What’s the difference between a house and a home?

When I was the executive director of the Urban Ministry nonprofit serving unhoused people in the Palo Alto area, I wrote an article that got a wider distribution than anything else I’ve ever written.  The title was “Houselessness and Homelessness”.  It ended up being reprinted in two different college English composition textbooks – to my great surprise!  I think the reason it resonated with so many folks was that it reflected a universal sentiment:  that just because you have a house doesn’t mean you have a home.  Or that your house or apartment is really your home at all.

My article described something I saw among the houseless people my organization served.  They didn’t have roofs over their heads, but many of them had a very strong sense of being at home in Palo Alto.  And by contrast, some of the volunteers that worked with us lived under very nice roofs, but lacked a sense of home.  They moved a lot for their careers – they traveled for work a lot – and they felt disconnected from any real sense of place.  More than one of my volunteers told me, wistfully, that it was only by volunteering for the Urban Ministry that they finally got a sense of being at home in Palo Alto.  By hanging out with houseless folks, they felt connected to the Palo Alto community in a profound way.

Think about it.  People without houses have to figure out where it’s relatively safe to camp and where to access their basic human needs.  My houseless friends in Palo Alto had very intimate knowledge of the community – knowledge that housed people had no clue about.  The folks living in tents and cardboard huts knew which dumpsters had the best food, and exactly what time that food would be tossed into the dumpsters behind the restaurants.  They were on personal terms with police officers whose names – and reputations – were unknown to almost all the housed residents of the town.  To survive living in the rough, you need to know which cops can be trusted and which cannot.  The folks living on the streets knew each other – they had to know each other – they had to know who could be counted on to help them out in a pinch and who could not.  Pluck any one of these unhoused people out of the town of Palo Alto, and drop them someplace far away, and they’d be in a serious crisis.  If you have a credit card and a good balance behind it, you can go just about anywhere and have three hots and a cot, as my unhoused folks would put it.  But without that credit card, without that intimate knowledge of a particular place and its people, you’d be in a world of hurt.  Which is why houseless people don’t leave town to look for a place where the weather is better or the cost of living is lower.  They can’t afford to leave the place and the people they know.

So it was a great irony that some of the most homeful people in Palo Alto were the houseless.  And some of the most homeless people in Silicon Valley were the housed.  How much better the world would be if everyone had both house and home!  We have work to do to make that happen.  Work that starts, by the way, with voting for candidates who take this problem very seriously.  Need I say more about that?

The lesson in all this?  If you want to feel at home in your house or apartment, you’ve got to make an effort to connect with the community around you, whether your physical existence depends on it or not.

“Foxes have holes, and birds have nests, but the Son of Man has nowhere to lay his head,” said Jesus.  How ironic, that the founder of the church, where so many of us find our spiritual home, was himself houseless!

And yet, he did have a sense of home.  There were lots of people in his life who would offer him three hots and a cot, amid his itinerations.  He had an open invitation to come to the home of Martha, Mary, and Lazarus.  He made a habit of inviting himself to dinner – check out the story of Zacchaeus, the tax collector!  He had spent so much time in the wilderness, first on his forty days of temptation, and later in periods of retreat, that he felt at home out there.  The whole land of Israel was home for him, despite his essential houselessness.  The people he served, the people he taught, the people who followed him were like family to him.  Once, pointing to his disciples, he said, “Here are my mother and my brothers!”

Home, in other words, is a spiritual experience that is portable.  Houseless people push their portable tents and cardboard around in shopping carts.  But the rest of us who live indoors can make and find home in a lot of different ways and a lot of different places.   We can make home for ourselves, and also help to make home for others.

Do  you have dreams in which houses show up a lot?  In your dream, you go in and out of doors.  You wander through hallways, upstairs and downstairs.  In my long experience of leading dream groups, I’ve observed how often houses loom large.   It demonstrates that houses symbolize home – even though they aren’t the same thing as home.  We go to tremendous trouble to make our houses look just-so.  When in fact the experience of home is an inner one, a spiritual experience.  What would happen if we worked as hard to cultivate our inner emotional and spiritual experience of home, and worked as hard to cultivate our face-to-face relationships in community into an experience of “home”, as we do to make our houses look “homey”?  You can tell whether you are in a house that’s just a house and not a home, even if it superficially looks “homey”.   Now when a house looks “homey” and the people in it have created and maintained homeful relationships, when their symbol of home resonates with their spiritual reality of home, you can feel that, can’t you?  And it has nothing to do with how much the furniture costs.

Home is where and how your soul lives in community with others.  Whether that’s in a fancy house, a modest house, an apartment, or a tent….

(See more of my “musings” here…)

JIM BURKLO

Pastor, United Church of Christ, Simi Valley CA