session seven: household words
by Elizabeth de Barros
Please welcome dear friend and sister in Christ, Diana Lovegrove, blogger at Waiting For Our Blessed Hope and contributor for today’s session on Household Words. Diana lives in England with her wonderful husband, adorable 7-year-old son, and naughty Jack Russell terrier. She loves nothing better than gentle family cycle rides at the weekend through the English countryside, but she also recently appreciated the opportunity to drive a racing car at speeds of 130 mph. Tea is her drink of choice, and the guitar her instrument to praise her God.
________________________________________
“Home is place, geography, and psyche…It’s a place of safety.”
-Barbara Kingsolver
________________________________
Kingsolver opens Household Words with a modern telling of the parable of The Good Samaritan. Except in this true account, it appears there was no Good Samaritan. Kingsolver is endearingly honest about her own inability to act, as she sits frozen in her car in a queue at traffic lights, and witnesses a homeless woman being assaulted by a homeless man on the sidewalk. As the traffic lights change, she drives away alongside many others, taking her guilt over her failure to intervene with her. I probably would have done the same.
Kingsolver considers homelessness to be an “aberration” of a civilised society. She is right. Homelessness is a sign of the curse we are living under, ever since Adam and Eve were banished from their God-given home in the Garden of Eden for their sin, and Cain, their son, was told he would be a “restless wanderer on the earth.” Homelessness is what living apart from God looks like, and I’m not talking about those without a permanent roof over their heads. What Kingsolver doesn’t realise is that those who have comfortable homes to live in are just as homeless as the man or woman on the street packing cardboard inside their clothes to help to keep them warm at night.
Whether or not we agree with Kingsolver’s political views of how to help the homeless, I am grateful that she has a compassionate heart, recognises that the home she has to live in is due to providence (although she doesn’t call it such when she recounts the conversation with her wheelchair-bound friend: “Barbara, the main difference between you and me is one bad fall off a rock.”), is aware of the sinful attitude of pride in all of us (“…smart like me, hardworking like me…they’d have a house like me.”), and has the urge to do something to help her neighbour in need.
I am arrested by her definition of home:
“Home is place, geography, and psyche; it’s a matter of survival and safety, a condition of attachment and self-definition. It’s where you learn from your parents and repeat to your children all the stories of what it means to belong to the place and people of your ken. It’s a place of safety.”
________________________________
A BIBLICAL LENS:
I read Kingsolver’s definition of home and I am silently awed…common grace pours from her heart. I read it and I want to share with her how this is all so true, and how God fulfils all of this! How He calls us to Himself and adopts us as His children through the blood of Christ, so that where we were once estranged from Him and restless wanderers, now we can enjoy the embrace of our Father. I want to tell her that really understanding what it means to be adopted as His child and welcomed into His family sends a thrill through my heart every time I contemplate it. Attachment to Him, being defined by Him…there is no greater security in life. How He assures our survival and safety: “But not a hair of your head will perish.” How we regularly gather with other believers, our family members, children through to grandparents, to celebrate and remember all the goodness He has given us in Christ. I want to show her the limitations of Robert Frost’s quote:
“Home is the place where, when you have to go there,
They have to take you in.”
My Home is a gift. “They” do not have to take me in at all, given the extent of my sin. BUT…because of the sheer grace of God, because of Christ’s sacrifice, because I can now call God “Abba, Father!” I don’t even have to go there alone, hoping my knock at the door will be answered:
“In my Father’s house are many rooms; if it were not so, I would have told you. I am going there to prepare a place for you. And if I go and prepare a place for you, I will come back and take you to be with me that you also may be where I am.”
-John 14:2-3
And then I want to look Barbara Kingsolver right in the eyes. I want to tell her how the story with which she opened this essay walked right into my heart. How it wasn’t merely her vulnerability and honesty in telling the story and her subsequent soul-searching which stirred my heart. I want to tell her how I personally identify with her guilt of not intervening when witnessing the abuse of a homeless person. How I was aware that my own sister was at risk of being abused by a “care worker” in the “care home” she was living in — a home in no meaningful sense of the word, but which epitomises the curse we are living under — not a home of safety, but a place to be survived. How I desperately wanted to inform the authorities, but for complicated reasons (which make no sense to me now, this side of the events) felt I couldn’t…so did nothing. How I have had to sit in court in recent days and listen as my sister described before judge and jury the harrowing extent of the abuse she suffered as a result of my saying nothing. Yes, I know something of that guilt.
How to deal with it?
I want to grab hold of her hand here and tell Kingsolver there is a much better way than how she dealt with her guilt, of rehearsing a different scene of the abused woman in her mind so that, “If I meet her again, I hope I can be ready.” There is another way to deal with guilt, a way that leads to forgiveness, to life, to hope, to HOME!
When we have failed to love our neighbour as ourselves, we need to cry out to the One who did, who left His own Home to come to this earth where He had nowhere to lay His head. We need to cry out to Jesus, who took all our failures to love our neighbour in need on His own shoulders, died and rose again, that not only could we be forgiven and have our hearts sprinkled by His blood to cleanse us from a guilty conscience, but that He would give us His love for our neighbour, and a new Home.
It is no coincidence that she concludes her essay by referencing this Martin Luther King Jr. quote: “True peace is not merely the absence of tension. It’s the presence of justice.” Here, God has revealed His very heart to her of what Home really is:
“Justice will dwell in the desert
and righteousness live in the fertile field.
The fruit of righteousness will be peace;
the effect of righteousness will be quietness and confidence forever.
My people will live in peaceful dwelling places,
in secure homes,
in undisturbed places of rest.”
-Isaiah 32:16-18
_______________________________
Next Thursday: The One-Eyed Monster, and Why I Don’t Let Him In
finding the motherlode 
Diana, thank you so much for Isaiah 32:16! I needed that reminder today, to purge the ghosts of my wandering past that rise up when I forget to trust God. I pray for your sister, that she is or will be welcomed into a place prepared for her, and know she is home. And for you, that your grief at your own inability to act is replaced by thankful assurance that God was and is sufficient.
Hi Tammy, thank you for reading, and I am so blessed Isa 32:16 encouraged you. Thank you so much for your prayers…I’ve just been to see my sister today, and was so thankful to have the opportunity to speak of Home with her. “God was and is sufficient”. Yes, He is! Amen!
Dear Diana,
Thank you again and again for taking up the pen and turning it into a sword pointing to truth on a difficult subject. To us, homelessness is a topic distasteful to the core, and it frightens our sensibilities, perhaps because on some visceral level we know we could be “one of them” if it were not for the express grace of God.
This:
“Homelessness is what living apart from God looks like, and I’m not talking about those without a permanent roof over their heads. What Kingsolver doesn’t realise is that those who have comfortable homes to live in are just as homeless as the man or woman on the street packing cardboard inside their clothes to help to keep them warm at night.”
You make an important distinction here — one that affirms how we are each undeserving of sitting at the King’s table. Yet, He bids us to come.
As for home, I never knew what home was until the first time I lifted my hands and sang to Christ the King.
It really was an honour to write this piece for you, E. I gained a new perspective on homelessness through writing this, I hadn’t truly appreciated the extent of the curse on Adam and Eve and the impact on all of us in our “homes” before, and how in Christ that curse is totally and utterly redeemed.
This is beautifully illustrated by what you said: “As for home, I never knew what home was until the first time I lifted my hands and sang to Christ the King.”
And you see what He has done?
“He settles the barren woman in her home
as a happy mother of children.” (Psalm 113:9)
Thank you for hosting such a thought-provoking and stimulating discussion.
This is much better than anything I could have provided for you, Elizabeth. It was clearly providence that I was unable to participate. I had such a hard time getting past Kingslover’s very uninformed view on homelessness in other countries. She seemed to hold the fanciful notion that in Canada we don’t deal with homelessness. She should avoid such statements; it really turned me off the entire piece. A writer of her calibre should research things better.
Clearly, Diana was the one suited for the job, and not me. She did much better with it than I could have.
Hi Kim, I also noticed that point as I live in Britain, one of the countries which has decided “homelessness is not an option”…there are some downsides to the “big government” response that Kingsolver advocates, one of which is that when we see homelessness around us here in Britain, there is a tendency to feel no sense of community responsibility in response, instead expecting the “state” to resolve the problem.
Politics is not my strong point, however, so I thought I’d give a wide berth to that part of the essay 😉
God bless you!
Homelessness is a very big problem in Toronto, which as about 90 mins away from me, and even in smaller centers. My daughter was approached by a homeless man in his 20s over the summer, and apparently, there isn’t even a shelter in the city of 200,000 where she lives. Politics is not my strong suit, either, but Kingslover brings it into the discussion, and I’m not sure as a writer of fiction it is suitable. We have a tendency to think that just because someone can write well, they must have solid views on anything. I think for her next book, she should come and live in Canada and contemplate the huge legacy of debt for my children and their children 🙂
Thanks for your contribution to this topic; I really liked it.
Hi Kim,
Your response in terms of Diana’s excellent writing on this particular essay is very gracious and I’m grateful it worked out for everyone all the way around.
The little research I’ve done on Barbara Kingsolver showed that although she has her fans, there are still plenty of others who would fall in a different category.
So glad you’ve hung in there for the discussion. For next week’s session, the essay topic is on television. I hope she doesn’t say anything about TV’s in Canada! 😉
Oh, we have the same sampling of vapid television here that is in the U.S. That’s where most of it comes from.
Dear Diana, thank you for sharing your heart here. It is true, we all are homeless until we come to Christ. Until the Father calls us by name and opens a place for us at His table. So true.
One thing that is clear to me after reading these 7 essays, is that we all feel like we would like to have an opportunity to sit across the table with the author and tell her what the Bible says about this and that. We all feel an urgency to fill in the gaps that are there. We all want to share the gospel with her. But she is not near to us? Or is she?
One thing I have learned this year — in which I purposely started reading more fiction and non-Christian authors — is to see how the world around me thinks and sees through life issues. So, as I have been reading all these essays, I kept on thinking that “Barbara Kingsolver” is, in a sense, among us. The people around us, those who don’t know the gospel are seeing the world just like her. The urgency I have to share the gospel with her can be translated into sharing the gospel with my neighbor who enjoys some of God’s common grace, but is still lost in her sins.
Dear E, thanks for hosting this thought-provoking series.
I love you!
Hi Becky, thank you for reading! I love how you see that “Barbara Kingsolver” is, in a sense, among us. I trust that those of us who have engaged in this book discussion will be better equipped to “defend the Truth with a right spirit” as we share the gospel with our neighbours, as E put it in her introduction to this series. God bless you!
Dear Becky,
Yes! What you said is the very heart of the reason for this book discussion:
“…as I have been reading all these essays, I kept on thinking that “Barbara Kingsolver” is, in a sense, among us. The people around us, those who don’t know the gospel are seeing the world just like her.”
And here’s a pro tip for us: While Jesus paid little heed to appearances, He took the time to listen long enough to read between the lines.
Love you, amiga!
Yes, yes, yes.
Love you, my friends!