Over this last month, we at the Thomas More Centre have been exploring the symbol, reality and importance of “the home”.
In part it is because the home is so central to the organic notion of human formation for good and sometimes ill.
Our new oral history project, “Voices from the Movement”, is so appealing and important for our future growth as the TMC because it helps us to connect with and hear from real people who provide our current thoughts with a “home base”.
It is also because our titular hero, St Thomas More, left such an extraordinary example of his home-based education and culture – one which at various times saw up to 80 people in his home’s care and support (more on this in our next newsletter).
In addition, next week, Western Australia’s Dawson Society is hosting an expansive conversation about “Home” at a conference at Notre Dame University, Fremantle (July 10-12). See the very attractive website for registration details.
C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien, two of the most widely recognised and extensively read members of The Inklings – that extraordinary mid-20th century salon of friends which formed in Oxford – made many dramatic, metaphorical, spiritual and lyrical allusions to the universal importance of home.
Many of their narratives and characters – whether they are Pevensie children, hobbits or mighty elves – head out from home, mourn their homelands and begin a quest in exile from home and finally yearn for a definitive and final home.
It is not surprising that in our times of social disconnection, incessant war, identity feuds, fractured families and a homelessness crisis that is profound in all the economic, social and spiritual senses, the vivid imaginative worlds of these two authors continue to strike such strong chords.
In 1941, Lewis delivered a riveting sermon at Oxford University’s Church of St Mary the Virgin called The Weight of Glory. At the invitation of the local vicar, Lewis was greeted by a large and expectant congregation. St Mary’s was the same church at which the later Cardinal John Henry Newman was an Anglican vicar.
There were clearly many good reasons why such a large crowd had gathered at the Church. By the late 1930s, Lewis was known to be a highly effective and clear apologist, a witty speaker and a down-to-earth theologian. He was a philosophically literate, clear (Tolkien would say booming) and courageous voice for “mere Christianity”: that is, for the basic and biblically resonant witness for the Christian faith. It was also significant that in 1941, Britons were hungry for some vigorous and meaningful Christian hope in a country that was embroiled in the Second World War.
Lewis was bracing. Firstly he pitches a lively reply to those who would depict Christianity as essentially killjoy and anti-erotic. Lewis indicates that this is often conveyed by Christians themselves who have been infected by the strains of “Stoicism or Kantianism”.
He declares that humans have broken hearts which are “too easily pleased” by the obvious or the superficial. We get caught up in the cheap but powerful thrills of transient sex, ambition or sensual pleasure – which are only pale knock-offs of true love, genuine desire for goodness and the deep appreciation of the gifts of creation. This defence of desire and love will be a recurring topic for Lewis, particularly in his later classic The Four Loves.
The second theme picked up by Lewis in his 1941 sermon perhaps shines a light on why “home” is such a large and important umbrella for our metaphysically orphaned times.
Lewis says engagingly: “I am trying to rip open the inconsolable secret in each one of you—the secret which hurts so much that you take your revenge on it by calling it names like Nostalgia and Romanticism and Adolescence.”
Here he pin-points in only a few lines what secular materialism and anti-theistic reductionism has shamed us into denouncing over the last three centuries: Home!
Work of the home is unpaid and unsung. A vocation “making” a home is considered servile and doltish. In our days of narcissist and identity theory the home is considered the most dangerous place to be. Governments fall over backwards to undermine our confidence in caring for or teaching children at home. Time within the family home is considered oppressive, reactionary and boring.
Yet our endurance of the covid-19 restrictions and the weekly revelations of the failure of non-domestic institutions have left us with a more honest taste for “home”.
We recognise that we need an embodied, loving and virtue-building place in which to grow, a place to become more humane even amidst all the gritty and sometimes messy and trying elements of babies, teenagers and overwrought parents.
This is not to promote an idealistic or idolatrous idea of the perfect home, but because decent homes foster people who can leave home to serve others and the common good and, in Christian homes, can develop a taste for an even greater and lasting Home.
Christian social teaching aims to identify valuable ingredients for a happy home, but it does not aspire for a perfect one – not here at least.
Lewis in The Weight of Glory again says: “These things—the beauty, the memory of our own past—are good images of what we really desire; but if they are mistaken for the thing itself they turn into dumb idols, breaking the hearts of their worshippers.”
We will aim to bring you news from the speakers and events at this Fremantle-based conference on Home, and we share the excitement of our friends at the Dawson Society and their concern:
“The place of home in our society and culture deserves critical examination. On the one hand our culture is replete with idealised, and perhaps clichéd, notions of home, on the other—particularly in an age of increasing globalism, competition, and crisis—it can often appear that homes and homelife are considered last on the list of priorities, if they are considered at all.”
To learn more about the background to the Home conference, please watch this interview between host Mark and Dawson’s Thomas Gourlay on the TMC’s YouTube channel.
Thanks again to all our readers for your interest, financial and spiritual support.
Anna Krohn
Executive Director
Thomas More Centre
