There are many places of power in the world: the Pentagon, the Kremlin, the Vatican. Yet the most powerful place of all barely draws attention to itself. This is the family home. One evening, I remember going for a walk. As I came home, the light was ebbing slowly. As the black tide of night was filling the valley, lights began to come on in the houses. The little lights seemed so fragile against the onrush of the night. This has always remained with me as an image of the vulnerability of human presence against the darkness of anonymity. Anywhere the tenderness gathers itself, life often seems to assemble in threat about its nest. This is why all the major thresholds in human life have blessing structures around them in the religious traditions: birth, initiation, illness, marriage, and death. There is a fragility and pathos in light when darkness encircles it. When you drive through a village at evening and the lights come on before the curtains are drawn, for a second you are allowed a glimpse into individual homes. The inhabitants become visible as they move about or sit down together to dinner. Within these walls a unique set of lives is framed and formed. Behind the guise of normal interaction, they are having a huge influence on the hearts and minds of each other. While the home may be a powerful cradle influencing mind and personality, the lack of home is also a huge influence. So many children in poverty-stricken areas are homeless. Some are in institutional care. Imagine how difficult it must be for these little vulnerable ones to develop minds and hearts where they can rest and feel the warmth and shelter of self-belonging. Being deprived of intimate shelter at such a crucial time must cast a lonesome shadow over their future struggle to belong within society.
The family is the most powerful structure of human belonging in the world. Within the limited compass of the home, a wide range of energies is simultaneously awakening. Limited space inevitably forces form. Their belonging together offers an outer unity to the world. In the family, the emergence of individuality is complex and always accompanied by either a latent or explicit struggle between the different family members. Later in life, when one begins to explore one’s identity, it is surprising to learn how the roots of one’s personality inevitably lead back to the unsuspecting home. The sources of your potential and the secrets of your blindness lie concealed there. The family is the first place where you stretch and test your essence. A family is not a monument to an extended egotism; it must be pervious, open in communication with the larger world. However, it is never a clear space where you can move as you wish. Family is a warm but cluttered space. Each family member must earn his own room in competition with the others. Yet amidst the cut and thrust of life, especially when times are difficult, it is great to know that you have your family.
A home is a place where a set of different destinies begin to articulate and define themselves. It is the cradle of one’s future. Home is the place where the stranger arrives, the place where you see things for the first time. Here you first begin to know that you have a body. You come to know smell, touch, and hearing. Home is the place where your infant senses are fostered. You have been on a long journey; now you settle and learn to recognize things. Here you learn how to cry and begin to notice how the cry and the smile get you attention. Home is where you first notice others, where you first sense that you are separate and different. It is the place where you first recognize your own gender. The fascinating thing about home is how it functions, without the superintendence of consciousness, yet different gifts are being quietly received by each member of the family. Gifts that will take a full lifetime to unwrap and recognize.
The word “home” has a wonderful resonance. Home is where you belong. It is your shelter and place of rest, the place where you can be yourself. Nature offers wonderful images of home. It is fascinating in springtime to watch the birds build their nests. They gather the twigs and weave them into a nest. The floor and walls of the nest are padded with wool, moss, or fur. In the wall of a shed near my house, a swallow returns from Africa every year and finds her way back into the opening between the same two stones under the side wall. There she builds her nest and hatches out her young. No journey is too long when you are coming home. In Irish we say, “Níl aon tinnteán mar do thinnteán féin,” i.e., There is no hearth like the hearth at home.
