home on Belongings

In his classic monologue, comedian George Carlin riffed on the mountain of stuff we compile. His assertion is that a “house is just a pile of stuff with a cover on it.” So when you get right down to ...

There is no object of desire quite like a house. Few things . . . are capable of eliciting such urgent, even painful, yearning.

“Perhaps home is not a place but simply an irrevocable condition.”

Home is ultimately not about a place to live but about the people with whom you are most fully alive. Home is about love, relationship, community, and belonging, and we are all searching for home.

Perhaps there is no object more desired than a house in America. Meghan Daum writes in her hilarious and poignant book Life Would Be Perfect If I Lived in That House, “There is no object of desire qui...

In her book Keeping Place: Reflections on the Meaning of Home , Jen Pollock Michel reflects on the nature of home in a transient age. In this short excerpt, Michel focuses on etymology of home in v...

The best things are nearest: breath in your nostrils, light in your eyes, flowers at your feet, duties at your hand, the path of God just before you. Then do not grasp at the stars, but do life’s plai...

One burden of homelessness is this: you’re always a stranger, counting on someone’s good graces.

Before Seattle resident Edith Macefield died at age eighty-six in 2008, she refused to sell her house to developers for the $1 million they had purportedly offered. Macefield wanted to die at home. Se...

No matter how much the world shatters us to pieces, we carry inside us a vision of wholeness that we sense is our true home and that beckons us.

Let us, who are on the way, hasten home; for our whole life is like the journey of a single day. Our first duty is to love nothing here; but let us place our affections above, our desires above, our w...

A prominent citizen in town was dying. As he lay in his lovely home, the best doctors surrounding him, he whispered, with a note of despair, ‘I’m leaving home, I’m leaving home.’ Across town there la...

Prayer of Adoration Lord – You are good …and Your goodness knows no bounds. When we were lost, You sought us out, found us and brought us home. When we were alone, You came near to us, and You gave ...

The idea of a modest dwelling all our own, isolated from the problems of other people, has been our reigning metaphor of the good life for a long time. It must now be seen for what it really is: an an...

Whenever I am traveling, I constantly look forward to the moment when I will return home. Even if I’m very busy and preoccupied, in the back of my mind one thought is always present: “Soon I’ll be goi...

God's thoughts, his will, his love, his judgments are all man's home. To think his thoughts, to choose his will, to love his loves, to judge his judgments, and thus to know that he is in us, i...

We fixed up the house and swapped it for another house and then another and then another. During the first ten years we were married, we moved six times. It was like being in the witness protection pr...

What you do in your house is worth as much as if you did it up in heaven for our Lord God.

If anything, there appears to be an inverse relationship between our growing obsession with the home as a totem object and the disintegration of families that has become the chief social phenomenon of...

Advent 2023: Make some noise! Echoes of a Dream AIM commentary Ancient lens What's the historical context? A Song Celebrating the Return from Babylonian Exile The book of Ezra recount...

Where we love is home - home that our feet may leave, but not our hearts.

Home shall men come To an older place than Eden And a taller town than Rome. To the end of the way of the wandering star; To the things that cannot be and that are, To the place where God was homeless...

I love old homes. I’m always drawn to them. The character, the drama, the history. The possibility they possess in a different way than a new build does. Often when referring to older homes, people sa...

Home is the place where, when you have to go there, they have to take you in.

When I am away from Liturgy for too long, I find I burn for it now, for the steadiness of the calendar, the words" that ring out in repetition, the heavy scented air. When I return each week, I a...

Happy will that house be in which the relationships are formed from character.

The biblical narrative begins and ends at home. From the Garden of Eden to the New Jerusalem we are hardwired for place and for permanence, for rest and refuge, for presence and protection. We long fo...

Place is a quintessentially human concept in that it is part of our creatureliness. E. Casey, who has done the most comprehensive work on the philosophy of place, notes that “to be in the world, to be...

Home is where one starts from.

Ancient lens What's the historical context? A Song Celebrating the Return from Babylonian Exile The book of Ezra recounts the return of 50,000 exiles and their entourage from Babylon after Cy...