Finding a Voice
Sunday, September 04, 2005
the household
We're trying something new at Briercrest College and Seminary this year: combining Student Families with Alternate Housing and calling it Student Households (http://www.households.blogspot.com/). Here's an instructive excerpt from Lauren Winner's new book, Real Sex:
At the heart of [Wendell] Berry's vision is an idea called the household. Household seems, at first blush, to be just a synonym for home, but it is actually quite different from what most of us mean when we speak of home.
Today some of us think of homes as warm places where people come together for affection and love. Others think of homes as sites of dysfunction, places that should have been filled with warmth, but were instead marked by neglect and abuse. And some of us reside not in homes but in houses--physical dwelling places where people who happen to be related to one another (or who happen to be roommates) live out their relatively separate lives. Each family member has his own TV, his own cell phone, his own car. We each have our own busy schedules that often preclude our eating breakfast or dinner together. We go to our houses to refuel and to rest our bodies, and then we return to the places that really matter--our schools, our businesses, the places where we earn the money to pay for all those cell phones and cars.
A household, by contrast, is a place of shared mission, of shared work. Think back to the eighteenth century when people did most of their productive labor together in family units, in their households. Mothers and daughters spun flax together. Children helped parents plant and harvest crops. I don't mean to romanticize the difficulties and privations of life in earlier centuries--work was hard, medical care was sketchy, life was short.
And yet there was something powerfully good about those earlier households, something missing from many of our homes and houses today. There was a togetherness born not merely of affection but of mutual work. It didn't really matter if you liked your husband on a given Tuesday. You were stuck working with him all day anyhow. Your togetherness, your relationship, didn't rely on the caprice of your feelings. You were bound together, primarily, by a common undertaking--making your productive household run. Your household was not a place where individuals happened to congregate; it was a place of genuine mutuality.
To understand the good work that work does for families and neighbors, think about backyard cookouts. Sure, ordering pizza from Domino's would be simpler, less labor-intensive than stoking up the grill, chopping all that cabbage for coleslaw, tending to the hamburgers and hot dogs, making sure they don't get overcooked--but when I work together with my neighbors, even simple work like cabbage-chopping, I am participating in a shared enterprise with them, and that sharing strengthens the ties of our relationship. So you don't have to be an eighteenth-century farmer to begin to conceive of your home as a household. Rather, beginning to approach your meals, chores, and furnishings as part of a rich domestic economy, opportunities to connect you, your family, and your neighbors in truly shared undertakings. (55-56)
How does this get worked out in your life?
At the heart of [Wendell] Berry's vision is an idea called the household. Household seems, at first blush, to be just a synonym for home, but it is actually quite different from what most of us mean when we speak of home.
Today some of us think of homes as warm places where people come together for affection and love. Others think of homes as sites of dysfunction, places that should have been filled with warmth, but were instead marked by neglect and abuse. And some of us reside not in homes but in houses--physical dwelling places where people who happen to be related to one another (or who happen to be roommates) live out their relatively separate lives. Each family member has his own TV, his own cell phone, his own car. We each have our own busy schedules that often preclude our eating breakfast or dinner together. We go to our houses to refuel and to rest our bodies, and then we return to the places that really matter--our schools, our businesses, the places where we earn the money to pay for all those cell phones and cars.
A household, by contrast, is a place of shared mission, of shared work. Think back to the eighteenth century when people did most of their productive labor together in family units, in their households. Mothers and daughters spun flax together. Children helped parents plant and harvest crops. I don't mean to romanticize the difficulties and privations of life in earlier centuries--work was hard, medical care was sketchy, life was short.
And yet there was something powerfully good about those earlier households, something missing from many of our homes and houses today. There was a togetherness born not merely of affection but of mutual work. It didn't really matter if you liked your husband on a given Tuesday. You were stuck working with him all day anyhow. Your togetherness, your relationship, didn't rely on the caprice of your feelings. You were bound together, primarily, by a common undertaking--making your productive household run. Your household was not a place where individuals happened to congregate; it was a place of genuine mutuality.
To understand the good work that work does for families and neighbors, think about backyard cookouts. Sure, ordering pizza from Domino's would be simpler, less labor-intensive than stoking up the grill, chopping all that cabbage for coleslaw, tending to the hamburgers and hot dogs, making sure they don't get overcooked--but when I work together with my neighbors, even simple work like cabbage-chopping, I am participating in a shared enterprise with them, and that sharing strengthens the ties of our relationship. So you don't have to be an eighteenth-century farmer to begin to conceive of your home as a household. Rather, beginning to approach your meals, chores, and furnishings as part of a rich domestic economy, opportunities to connect you, your family, and your neighbors in truly shared undertakings. (55-56)
How does this get worked out in your life?
posted by Colleen McCubbin at 6:40 PM
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