Home. Perhaps few words are as paradoxical. It contains within itself our sense of origin as well as our longing for an ultimate destination, a realized future (in both the context of this world and the next). Home-seeking, home-longing is that desire T.S. Eliot describes as the hope of knowing and being known, of ‘arriv[ing] where we started / And know[ing] the place for the first time.’ Home is a hard-won space but is also so easily taken for granted. It’s meant to be the safest place but is often the one most threatened (from forces within and without). 

In Biblical, psychological, and theological accounts of human experience, the idea of the home continually (re)surfaces as one of the key identity markers and makers. Christ’s parables, for instance, frequently feature homes to represent the drama and implication of the soul’s choices. Across cultures and historical contexts, homes are used as architectural metaphors for the spiritual life.

In Mere Christianity, for example, C.S. Lewis presents the home-under-renovation as a metaphor for the human soul becoming renewed by divine love. It’s worth quoting what Lewis says about this at some length: 

‘Imagine yourself as a living house,’ he writes. ‘God comes in to rebuild … At first, perhaps, you can understand what He is doing. He is getting the drains right and stopping the leaks in the roof and so on […] But presently He starts knocking the house about in a way that hurts abominably […] What on earth is He up to? The explanation is that He is building quite a different house from the one you thought of […] You thought you were being made into a decent little cottage: but He is building a palace. He intends to come and live in it Himself.’ 

The source of our renovatio  – our being made new –  is the presence of divine grace in our souls, of divine love moving, working, dwelling within us. Lewis’ fondness for using house and home imagery to consider the drama of the spiritual life continually crops up in his writings. His theological sense of the home is a significant shaping force and organizing feature of The Chronicles of Narnia. It is also repeatedly used throughout Screwtape Letters to discuss the dynamics of spiritual struggle, of the temptations and divine assistance we encounter in the most commonplace of scenarios, like work meetings, train stations or family conversations around the dinner table.

When it comes to appealing to the house as a metaphor for the soul, Lewis is of course mining from, and re-shaping, a rich aesthetic, Scriptural and theological tradition far preceding him. For instance, Augustine also uses architectural metaphor in The Confessions, and not only to articulate the nature of memory as a faculty of the soul. He also uses it to lay out a poetic theodicy, an accounting of the worth and painful beauty of human suffering when it is united with Christ’s. Near the outset of Book One, for instance, he describes the soul as a ‘house’ which ‘is too small’ for God to enter. He petitions God, saying: ‘make it more spacious for your coming. It lies in ruins: rebuild…’ Present within both Augustine’s and Lewis’ use of the house as a metaphor for the soul is a sustained and penetrating wondering at God’s desire to dwell among but also within us. 

It is no surprise, then, that the idea of the soul as a house is brought to a new pitch of profundity when we consider how poets and theologians alike have described the tabernacle, the house of the Eucharist, as the greatest home on earth. Many of them describe the Eucharist as the source and summit of existence, as that which makes us feel most at home in the world—precisely because in the reception of the Word-made-flesh we abide in God and he in us. 

George Herbert, for instance, in his poem ‘The Banquet’ resorts to a simple pattern of rhythms, cadences, and tender words in order to seek to express, at the levels of form and feeling, the mysterious splendour of the presence of God living in us. Directly addressing Christ in the Eucharist, Herbert says: ‘Welcome sweet and sacred cheer, / Welcome deare; / With me, in me, live and dwell: / For thy neatnesse passeth sight, / Thy delight / Passesth tongue to taste or tell.’ In a similar vein, Gerard Manley Hopkins, SJ, describes the Eucharist as at once the most extraordinary and ordinary of events, an encounter with the Word-made-flesh who resides in the tabernacle, deigning to be ‘from cupboard fetched’ and given to us as our daily spiritual food. 

Many of us know what J.R.R. Tolkien said of the Eucharist. It’s especially in his private letters that we find discussion of his deep devotion to daily reception of Communion. The Eucharist, he writes, is ‘the taste—or foretaste—of which alone can what you seek in your earthly relationships (love, faithfulness, joy) be maintained, or take on that complexion of reality, of eternal endurance, which every man’s heart desires.’ Particularly in our era of excessively virtual communication, widespread family fragmentation and prolonged uncertainties about our sense of meaning, role, and place in society, the unchanging divine love of God, available in the Eucharist, can serve as a home for us. 

Writing on the spiritual and redressive resources available to us, especially in our current ‘electric’ and ‘discarnate age’, Eric McLuhan recently observed that ‘Eucharistic love’ is the central and ‘infinite source of communion.’ In other words, the sense of home is most fully provided in encounters with the Eucharist. 

This has increasingly become my experience, for a variety of reasons. One of them being that in the last four years I’ve lived the life of the early career academic: prolonged, exciting yet tiring itinerancy. I’ve moved to four different cities: London (Ontario), Barry’s Bay (Ottawa Valley), Toronto, and St. Andrews (Scotland). 

I’ve taught and researched in these places as well as in various parts of England and Rome. I’ve grown accustomed to keeping my belongings in boxes, spread across the homes of families, friends, and generous friends-of-friends-of-friends on both sides of the Atlantic and have only recently received the marvelous gift of a permanent professorship. As we begin 2019 and I look back over the somewhat dizzyingly adventurous four years, it’s been beautiful to see that throughout past and present uncertainties, the one constant, that which is ‘ever ancient, ever new’, has been the liturgy and the presence of Christ in the Eucharist.   

Lines from G.K. Chesterton’s ‘The House of Christmas’ come to mind as I give thanks for the home-centring gift that is Christ in the Blessed Sacrament: ‘A Child in a foul stable, / Where the beasts feed and foam, / Only where He was homeless / Are you and I at home.’ Christ chose to leave his father’s house, to become ‘homeless’, to have nowhere to lay his head, so that I could be at home in this unhomely world, so that I could find, to borrow T.S. Eliot’s words, the ‘still point of the turning world’: Christ in the tabernacle, waiting and ready for me to visit him, to be at home in the world, no matter the time or place.

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