place; but Mole did. Why? Because it is Mole’s home, not the Rat’s. As the text says, it is “the home he had made for himself, the home he had been so happy to get back to after his day's work.” Home, by its very generation, is particular and exclusive. One might say that it is subjective, not objective; or better put, it is an exclusive relation of a subject to an elevated object in his experience.

But rarely is a home only a home for a singular individual. Indeed, most often a place is home because people dwell with others. It’s not the looking-out, but from the front porch looking in that you most see home. And of course one cannot fathom a hometown without it being a hometown for many others. Moreover, you cannot separate the place and the people; the place is the people—their customs, traditions, manners, language, clothing, architectural style, and many other things. If you replace the people, you replace the place.  Can we separate an American town of the 1950s—with the iconic cars and townscape—from the 50s fit-and-flare dresses or the American sack suits? There is a sort of fittingness to it all. Of course, places change over time, but the substance of it—that which does not change—is the people, being linked by intergenerational ties that bind them together and to that place. In other words, there is an irreducible connection of people and place. The continuity across change is found in the people, united by natural and civic loves across generations.

The nation, though typically much larger, follows the same principles. The built environment of a nation changes. The material and artistic culture changes over time. People are born and they die. But the people and the place—as to its substance—endures. A house of deceased grandparents, now the home of the grandson, perhaps remodeled and furnished in a modern style, is still the family home. The same is true of the nation, if the people of that nation are not replaced. This is why ancestry matters—it links one to the nation back to time immemorial or to its founding. It links one beyond universal propositions and beyond mere legal “citizenship.” Rather, people are united to a place by particular loves, both natural and civic. It binds one to the soil, to one’s native land. Delightful for people is the soil of one’s native land, and grateful we are for the sacrifices of ancestors. For we Americans sing

1 My country, 'tis of thee,

Sweet land of liberty,

Of thee I sing;

Land where my fathers died,

Land of the pilgrims' pride,

From ev'ry mountainside

Let freedom ring!

2 My native country, thee,

Land of the noble free,

Thy name I love;

I love thy rocks and rills,

Thy woods and templed hills;

My heart with rapture thrills,

Like that above.

3 Let music swell the breeze,

And ring from all the trees

Sweet freedom's song;

Let mortal tongues awake;

Let all that breathe partake;

Let rocks their silence break,

The sound prolong.

4 Our fathers' God, to thee,

Author of liberty,

To thee we sing;

Long may our land be bright

With freedom's holy light;

Protect us by thy might,

Great God, our King

See how the song connects together the land, liberty, our fathers, and our father’s God.

Our ancestors pledged their lives, fortunes, and sacred honor to secure liberty for themselves and their posterity. We are their posterity. A land of liberty was their gift to us.

Final

Now, to the final cause, the purpose of home. One purpose of home is the earthly perfecting of union between loved ones. The ground of this union is life together, but life together could be nomadic, or the group could be constantly on the move, such as the modern-day military family. Still, it remains the case that place is where that life together becomes imprinted; it’s where memories are lodged; and where all the good that endures is recognized, felt, and experienced as gift. The home perfects the house, and in so doing the home completes the family. Or, I should say, the family completes itself by home-making. Likewise, the homeland completes the nation. The Hebrews remained a people as they wandered in the desert. Yet they longed for and sought a homeland. No one would say that the Hebrews were a complete people, moving about with no fixed dwelling. They needed a home, and by God’s grace they got one—a place of their heritage.

The homeland is the place, as Edmund Burke said, where the nation exists as “a partnership not only between those who are living, but between those who are living, those who are dead, and those who are to be born.” You receive what your ancestors gifted to you, you live well in them, and you work with obligation for the unborn, that you might gift a glorious and godly nation to your children and grandchildren. See, home is not a matter of the present experience. Your existence comes from others, is with others, and is for others. But your existence is not from, with, or for humanity as such, but centrally for a particular people that stands across time and generations. To be bound to a homeland is to be bound to the people of that homeland.

So, the telos, the end, of home is the union of people and place—the fittingness of a way of life, of obligation and sacrifice, and of common sentiment fused with a built environment and landscape. In other words, to have a land of heritage.

But the supreme telos, the ultimate end of home, is the foreshadowing of that home to come. The eschaton, our heavenly home, does not destroy or eliminate home on earth, but rather assumes and directs it. Earthly home points to our heavenly home. This is why God designed us to be home-makers—to image on earth the promised heavenly home, lost by Adam and restored to us by the Last Adam.

The great church architect, Christopher Wren once said, “Architecture has its political use; public buildings being the ornament of a country; it establishes a nation, draws people and commerce; makes the people love their native country… Architecture aims at eternity.” Burke referred to a nation as an “eternal society.” Now, we know that there is no lasting city on earth. We could easily contradict Wren’s and Burke’s claim with true theology, if we analyze it with linear time, having a beginning and end. That is, time as quantity, a succession of moments.

But time in everyday life is more like duration; it is qualitative. It is continuous and flowing—an experience of interwoven past, present, and future. This is difficult to describe, so bear with me. Everything we perceive in experience has endured from the past and is under our concern for the future. We are always assuming the temporal endurance of the things around us, and we treat and relate to them as such. Indeed, we must do this to get on in the world. Taken to the level of the nation, we build and act for “our people”, not thinking of them as a succession of people but simply as ancestors and posterity…as a mutual partnership of a great society. A society composed of many dead and many to be born and yet all united to direct our lives now.

Certainly, on one level, we know that moth and rust destroy, that kingdoms rise and fall, that the things of this world are not everlasting. This is true. Nevertheless, our delight of home, stretching across generations, foreshadows that true eternal state of being, where God’s people are united together in Christ and at rest in the New Jerusalem forever. In our earthly home, there is a glimpse of eternity. I won’t call earthly home sacramental but it is close.

See the earthly home and the heavenly homes do not conflict. Indeed, being at home in this world is preparation for and even orients the people to that true and perfect home. The home on earth is an image of our heavenly home. Remember: We do not lose our humanity when we become Christian; rather, we become Christian human beings. We are still home-makers on earth on our way to a heavenly home prepared in advance for us.

In that much abused passage, Jeremiah 29:7, God tells his people to “seek the peace of the city” that they dwell in. First, notice that seeking earthly peace does not distract from eternal peace. It is not zero-sum, just as resting on Sunday does not take away from our eternal rest but rather points us to it. Second, what is earthly peace but a people who live in the good gifts of ancestors and prepare a good place for future loved ones? Isn’t peace having a place of shared loves that began with natural relations and civic friends that endure to the present, and are conserved for the future—a love stretching generations? Doesn’t this foreshadow our future home, where we join our spiritual forefathers and Christian progeny and together attain our eternal home?

The telos of home, therefore, is twofold—to bring union to people and place in this life, according to earthly principles, and to bring union of people and place in the life to come, according to heavenly principles. The former submits to the latter without being confounded and confused.

This is why our home—our house-as-home, our hometown, and our homeland—must be Christian. Not only does grace set nature into order, it points beyond nature itself to the promise of glory. Our household homes are Christian because they point in our activity and relations as something beyond itself in light of grace. Our homeland is (or ought to be) Christian, because it points in its national life to something above it. The lower is ordered to higher.

Conclusion — what now?

I hope that you can see, at least dimly, how the old pagan impulse to worship ancestors is fundamentally a good impulse, though misapplied. We do not worship ancestors or call upon their aid in prayer. Nor do we establish sacred shrines to evoke their blessings. Nevertheless, the union of people and place across time and generations is natural, good, and necessary for living well in this world. Indeed, it points us to a higher, eternal home.

Now, I’m sure that people are going to say that this is nationalistic romanticism. There certainly is an ideal in what I’ve stated here. But of course you must know the ideal in order to aim properly. We will likely hear people with million dollar homes and massive 401k’s, tweeting from their mediterranean cruise all about our “exile”—the sort of people who care about every homeland in the world, especially Israel, except their own.  But exile theology, as expressed today, simply expresses their own Western malaise and tiredness. But we are “exiles” not to human good and creation’s goodness but to the fallenness of the world. If home-maker is the sort of creature we are, if home is a universal human good, then neither grace nor the gospel destroys or undermines it. Rather, grace affirms it, orders it, and perfects it. Loving your neighbor, even those who bear your likeness, means making a home together—a Christian home.

On coming back to the shire, seeing it in a sorry state, Sam said, “This is worse than Mordor!”“Much worse in a way. It comes home to you, as they say; because it is home, and you remember it before it was all ruined.” Sam didn’t have a cold, weak heart, despite his harrowing journey into darkness. His heart was full on home, and it crushed him to see what his home had become in his absence. But did he devise a theology or philosophy to tolerate it, or even to glory in its desecration? Did he throw up his hands and say, “well, this is divine judgment; we have to just take it.” No, he acted. With his friends—Merry and Pippin—he fought and won in the Battle of Bywater. And afterwards, they replanted and healed the lands, and Sam became the mayor of the Shire.

In our day, our homeland—gifted to us in liberty from our ancestors—lies in ruin. The party of Saruman, with their reckless hate, have spoiled and polluted it. But we can put safety third and fight back. The foreigners, flying their foreign flags must go back. All illegal immigrants must go back. All H1Bs must go back. Send them all home, where their hearts will always reside. Third-world immigration must cease immediately. Dual-citizenship must be banned, as well as birthright citizenship. Businesses who hire foreigners must be punished or shutdown. Pornography, abortion, and gay marriage must be eradicated. There’s hope for all this, as the New Right makes their ascendance.

As I said earlier, “home” simply happens, without thinking much about it. But in our time of rapid change and hostility and demographic change, home requires conscious effort. That is, we must move to a more authentic mode of being in which home is made by conscious effort. This is, in a way, unnatural; it shouldn’t be this way. But our time calls for it. We will lose our home without it. We need the mundane and ordinary, but more than that; we need the extraordinary.

It is not enough to deport and tear down the smut. We must replant, replenish, and renew, and this takes both mechanical and literary arts. We must, through mutual support, seek excellence in all areas of life. We need poets, novelists, essayists, musicians, academics, architects, lawyers, and statesmen. We need wealthy patrons to fund the longterm pursuit excellence in various institutions. We need some people to be loud and others to quietly build.

We Protestants must realize that there is much more to politics than opposing abortion or posting videos of yourself opposing abortion. I know that this energizes base and the evangelical voting bloc. But there’s a reason why even in the conservative movement that Roman Catholics dominate the institutions. Why is there no evangelical on the Supreme Court? Why is nearly every well-known conservative institution dominated by Roman Catholics? There are many reasons, but one reason is that Protestant politics has been reduced largely to populist appeal. We lack elites, because everything is populism. Even those with fancy degrees orient themselves to the many. We need something more. We need elite formation, the sort of people who can take seriously the complexity and challenges of political life and all its various aspects. We do need the sound-bite maker and the guy who “owns the abortionists and atheists” on YouTube. But we also need those who will stick to their principles and know the institutions, the laws, and the procedures of government. We need an intellectual class. Further, we need an intellectual ethos that allows one to take seriously the Western tradition beyond the theological innovations after World War II, and more importantly an ethos that supports each other, to see that fellow Protestants retake ownership of a Protestant country. That should be our public identity, Protestants renewing a Protestant country.

We hear a lot about “envy” today. True, there is a fine line between envy and righteous anger over injustice. I thinks there’s a lot more indignation on our side than envy. But regardless of whatever motivates these things, let’s channel it to emulation. Emulate the successful. Find those people who have achieved something great; study them; and follow their example. Social media so often distracts us away from emulation and into spending our days denouncing injustice or some evil. But we should practice the good; emulate the wise and successful. Emulate even our enemies, not to their evil ends, nor in their evil means, but in those good or morally indifferent practices that brought them success.

Lastly, let me speak to families. The love of homeland begins at home. Listen to Johann Herder:

What first invigorates us in the fatherland is not the earth beneath our feet but the air we breathe, the father’s hands that hold us, the mother’s breast that feeds us, the sun we see, the siblings we play with, and the friendly natures that are good for us. Our first fatherland, therefore, is the father’s house, a father’s field, family. It is in this small society that the first and foremost friends of the fatherland live, as in an idyllic circle; the land of our early youth lives by just such idylls. Let the soil or climate be what it may: the soul yearns to return there…It was there that we heard and understood the first tones of love; it was there that we committed ourselves to friendship for the first time and felt the first buds of tender attraction between the sexes.

We saw the sun, the moon, the sky, the spring with its trees, blossoms, and fruit that were then so sweet to us. The course of all the world was displayed for us; we saw the seasons roll along, we struggled with dangers, with grief and joy—we grew into the world like summer and winter, as it were. These impressions, moral and physical, remain engraved upon our imagination; the tree’s tender bark received them, and if they are not eradicated by force they will die only with the tree itself.

We’ve all heard that citizenship begins at home. But let me conclude by saying that the love of homeland begins at home. This is where our children learn our folk stories, the lives of great men, the symbols, and the great events of our people. It’s where they learn the birds, the trees; the labors of keeping home; the sacrifices for those dear to us; and the practices and sentiment of patriotism. And it’s where they first learn to praise God for the wonderful gift of home. Let us remember that great calling, from God and from our ancestors, that we would pass down a home for our children and for our grandchildren.

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