Home Before Education

The house came first.

In an old Victorian with high stamped tin ceilings, pocket doors, and closets that opened into other rooms, a family of six rowdy children filled the house. While there was constant fighting and jockeying for position, there was also a lot of laughter.

Somewhere in that house you’d find me. Maybe in our tree house out back, or running through the neighbor's field with my brother. If I needed to get away and hide, you could find me in the upstairs hall linen closet reading. My flashlight, my books, and me. It was like being tucked inside a cocoon of words. There, I felt safe. My house wasn’t safe.

That was the same house where Mrs. Wonder introduced me to the idea of Spanish. It had never occurred to me that other people use different words than we do. Where did their words come from? How did they find them? What if we spoke the wrong words and their words were the right words? This was baffling. By then, I was repeating ordinary words just to hear them. I wondered where we got our words. Sink. Sink. It sounded ridiculous. It sounded nothing like the thing you put your dishes in. Who came up with that word? Was there a meeting of some kind?

But not all of them felt silly. Some felt lovely. Rosemary. Pistachio. Pistachio is a great word. Lewis Carroll's "The Jabberwocky” was one of my favorite poems. Snicker-snack. Snicker-snack. That man knew about words. Thus my love affair began. When I was 26, I met another lover of words. She gave me an American Heritage dictionary. That dictionary traced where words came from. Who knew they made such things? I was smitten.  A whole new world opened up. Webster was upgraded!

One of the first things I notice about the words homeschooling and home education is that home comes first. What is a home? I’ve been in a lot of them. Lived in quite a few too. Did you ever notice that homes have smells? My grandma's house always smelled like dinner on the stove. Her upstairs smelled like old things. Our elderly neighbor, Hulga, lived across the street when I was in kindergarten. She had an enormous garden and a giant rhubarb patch. She’d give me bowls of sugar to dip the rhubarb in. It’s a wonder I have teeth. She let me pick green beans with her. Canning jars, old pictures, and grandma smells cluttered her home. I liked her home.

Home isn’t a sink kind of word, nor is it a pistachio sort of word. It feels like soup or my grandma’s knitted afghans. I feel the need to pull on this home thread a bit and see where it takes us.

 Pulling On a Thread

According to EtymOnline home comes from “Middle English hom, from Old English ham, home “dwelling place, house, abode, fixed residence; estate; village; region, country,” from Proto-Germanic *home “home,” which is reconstructed to be from a suffixed form of PIE root *tkei- “to settle, dwell, be home.”

Proto-Germanic is the reconstructed common ancestor of all Germanic languages, including English. It seems that the idea is a place where people live. It can describe one house or a gathering of houses, a village and town, and even a country. That tracks with how we use the word today. We use home to mean a house, our state, and even our country.

Let’s take a stroll through Strong’s Concordance and see what we get. Before the scholars jump on my case about Strong’s not being scholarly enough, let me just say, “Exactly!” I’m a mom on a hunt; I’m not writing a master’s thesis.

 Building a House

What does Strong’s say about home? In Hebrew, the word for home is bayith, which is also dwelling, but it gives us more information. The root is banah: to build. Banah can also mean obtain children. That is curious. What are children doing in this definition? What are the children doing sitting next to ‘to build’?

Maybe in homes we build families and legacies? If we look for ways it is translated as “obtain children”, we find Rachel uses this word when she gives her maidservant to Jacob to wed so that she can have children (Gen 30:3). And there it is...she is building her house in the same way Leah is building hers. The family is the building. The children are the construction.

I noticed that banah implies an ongoing act: the work never completes. It is always being done. There is no static house - it is always being built up. If we think of the children, that is true. (Insert laundry and dishes here.) The work isn't complete even after the children are grown.

In contrast, the foolish woman tears her house apart with her own hands. The thing that sticks out to me is that the proverb does not say the foolish woman burns it down or abandons it. She tears it apart with her own hands. The same hands that could be building. The instrument of construction and destruction is the same. Ugh! If you feel my pain, I feel yours. Enough said.

Now if we tug on this word a little more, in the Latin direction, we find the word domus, which means house, dwelling, covering, and concealment. Covering and concealment are fresh layers on our word home. They are interesting words to stick near dwelling. You can hear the echo of domus in the words: domestic, domicile, and dome. We also get dominus: the lord of the house. The one who covers. The one responsible for what happens under the roof. From dominus, you can practically hear the word dominion. When I think of dominion, I don’t think of care, covering or concealment; I think of power and domination. Domination carries with it the ideas of use, subjugation, and extraction. I'm wondering how dominus contains a word like dominion and dominate given their meanings.

It seems highly unlikely that God gave Adam dominion over creation to control, conquer, and do with it as he pleased. It seems a more reasonable position that dominion was not so much about conquering or controlling, as much as it was about tending and keeping; he was called to be the domus of creation in the same way that God is the domus for the whole cosmos. A smaller version of the bigger version.

 The One Who Stands Before

Now I have a bee in my bonnet. It is a bit like a compulsion. Let’s hop on over to the Latin Vulgate and dig up Genesis 1:26. This is where I was always told God gave Adam the dominion mandate. In the NASB it reads:

Then God said, “Let Us make mankind in Our image, according to Our likeness; and let them rule over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the sky and over the livestock and over all the earth, and over every crawling thing that crawls on the earth.”

The King James translates “let them rule” as dominion. But the Vulgate uses a word that comes from praeesse, a word sum of prae + esse.

Prae — before, in front of, at the head of.
Esse — to be.

So literally — to be before. To be in front of. To stand at the head of.

It appears that dominion is not first about ruling over in the sense of domination. But to be the one who goes ahead. Who stands between. Who is positioned in front of what is behind.

Now our word dominus has additional layers. The Lord of the house is not only the one responsible, but also the one who presides over to tend and care. He goes ahead and makes the way smooth. He stands between those who are under and everything that is over.

 A Covering for Shame

This reminds me of one of my favorite stories in the Bible: the story of Ruth and Naomi. Naomi and her husband left their home in the Promised Land because of a famine. For the story to have its full impact, we need to remember that Naomi and her husband spent at least some time in the wilderness. Boaz, who married Ruth, was the son of Rahab the harlot. Rahab and Naomi may have been around the same age.

As the Israelites attacked Jericho, Rahab hung a red cord out her window, just like the Israelites painted red blood on their doorposts, marking their houses as true homes.

The Lord fed Naomi and her husband with manna from heaven. Now there is a famine in the promised land. Because there isn’t enough food, they leave their true home and true God and seek refuge in Moab. In order to get there, they retraced their steps back through the wilderness into the hands of the god of the Moabites. This god demands an offering. This god devours. Naomi loses both her husband and two sons in Moab. It is Ruth who stays by her side. She weeps. She begs. She pleads with Naomi, “Where you go, I will go. Your people, my people. Your God, my God.” I can almost hear the desperation in her voice.

Ironically, or maybe not, Naomi has to go back again by retracing her steps through the wilderness to get back to Bethlehem. With Ruth by her side, they cross the Jordan and then pass by Jericho.

What are the chances that in all of Israel Ruth would find the field of the man whose mother, a harlot, hung a scarlet cord out of a window and saved her family?

Ruth is gleaning in the fields, bearing her shame. She was a widow taking shelter in a land not her own, among a people not her own. Her people began when father and daughter shared the same bed. The other women likely snubbed her and gave her the side-eye. No near kinsman redeemer would take her.

Then along came Boaz, a man predisposed to take covering seriously. His father covered his mother. We still call her Rahab, the harlot. When Ruth shows up on the threshing floor, Boaz takes his garment and covers her, as his father covered his mother. The way a house covers the inhabitants. What's interesting to me in this story of home is that the root word for shame means ‘to cover’. Hidden inside the word shame is the answer to the condition. When Ruth found Boaz, she found a covering for her shame and a place to call home.

That need for covering is innate. We want something between us and the world. I remember hiding under the covers at night when I heard a scary sound. I also remember grabbing a pillow to place in my lap when I watched television. It was my small attempt at covering.

In the garden, Adam and Eve were naked and unashamed. The ancient church believed they were covered in God’s glory. Then they sinned. Their eyes were opened, and they knew they were naked. They did not feel shame until their nakedness became apparent.

Genesis doesn’t say they were ashamed of disobeying God. Their nakedness caused the shame. Their first instinct was to cover themselves with fig leaves, as I covered myself with a pillow. Neither covering was sufficient for the task. God slew an animal and covered them in animal skins. The Orthodox Church believes this animal was a lamb. That makes me wonder about “The Lamb slain from the foundation of the world.” Was it this Lamb?

It also makes me think of 1 Corinthians 13 - where we are told that love bears all things. We could look up both love and bears, but I don't have the room. So, bears it is. I have a sneaking suspicion it will reward us. Turns out that the root of bear has the idea “thatch or roof” contained in it. We are back at the idea of covering, but also a shield. A roof conceals what’s inside and protects from the elements. It sits between the inside and the outside. We are back at home again, putting a roof over our house, covering and concealing what is inside.

The Great Over and Under

In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth. In principio creavit Deus caelum et terram. The first act of creation, after establishing the beginning, is establishing the great over and under. Heaven above. Earth below. It is almost like a house. In fact...

Caelum, heaven, sky, the great dome above, is where we get our word for ceiling. Ceilings are like roofs, but different. Both are part of a house; both are above. But one is inside, and the other is outside. The ceiling is the indoor, a sky in miniature. A copy of a pattern. Every room with a ceiling testifies to the dome of heaven above it. Every room with a floor testifies to the earth below.

We can translate several Latin words as "floor." I looked them up. They all circle around the same meanings: that which is below, something smoothed out, a covering, layering, and something that holds you up or comes in between. That is very similar to the Hebrew words for floor: the bottom (or that which is under/below), smoothed out, land, to spread out, to smooth over, and lay flat.

Our word for floor comes from the Proto-Germanic root meaning flat surface, ground. The floor is the earth brought inside, flattened, leveled, domesticated, made safe to stand on. And plan comes from the same root, a flat surface on which you lay out a design. When planning a home, you lay out a small earth on which builders will construct a small cosmos.

Every child looking up from their bed sees a small caelum while resting on the small earth below.

Between the ceiling and the floor, between the small heaven and the small earth, is the inhabited space. That's where we live, move, and have our being. Just as we live between caelum and terram. The house is not an imitation of the cosmos. It is a participation in its structure.

Is this why some homes make you feel safe and at rest? There is a peace about them. A rightness. Is it because they are taking part in the structure of reality itself? As a child, did I seek the safety of the closet because my home failed to cover? The floors were unstable, and the walls did not not hold; it felt like chaos. Like the cosmos coming undone. Because it was - in miniature.

The Greek word for house is oikos. From oikos we get ecology, the study of the home, the cosmos as household. And economy, the management of the home, the ordering of the household. The Greeks understood what we have forgotten. The cosmos is a house. The house is a cosmos. To manage a home well is to participate in the ordering of the world.

In Hebrew shamayim, heaven, means that which is above. That which covers. And the covering pattern repeats at a smaller scale all the way down.

The sky covers the earth. The dome covers the city. The roof covers the house. The ceiling covers the room. The parent covers the child. Boaz’s garment covers Ruth on the threshing floor. The garment covers the body. The bandage covers the wound.

The bandage is perhaps the most honest of all. A bandage does not pretend the wound is not there. It does not cover so that it can remain in denial. It covers precisely because the wound is real and needs protection while healing happens underneath. Which is exactly what God did with the garments in the garden after the fall. Not pretending. Not erasing. Covering a real wound with a real covering while the long healing begins.

We do this a hundred times a day without knowing we are doing it. Clothing a child. Bandaging a knee. Tucking someone in at night. Holding an umbrella over someone in the rain. Each one a small shamayim. A tiny participation in the gesture God made in the garden. Heaven coming down to earth in the most ordinary acts of daily life.

 The Architecture of Formation:
 Walls That Bear Roofs

Home contains the idea of formation. The ongoing act of building up children who can stand. Having a roof placed on their heads while the walls are still new and the mortar still wet.

The child begins as the building itself. Soft. Unformed. Needing a roof over them before they can bear any weight. But formation, the ongoing banah, is not only covering, it is strengthening. Wall by wall. Course by course. Until the child who once needed a roof entirely becomes someone who can shelter others.

The goal of the covering should be to produce a coverer. Or at least that is where the patterns seem to be leading us. We are growing children who can participate in the great over/under. The contractor's goal is to build walls strong enough to bear a roof. Our children are like the interior walls of a house. Ideally, they will become exterior walls. Those walls will need roofs of their own. Not today. But one day. And those walls need to be strong enough to bear up the roof: strong enough to cover, to hide, to come between the vulnerable and the storm.

This is banah continuing forward through time. Legacy is just bayith extended into the future.

 The Church Fathers Were Here First

When I first began pulling the home thread, I had no idea where it would lead. I just kept tugging and noticing and wondering. My eyes focused on the dictionaries and lexicons. I was busy remembering where I had seen this before. Then, as I came to the end of the thread and looked up, the church Fathers were there, grinning and waiting for me. They could have told me directly, but I suspect I needed my own route home.

Chrysostom refers to the home as both a miniature church and heaven on earth. He encourages hospitality and sheltering others under your roof.

I recently discovered Irenaeus of Lyons who proposed that when God created man, he was immature. The garden was a place for him to grow and develop. Immaturity was the natural starting point. We are to progress toward maturity and ultimately to glorification. It was exciting for me to see how the words we've been tracking contain the theology.

According to Maximus the Confessor, humans were created to be mediators, serving as priests of creation who stand between and bring together divided things into unity. However, individuals must develop this capacity. We are not born as mediators. We are built (banah) into them. The child who once needed mediation becomes the mediator. The wall that once needed a roof learns to bear one. Hold on to Maximus; we'll come back for him in future posts.

John Climacus in The Ladder of Divine Ascent builds the whole of ascetic theology as an architecture; rung by rung, each virtue bearing the weight of the next. This seems to be the pattern. I noticed that as we pulled the thread connected to the word home, we added layer upon layer of meaning. Each new layer supported the next.

As I write this, I notice this is exactly how we teach math. It is a layering of language on a structure. Each additional layer supports the previous one. It is right there in the word floor. The floor is the bottom, the underneath. But it can also mean cover, or quilt, and strata. This pattern is in both the layering and the climbing. I didn't make that connection till now.

It is in the language. It is in the Fathers. It was always already there. Waiting for anyone humble enough to look long enough to let it show its face.

 Home Education

Home education is not school moved to a different building, nor is the factory conveyor belt model moved to the dining room table. And it cannot be better coverage of the curriculum achieved in a more comfortable setting.

It is the ancient work of banah. Of bayith. Of domus and dominion rightly practiced. It is the cosmos in miniature: a ceiling and a floor and the inhabited space between; creatures are formed slowly, carefully, under a covering that knows when to hold and when to yield.

It is the wise woman who builds her house with her own hands. The same hands that could tear it apart but choose instead to build.

It is walls being raised that will one day bear roofs of their own.

It is me, hiding in a closet, with a book and a flashlight. Wooed by words I didn't understand, under a roof of towels and sheets, themselves coverings. Under me, the floor. The ground made smooth enough to both walk on and rest quietly long before I understood the meaning of what I was doing.

It is shamayim over eretz. Heaven over earth. The great over and under, repeated in miniature, in your house, today, in the most ordinary acts of covering and building and tending and keeping.