Busy at Home

• I’m reading the autobiography of G.K. Chesterton in which he speaks of his love for his family home, and the beauty and usefulness of ordinary domesticity. In the quote below he has just described his father’s creativity and craftsmanship in building a toy theatre for his children.

If my father had been some common millionaire owning a thousand mills that made cotton, or a million machines that made cocoa, how much smaller he would have seemed. And this experience has made me profoundly skeptical of all the modern talk about the necessary dullness of domesticity; and the degrading drudgery that only has to make puddings and pies. Only to make things! There is no greater thing to be said of God Himself than that He makes things. The manufacturer cannot even manufacture things; he can only pay to have them manufactured. In the same way I am now incurably afflicted with a faint smile, when I hear a crowd of frivolous people, who could not make anything to save their lives, talking about the inevitable narrowness and stuffiness of the Victorian home.

• One of the reasons I found this fascinating was Chesterton died in the 1930s, meaning the attack on home-life must have begun decades before then. In America, we generally associate the belittling of domesticity with what people call “second wave” feminism (1960s), but Chesterton makes me realize it started much earlier. Personally, I’m not sure it’s about feminism at all, but more the result of people whose memories of home and childhood are filled with misery, the natural result being a disparaging of home-life.

• For me, Chesterton’s reflections cast a new light on passages like Titus 2:3 “Older women likewise are to be reverent in behavior, not slanderers or slaves to much wine. They are to teach what is good, and so train the young women to love their husbands and children, to be self-controlled, pure, working at home…” For decades now, those verses and others have been subject to endless snark. But in God’s economy, a home has always been, or has been intended to be, a haven and refuge where the love and grace of God are passed from generation to generation. Home is a place of nurture, or what people would now call “empowerment,” except it’s not really about power. In that love and grace, we have freedom to create, freedom to fail and start again, freedom to make things without the pressure of having to sell them, or be graded on them. All this is possible because the premise of a family is love, not merit, just as love is the premise of the household of faith.

• So as we head into the holidays, a season of creating and making, you can rejoice in domesticity (a word that means “belonging to the household”). For “you are no longer strangers and aliens, but you are fellow citizens with the saints and members of the household of God” (Eph 2:19).