Very powerful read from the book "Beyond Homelessness" that describes what we are accomplishing with our Habitat on Wheels (www.mlfnow.org/how) initiative. Housing First has been our mantra but today we are coining a new term "Community First!". To download the article to read later click here Download Eight Characteristics of Home.
Eight Characteristics of Home
What is home? What does it mean to be at home? What is it that homeless people do not have that renders them homeless? And how would the jet-setting global consumer, the postmodern nomad, recognize home if she ever found one? Acknowledging the dangers inherent in any kind of phenomenological description of such a clearly constructed reality as “home,” and not wishing to fall prey to either the Scylla of constructivism or the Charybdis of essentialism, we nonetheless need to reflect on the basic phenomenological contours of what might count as “home.” At the risk of sounding overly schematized, we offer eight characteristics of home.
First, home is a place of permanence. To be “at home” somewhere is more than simply having a place to stay. We sometimes stay in motels or hotels, perhaps even for relatively long periods of time; but we typically do not consider or call such places home, because motels and hotels signify transience and unfamiliarity, while home is a place of permanence and familiarity. No matter how long we have been there, we are always guests in motels. Likewise, a community of squatters under a bridge may have some semblance of shelter; but the insecurity of that environment and the lack of any lasting tenure in that space (not to mention its inhospitable character) make homemaking, in any meaningful send of the word, impossible. Thus, while shelter may be necessary for the experience of home, shelter is not sufficient.
Home, by contrast, signifies a certain degree of spatial permanence, an enduring presence or residence. In a speed-bound culture, every highly mobile person is a victim of at least some form of homelessness because there is no time to foster a sense of enduring emplacement. Indeed, even traditionally nomadic peoples do not live in a world of sudden displacements; they, too, function within a context of a permanently sheltering structure of tribe and place. Remove an aboriginal child from his tribe, strip the people of their traplines, transport them to a different landscape, and you will render them homeless.
Second, a home is a dwelling place. A home is not just a place of permanence, for home is not the same as house. “The notion of dwelling,” says Susan Saegert, “highlights the contrast between house and home.” The common expression “make a house a home” points to an important difference between house and home. A house is a domicile, while a home is a dwelling. A house is a building, whereas a home is an adobe. A house is made of brick or wood or sod or thatch; a home is made of memories and stories and relationships. A house is space devoid of a deep meaning, while a home is a place filled with psychological resonance and social significance. A house is a space of residence, while a home is a place of (in)dwelling.
Therefore, while houses can be bought and sold on the open market, homes can be neither bought nor sold. A home is not a commodity and thus cannot be commodified. Kimberly Dovey says: “Home is a relationship that is created and evolved over time; it is not consumed like the products of economic process. The house is a tool for the achievement of the experience of home.” This is why indigenous Hawaiians have advocated for a richer approach to homelessness than shelters and public housing, something called ‘ohana housing, which seems somewhat akin to the New Zealand Maori notion of the marai, composed of people “connected by ties of love and loyalty, duty and obligation.” And ‘ohana housing attempts to engender such communal relatedness by recalling “that ‘home’ is more than a roof over one’s head and ‘residing’ more than a matter of having a place in which to eat and sleep.” So a dwelling is more than a building; home is more than house.
Third, home is a storied place. Homemaking transforms space into place. Certain practices turn spaces without stories into narratively formed places. They endow a place with meaning. Brueggemann argues: “Place is space which has historical meanings, where some things have happened which are now remembered and which provide continuity and identity which are now remembered and which provide continuity and identity across generations. Place is space in which important words have been spoken which have established identity, defined vocation, and envisioned destiny.” A house becomes a home when it is transformed by memory-shaped meaning into a place of identity, connectedness, order and care.
We could say that careful and protective dwelling is itself always rooted in and directed by those historical meanings that made this space into the dwelling place of being-at-home. In other words, the boundaries of homemaking are narratively formed. John Berger says: “The mortar which holds the impoverished ‘home’ together- even for a child- is memory.... To the underprivileged, home is represented, not by a house, but by a set of practices… Home is no longer a dwelling but the untold story of a life being lived.”
Some, perhaps many, of the meaning-making practices and stories have to do with rituals. According to David Saile, rituals transform “inert physical and spatial fabric into living, participating, and richly experienced home places,” and in so doing, “not only is the physical environment transformed but so too are the human participants and their relationships with the changed place.” Housebuilding and housewarming, spring cleaning and Thanksgiving dinner, Easter and Christmas, births and birthdays, weddings and funerals - all of these events, with their ritual practices, generate stories and thus provide the meanings that make a house a home. Without stories, without particular memories, there is neither home nor identity. Once we have forgotten the stories, there is no home to return to, because there is no place, or even potential place, that could be shaped by those stories. Houses become homes when they embody the stories of the people who have made these spaces into places of significance, meaning, and memory.
Fourth, home is a safe resting place. In contrast to a war zone, a site of danger and fear, home is a refuge, an asylum of safety and security. Home is where one can be relaxed and at ease rather than tense and anxious. Saile says that home is “a secure and familiar base from which people explore their world, physically and psychologically, and to which they return for rest, regeneration, and a sends of self-identity.” Edith Wyschogrod says that the metaphor of home as bed or lodging “suggest that home is a milieu of safety, that at home one can drop one’s wariness, allow oneself to fall asleep.” Or, as Bruce Cockburn sings, “Make me a bed of fond memories/Make me to lie down with a smile.” Home is a place constructed in such a way that we are safe to rest.
And beyond our present nomadic restlessness, home can be a place of “enough” of satisfaction, of peace. In stark contrast to the insatiable activity of our consuming culture, at home we can find Sabbath rest and thus cultivate contentment in place of envy, generosity rather than greed, moderation in contrast to overconsumption. And when a space becomes a dwelling place of homemaking, it is not viewed as an anxious achievement, but received as a gift. Gratitude not privilege should mark those who inhabit a home.
Heidegger is instructive when he notes that to dwell is “to be set at peace.” Like the biblical term shallow, to be at peace is to dwell in a particular place in a way that respects the integrity of others. Not held captive by what others think or driven by the need to polish our own self-image, we are not only free to be ourselves but also to let others be themselves. In so doing, we can know and truly be known. A home is a place of vulnerability and trust. In short, the dwelling that is home is a place of safety and rest.
Fifth, home is a place of hospitality. If homes are to resist the temptation to become self-enclosed fortresses- that is, if homes are to have windows and doors that are open- then they must be sites of hospitality. In a fortress the boundaries are high and thick and tightly secure; everyone is a stranger, and there is no room for others. In a hospitable home, by contrast, the boundaries are low and thin and loose; few are strangers there, and there is always room for others. A fortress of hoarding possessiveness versus a home of openhanded hospitality. In this sense, home is a kind of hospice, a welcoming and caring abode for those- that is, all of us- who are terminally ill.
Such hospitality was at the heart of Dorothy Day’s vision for the Catholic Worker Communities. Day was dependant for her views on the philosopher Emmanuel Mounier, who argued that property was an extension of the body of a human being. In capitalist societies, however, “the tendency is for property (or place) to be used simply as the physical extension of one’s sphere of control,” so that “it becomes a protective shell, making oneself less vulnerable to the intrusion of the world.” Mounier notice that, “by using property (or space) in a protective, defensive manner, one becomes unavailable to the outside world. His property insulates and isolates him.” In contrast to such attempts at insulation and isolation, Rosemary Haughton emphasizes that “hospitality means a letting go of certainty and control- and paradoxically it’s only this letting go that allows that richness of growth and change that makes real and not pretended continuity possible.” In other words, hospitality is what constitutes home as home yet keeps home open, keeps the boundaries suffused with welcome and protection, not exclusion.
Sixth, home is a place of embodied inhabitation. This trait assumes that there is a distinction between a temporary occupant and a permanent inhabitant, between merely living in a place and becoming rooted in a particular place, by virtue of intimate knowledge and care. David Orr perceptively describes this important distinction between residing and dwelling, paying particular attention to matters of ecology:
The resident is a temporary and rootless occupant who mostly needs to know where the banks and stores are in order to plug in. The inhabitant ad the particular habitat cannot be separated without doing violence to both…. To reside is to live as a transient and as a stranger to one’s place, and inevitably to some part of the self. The inhabitant and place mutually shape each other.
Elsewhere, Orr expands on this distinction:
A resident is a temporary occupant, putting down few roots and investing little, knowing little, and perhaps caring little for the immediate locale beyond its ability to gratify…. The inhabitant, by contrast, “dwells” as Illich puts it, in an intimate, organic, and mutually nurturing relationship with a place. Good inhabitance is an art requiring detailed knowledge of a place, the capacity for observation, and a sends of care and rootedness.
Thus, while residents require only “cash and a map,” inhabitants “bear the marks of their places,” and when uprooted they get homesick. Inhabitants know and treasure what is homemade, homegrown, and homespun. For the inhabitant, there is a place of dwelling where one finds identity, from which one derives meaning, and apart from which one feels a bit lost and lonely.
Inhabitation is a matter of being, as Edward Casey puts it, “not merely at our destination but fully in it.” We live not as strangers to our place, but fully in our place as knowledgeable and caring dwellers. Home, we have said, requires care and cultivation, but that care and cultivation is always located in a particular place. So inhabitation requires attention to one’s habitat, and to one’s nonhuman neighbors as well. Inhabitation requires intimacy with and love for our coinhabitants, for only then are we at home in that place. Thus the place itself functions as another boundary for homemaking. We should note that inhabitation is a two-way street. We not only shape a place according to our own home-making ways, but we are shaped by the places we inhabit. Kimberly Dovey observes: “We not only give a sense of identity to the place we call home, but we also draw our identity from the place.”
Seventh, home is a place of orientation. To elucidate this meaning of home, we might find it helpful to reflect on homesickness. What is it to be homesick? Think of children away from home, perhaps at a summer camp. Or recall your first week or two at college. Or the months your lived in a foreign country. As is often the case with children, homesickness can even have physical symptoms- upset stomach, loss of appetite, insomnia. Common to almost all such experiences is a kind of disorientation. When we are homesick, we feel emotionally out of sorts and out of kilter. We get lost, turned around, or mixed up more quickly and easily. Familiar things- places, customs, languages- are now unfamiliar. The habitual ease with which we once negotiated much of everyday life is gone: When does the mail come? Where do I get the car repaired? How do I make a long-distance call? Because home functions as a point of orientation around which our world is rendered meaningful, we no longer feel “at home.” A geography of home consists of more than the lay of the land, and our unique topography involves more than merely our topos as a point on a map, important as that is.
In other words, home provides order and direction to our lives. It functions, as Eliade as put it, as an axis mundi for life. Home is the axis of the world, the point of orientation, around which all else makes sense. Dovey likewise describes home via the ordering of environmental experience and behavior: “Being at home is a mode of being whereby we are oriented within a spatial, temporal and sociocultural order that we understand.” Home is the center of our spatial world, the ordering memory of the past, and the taken-for-grantedness of everyday practices and discourse.
For Edward Relph, this idea of orientation is connected to the notion of “roots”: “To have roots in a place is to have secure point from which to look out on the world, a firm grasp of one’s own position in the order of things, and a significant spiritual and psychological attachment to somewhere in particular.” Writing in the aftermath of World War II, the great French mystic Simone Weil describes the importance of roots:
To be rooted is perhaps the most important and least recognized need of the human soul. It is one of the hardest to define. A human being has roots by virtue of his real, active, and natural participation in the life of a community which preserves in living shape certain particular treasures of the past and certain particular expectations for the future.
For Weil, this sense of rootedness is brought about, in part, by place. Home is a rooted place from which we can orient ourselves, get our bearings, and find direction. Home provides an anchor that prevents us from being set adrift amidst the flow. Like turtles instinctively returning to their place of birth or salmon seeking their spawning grounds, we “home in” on home.
Eighth and last, home is a place of affiliation and belonging. Think of the resonances of home team, hometown, and homeland. Home is where we find our place and gain our identity. Just ask any long-suffering Chicago Cubs fan or proud Torontonian or persecuted Palestinian. Not only a point of orientation, home is a locus of recognition and acceptance. Jürgen Moltmann puts it this way: “I am ‘at home’ where people know me, and where I find recognition without having to struggle for it.” When we are homesick, we long for the familiar and familial bonds of affection derived from membership in our clan or group. Even when those bonds of affection are strained or absent, we nonetheless find ourselves returning to that place where we know we will find refuge. Recall Robert Frost’s famous line from “Death of the Fired Man”: “Home is the place where, when you have to go there, they have to take you in.” That is, home is where you are taken in, at the very minimum, even if neither you nor your family find the prospect pleasant. More positively, as Frederick Buechner puts it, home is “a place where you feel you belong, and which in some sense belongs to you.” As Nicholas Wolterstorff poignantly observes, reflecting on the untimely death of his twenty-five-year-old son: “When someone loved leaves home, home becomes mere house.”
Related to the experience of homesickness is that of homecoming. In times of war, when soldiers return from places of conflict, we often speak of their homecoming. Many American high schools and colleges have “homecoming” for their graduates, usually once a year. And we often refer to Christmas as a time of homecoming for family members who now live far away. In these instances, our language reveals that home has to do not primarily with space but with indwelt and intimate place. The home to which we, the soldiers or graduates or family, come when we participate in a homecoming is a webbed network of relationships and shared stories and memories that may or may not be fixed to a particular location. For example, while a college homecoming almost always involves visiting the exiting alma mater, a return home to visit parents at Christmas may not mean stepping inside the old house. Indeed, returning “home” when your parents’ home is no longer the house you grew up in is often a strange and unsettling experience: “this new house (or apartment) they have simply does not feel like home. And yet it is a homecoming. Despite the different location, it is still a place peculiarly shaped according to the life projects and unique identity of your family. After all, your picture still hands on the wall or sits atop the piano.
Notice that in homemaking there is a process of appropriation in which the place and the relationships within that place are taken as one’s own. And this appropriation goes both ways. The place somehow belongs to us, and yet we belong to the place. We belong to the web of interconnected relationships that make up the place, and yet they belong to us. And so again, there are boundaries to be erected and respected: to belong here not to belong elsewhere. To be on the inside of this home necessarily entails that others are one the outside of this home, those who do not belong at all or in the same way.
In short, home is a place of belonging, of recognition and acceptance rather than disdain and rejection. At home we feel included, we belong, and we have friends. When we are not “at home,” we feel like outcasts, are plentitude of healthy relationships, while outside the home- or in a dysfunctional home- we often experience a poverty of relationships.
What insights has this phenomenology given us? First, home is a place of permanence. Whether connected to a stable location or not, home signifies what endures over against what is transient. At home we are host, not guest. Second, home is a dwelling place. Saturated with meaning, home is no mere domicile. We are at ease at home because we know the way around, we know the family customs, the quirks and the jokes- the “rules of the house.” Third, home is a storied place. A home is a dwelling made familiar and particular by the stories that have shaped it. At home, the stories we remember recall our common past and infuse our hoped-for future. Fourth, home is a safe resting place. Home is a berth where we are secure and at rest because of the mutual respect everyone has for the integrity of the inhabitants. Fifth, home is a place of hospitality. At home, we take family in; ideally, we also welcome the stranger because we are at ease, without fear. Sixth, home is what we inhabit. More than merely where we reside, ecologically understood, home is our habitat, and as such, it includes our nonhuman neighbors. Home roots us in the sights, smells and sounds of a particular piece of earth. Seventh, home is a point of orientation. From home our world is made meaningful. Away from home we become homesick. Eighth, home is a place of affiliation and belonging. Home is, minimally, where they have to take us in, like it or not. Ideally, it is where we are loved and cherished even though we are known. Home is where we have a shot at being forgiven. Barbara Kingsolver just about covers it all when she exclaims:
I’ve spent hundreds of pages, even whole novels, trying to explain what home means to me. Sometimes I think that is the only thing I ever write about. Home is a place, geography, and psyche; it’s a matter of survival and safety, a condition of attachment and self-definition. It’s where you learn from your parents and repeat to your children all the stories of what it means to belong to the place and people of your ken.
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