There's No Place Like Home

This was written a few years ago. With the stay-at-home orders in the time of the coronavirus pandemic, families are at the moment spending more time together within the walls of their homes. May this be a time sharing love, hope, and peace.

Photo by Elly Fairytale, Pexels

We live within walls, creating a shelter to protect us from the elements. We live as family units within these walls and call it creating a home. Yet with the dissolution of the family unit, the dwelling is no longer a home with heart, but often merely a shelter – devoid of the thrumming of a spiritual heartbeat and Divine energy. Our homes:

- are no longer the heart of the family or community

- are no longer the place we gather daily and join in succor of spirit

- are the place we leave to do the “important” things of life; school, work, extra-curricular activities

- are often just a place we buy things for and decorate, but to what ends since we rarely spend time living within its walls

- are the place we have parties, entertain others, host holiday celebrations – if time, and

- are a place that holds within its walls a family unit to act as a launching pad propelling its members outward to work, to benefit self, family, and ultimately society.

Yet, in our business heart is at times missing – there’s a frantic scurrying. Today’s household has a growing, never-completed, to-do list. There is no longer loving care of its space to create a healing sanctuary dedicated to nurturing souls to love and serve the Eternal.

We can choose to live in unity with the Eternal and invite the Divine into our homes to energize not only the hearts of those living within its walls, but also the very space itself, or we can choose to live separate from God and live within glorified shelters.

Our shelters, whether infused with love-affirming energy or empty of spirit, require resources of time, materials, and energy. In our western culture this can be summed up in one term, money. We require money to build our domains. We accumulate monies to buy our shelters, decorate and maintain them. Nevertheless, when we over focus on earning money then the Eternal is not pursued as the ideal of the home.

We leave our homes each day to go to school or work. We get up, eat breakfast, get dressed and leave. We come home, have dinner, run around to other activities …we are rarely home!

Eating together creates a social bond. When we eat on the run or alone in front of a television or a computer screen, we miss out on this necessary social interaction. People need nourishment of both food and companionship to live.

We were created in such a manner that we worked together to hunt and gather the food and then prepare it together and partake of it together, much like how a pack of lions hunts together and then eats together from the carcass. It illustrates that we are a social creature, a pack animal, and need others in order to live. It’s a myth of our culture that independence is the ultimate lifestyle. In actuality, community, or joining together in order to help one another sustain life, is how life is meant to be lived.

There may be something missing in our homes, our place of family succor. It has been preempted by the busyness outside our homes which many of us have been brainwashed into believing is of the utmost importance. We may entertain friends and family within the walls of our homes, but this is different than daily being with one another, conversing, praying, playing and working side-by-side. Perhaps, if we are not already doing this, we could set aside time each week just to be with one another.

Appreciate our homes for sheltering us, but also for the space inside where we live and learn love.