Making a House a Home (September 17, 2006 by James Montgomery Jackson)
(at the occasion of our first service in our new meeting house)
Here we are in our new Meeting House. Some of us think of this place as a church, but others are put off by the word. Next Sunday Mike Gorski will host the Adult Forum on “Creating Community in Congregation: Church Talk.” In the meantime, I’ll go with our habit and call this building our house. To me the real question isn’t Meeting House versus church – they are both just labels. To me the real question is how we make this place our home.
A definition of home I have often heard is “Home is where you hang your hat.” Used to be when I had a full head of hair I never wore a hat, which perhaps implied I never had a home. Now between the vanished hair on the top of my head and the vanishing ozone layer, I’m forced to wear a hat almost always and when I do, I’m forced to look for a place to hang the darn thing. In case you haven’t guessed by now, I haven’t been too fond of the “home is where you hang your hat” philosophy.
It does say something positive about being comfortable with yourself wherever you are. Nothing wrong with that. It’s a very Zen approach to the question. You are who you are, regardless of where you are and your current home is the place you are in. But for me it trivializes the process of making a place special, and I need special places. I’m just made that way. I try to learn from the Zen approach, but with respect to a home, it comes out as trivial as the Crosby, Stills and Nash song that proclaims one should “Love the one you’re with.”
I have some experience in making places into my home. I needed to take off both shoes to count up the number of places I have lived since I left home for college in the fall of 1968. Not counting temporary residences, and innumerable hotel rooms while traveling for business, I have had fourteen homes in the past and have two now: our camp on Shank Lake in northern Iron County and a condo in Northern Kentucky, just south of Cincinnati. These residences covered seven states.
Okay, okay. I never claimed to be stable. With so many moves, I lost the ability to be rooted to an area, to deeply know it. The longest stay in one place was about ten years. The shortest less than a year. These homes have ranged from a roach-infested efficiency in Albany, New York, to first owner abodes, to a house built in 1795. Square-footage ranged from 400 to 4,000. I provide all these statistics because they are the kinds of questions we ask each other and have everything to do about the house aspect of the abode and essentially nothing to do about the home aspect.
Each time I moved from one home to another there were certain processes I needed to follow. First was making the decision to move. Sometimes it seemed as though it was forced – a job transfer for example – and yet when I look at friends and associates, I realize they made different choices. They refused the transfer or found a new job so they did not move. So the first thing about making a new place a home is recognizing I wanted to move. My decision was certainly influenced by others, but no one ever forced me to move.
Staying in one place for any period of time provides the opportunity to accumulate stuff – stuff that should never have been acquired; stuff that should have found a better place to be; excess stuff. Moving provides the opportunity to determine which possessions should be retained and which recycled.
When I was young, this was easy. I had little and what I had, I figured I needed to retain. Most of my moves while I was working were paid for by my employer, and that short-circuits the process of weeding out stuff. I come from good New England stock – you’ve seen the barns – each generation builds an extension to hold their stuff; nothing is ever thrown away because “you just never know when you may need it…” Talk about excess baggage. I have learned that one of the things that makes a house a home is keeping only those things that I still need and want. Because of the “someone else is paying for this move” scenario, it took me a long time to learn this.
That’s actually not true. I knew it all along and would joke about “needing to have a place large enough to store my books.” That’s still a tough one for me. Jan and I keep accumulating books and although I have managed to throw away several hundred professional books, I still find it hard to let a book out of my grasp – even when I didn’t really like it and never plan to read it again – you never know when…
So lesson one is that moving is a good time to determine what possessions are important to making the house a home and which should find new homes of their own. We’ve done that step already. I use the collective we, because this part of us actually wasn’t involved – which was probably a good thing if the rest of the collective we wanted to discard a book or two.
Lesson number two is that I have never done lesson number one exactly correctly and when I come to unpacking at the new location, I am struck by some of the things I have brought along. Despite my New England ancestors whispering in my ear that I must subconsciously know I might need it later for something, there is a second opportunity that should not be overlooked for weeding out possessions. We still have time before the rummage sale to change our minds.
Something else often happens in the packing/unpacking process. I discover a true treasure that has been buried away. Once it was an old photo album I had forgotten about. I had to stop what I was doing and relive those trips. Reminders of times past are often triggers for us as individuals, providing windows into what is important to us. But sometimes, after revisiting the past we know we can now let it go. There is something wonderful about realizing all those self-help books no longer have any call on your psyche.
Moving in is a time of discovery in more ways than refinding stuff that had been packed away. That’s when you discover that any rational person would have designed the house with an electrical plug right there – and the nearest one is eight feet away – what were they thinking? The wall that was just the right length to store the bookcases would still be perfect if the bookcases were exact rectangles with no space between them and if I ripped out the floor molding. How do you get a queen-sized box springs up a staircase with a tight turn at the landing? Who would have thought the back door was an inch smaller than standard? Such discoveries have often forced me to rethink how I planned on using the rooms, how to place the furniture. Invariably, I devised a solution and without fail after a short period of time I had forgotten whatever my original plan might have been.
Is any of this the house’s fault? No. Does any of it prevent the house from becoming a home? No. And that’s the third lesson. The place is what it is, regardless of what I thought I bought or rented. I am who I am regardless of its idiosycrincies. If I am to make the house my home, I need to put behind me any peculiarities I hadn’t anticipated. Point of fact, they may just be the things that help me grow in my new home.
Have you noticed that whoever was in a place before you never has your sense of decorating style? I’m a let the light in, minimal window treatments kind of guy. As for color, I’d rather have some than not, but decorating is pretty much a ten-letter word. Fortunately, Jan has a good sense for these things and can figure out where to start with color schemes, and so forth. Once she gets us close, I can actually make some suggestions for subtle changes that seem to work. For real estate people the mantra is often “light is right.”
I say let there be color.
But whose color? When my kids were old enough, we let them choose their own room color. Some were not the shades I would have chosen, and certainly the wall decorations were not my style, but that wasn’t the point was it? They needed to feel comfortable in their new space. It was a small price to pay for helping them learn to make independent decisions.
It’s a little different for a congregation. Unlike making a family house into a home where there are only a few interested parties, here we have fifty members, a raft of kids, friends who worship with us and all those in the future who will cross our threshold. How do we possibly reflect the views of all these constituencies in deciding if the wall should be robin-egg blue or western bluebird blue or maybe not any blue at all?
Some of us have a sense of style and some of us don’t, but maybe think we do, and some of us are comfortable with whatever. How do we decide these things? Our fifth principle states we covenant to affirm and promote the right of conscience and the use of the democratic process within our congregations and in society at large. Does this mean we need to vote on every wall surface? Fortunately, no, but it does mean we need to provide opportunities for interested folks to have input.
We have some committees, we’ve elected a board. Help where we can, get out of the way when we can’t, and although I may prefer Paul Newman’s blue eyes blue, I’ve discovered it just doesn’t matter much in the end.
In church architecture, I have a preference for stone churches, beautiful stained glass windows (even if they show 11 disciples with halos or the state sponsored brutal murder of Jesus of Nazareth – it’s light I appreciate.) So this meeting house doesn’t exactly meet my preferences. I’ve learned my lesson. The sanctuary in my Cincinnati church has a roughened cement floor, mostly unadorned brick walls with a modern sculpture hanging from the ceiling near the front and a huge modern painting I don’t understand on the back wall. It is not warm; it is stark. My first impression was “Ick, how sterile.”
Of course I didn’t know about the symbolic lines on the floor marking the equinoxes and solstices. I didn’t know how the light could play upon the ceiling beams at the winter solstice making a shimmering not unlike the late afternoon light reflecting off my lake when there is just a slight breeze. In my first reaction, I didn’t appreciate that from one area of the church I could look out a window and see a marvelous spruce wave in the breezes. I didn’t realize mourning doves often nest in the window nooks. I had not yet heard the exquisite acoustics in the sanctuary. My first impression was “Ick, how sterile.”
And yet it has been my church home for thirteen years – longer than I have lived in any residence. How can that be?
It has nothing to do with the architecture, the texture or color of the walls, the member gifts hangings on the walls that I think tacky or the painting I’m sure my children could have done given no adult supervision and several buckets of paint.
It has everything to do with what happens when I walk in the door. I am greeted and greet people I have shared my life with. There are children I have watched grow from babies to teenagers, others from grammar school to adults with children of their own. Lives I have touched and who have touched mine.
It is the right action we take. How we treat each other: individual to individual. How we respond collectively to the world around us. It is our sharing at the Joys and Concerns.
When I think of making my individual house a home, it is mostly about making it a place I feel comfortable in; a place where I can restore my vitality. That is the big difference between making a residence a home and making the building that houses our congregation a home. Here, it’s not about me; it’s not about you; it’s all about us.
Last Sunday afternoon, we smudged the building, cleansing it of its past, providing a tabula rasa for our future. But as soon as we enter the building, we bring our past with us. Once again, I’ve proven my self wrong. For a church community, it is all about where I hang my hat – as long as we are hanging our hats together.
So, welcome to my home. Welcome to your home. Welcome to our home as we share this journey through life together. And I send this message to the universe: welcome to all those who will yet make this their home.
Now here’s the challenge I’ve given myself and the challenge I offer to each of you as a home-warming gift from you to you. Visualize the following: The year is 2016 and as part of a coming of age process for the youth of our congregation one of them interviews you and asks you the following question: tell me about the one special thing you did for the congregation in the first year after we moved here that gave you the most pleasure? You sit back in the chair and break into a wide grin – oh, you say, it was so great. Here’s what happened…
I leave it to each of you to fill in the details.