Life is a symphony and the heart of that symphony is the human household. There are only two valid roles for us to play as men and women. The first is to build a household or a home. The second is to support those who are building households or homes.
There has never been a golden age, but civilized society is at its most civil when it breathes through the lungs of the household.
Men moving out of the home for the industrial revolution destabilized every element of human society. We are lost until we return home.
The practical object of our thinking, therefore, should be driven by the question, How can we build up a network of independent households, each of which is a member of a shared community and gives itself to the life of the wider community.
Sources of wisdom are available for us when we seek this end. For example, the Greeks give us Homer, the Romans, Virgil, and the scriptures the Old and New Covenants.
Honor your father and your mother, the covenant instructed, that it may be well with you and you may live long in the land that the Lord is giving you.
Reverence is the heart of civility and only the home can cultivate a rightly ordered, balanced, integrated reverence. But the vision I am describing means, by the home, a place where the family works together to develop an internal economy (a Greek word which literally means “household customs” or “laws of the home” and has as its object the well-being of the household) that sustains practical freedom (as opposed to the abstract freedoms our contemporaries worship), pursues the ideal of self-sufficiency with a mind to blessing rather than depending on neighbors, and works together rather than engaging in the sibling and marital rivalries that characterize and age driven by the anxiety of the hustle.
I wonder if it is not the greatest shame in human history that contemporary man has turned its back on the household as an obstacle to success.
Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me the sinner.
Related articles
