UNDERSTANDING HOME

 

                   UNDERSTANDING HOME

                                    Fr. Mervyn Carapiet

Home. It is a magical word that resonates with all of us. Even those from broken homes, or homes that no longer exist, there is still something in the idea that is sought after. Home is that place where we are meant to be safe, nurtured, known for who we are, to freely live and love.

Home’s universal appeal populates culture. Take Me Home, Country Road, Home on the Range and I’ll Be Home for Christmas are a few songs that invoke the theme. Movies and literature end happily with protagonists, like Odysseus, finally going home. The entire goal of the American pass-time of baseball is to be safe at home. YouTube videos of joyful homecomings fill up our social media feeds and we spend a lot of money constructing and decorating our own houses, turning them into Home Sweet Home.

Our homes are the great theatre where the drama of our lives unfolds, as G.K. Chesterton eloquently said:

“The place where babies are born, where men die, where the drama of mortal life is acted, is not an office or a shop or a bureau. It is something much smaller in size and much larger in scope. And while nobody would be such a fool as to pretend that it is the only place where people should work, or even the only place where women should work, it has a character of unity and universality that is not found in any of the fragmentary experiences of the division of labour.”

Home, by its nature, foreshadows heaven. Pope Saint John Paul II’s final words in this life were “Let me go to the house of the Father.” He wanted to go home – to the home that all of us are willed by God to go to, even if he allows our own will to lead us somewhere else. The home is sometimes described as a “domestic church”, which, to be cautious, does not excuse home birds from attending Sunday Mass in church!

 

Feminism hasn’t led women to happiness, just to more searching, grasping, transitioning, with the next best thing around the corner. What they don’t know is that no career, string of lovers, exotic trips to Bali, or Louis Vuitton handbags will fill this gap.

What happens, then, when you have generations of people that have wilfully killed their own children through abortion? The Medievals were against abortion because it takes an innocent life, but also because they knew it was mortally damaging to the human soul. It isn’t just a child that dies in an abortion, but something in the mother and the father dies as well.

As St. Thomas Aquinas said, bonum est diffusivum sui, “the good spreads itself out”. The opposite is also true: evil spreads itself out. This grave evil has reached into every area of familial life.

This doesn’t absolve them of their crimes, but at least helps us to understand how those entrusted with the care of so many souls could respond with gross malfeasance. When some women can view the destruction of their children as a social rite of passage to join the “sisterhood,” it isn’t too far of a leap to see that bishops could abandon their spiritual children to join the “brotherhood.”

“There are two ways of getting home,” Chesterton explained, “One of them is to stay there. The other is to walk round the whole world till we come back to the same place.”

We are a culture that needs to reclaim the home, having looked the world over for happiness. Radical feminists, although they have looked high and low, still have “that ache that cannot be defined.” Their restless hearts are a God ache, which will remain until they make their way back Home again.