Householding

In an end of the summer push, we've picked up the pace in recent weeks on home projects. Our last few weekends have consisted of finishing up trim and baseboard upstairs, staining our doors and finalizing some kitchen odds and ends. We're trying to get all of these projects done to prepare ourselves for the fall mother of them all project, remodeling and converting our upstairs half bath into a three quarter. Oh, help us.

Last Saturday, we started off with a trip to the gym before launching into a day of projects (side motivation - make sure A gets really worn out playing in the Kid's Club so that we can take advantage of a long afternoon nap to actually work simultaneously!). While there, I was catching up on my latest issues of Sojourners and landed upon this lovely article by Rose Marie Berger.

In this piece, The Art of Householding, Berger successfully captures many of my sentiments about being a homeowner. She shares her own struggle with not wanting to be tied down and with her feelings on the ethics of "ownership" (a theme we're hearing a lot about these days as we try to pull back from a consumer crazed culture), but goes on to describe how she realizes that she has been given the gift of stability, and is called to, as Thomas Merton put it, "Find the place that God has given you and take root there." Berger goes on to tell the story of the house she currently "holds," of the people who came before and the impact each had on the house she, for the moment, calls her own. She also touches on the beauty of being planted in a neighborhood, where you are called to love your neighbors - not only the people who you choose to be in community with, but the people you are literally planted next to.

When we started looking for houses sixteen months ago, in a mad rush of late pregnancy and life change and we can't believe we actually sold our condo in this market, we had many discussions about the kind of home we dreamed about living it. We talked about the excitement of having a yard and a garage and how nice it would be to be in a home where we didn't have to do any renovating (obviously that didn't happen). But what we kept coming back to - and why we ended up where we did in the end - was that we wanted a home and neighborhood with a story. A place that felt like us, that resonated with who we are and why we love this little city. A house with a past bigger and longer than our lives, a story broader than the little time we'd be inhabiting it. Maybe a little daily something to remind us of how small we are in God's great picture.

So we got our house with a story - without any air conditioning, with paneled wood waiting to be repurposed, and funky octagon windows that are a pain in the rear to trim, and cabinets hung in the family room. And in my mind, as we're chiseling away on another renovation, I imagine my chances to talk to the old owners about how they used the space. I'd ask the university librarian who lived here all about his process of putting up the solar panels (that currently don't work...), and the couple that added on the second level why on earth they added on two huge bedrooms and only a half bath (grrrr), and the renter who lived here with many children how exactly they utilized all three fridges they had in the kitchen. And I wonder about what people will want to ask us someday - someday when we've moved on and they've become the householders for this space. (Most likely it will be why on earth we painted the kitchen teal, and I'm cool with that.)

Berger closes her article on this note, which I think is the best of them all:

"Householding is an art with deep biblical resonance. 'The central [biblical] problem is not emancipation but rootage,' writes Walter Brueggemann in The Land, 'not meaning but belonging, not separation from community but location within it, not isolation from others but placement deliberately between the generations of promise and fulfillment."

So today, to being where you are. To seeking out the place that feels like home and hanging onto it for a while. To taking root in the place that God has given you to hold.