Book Club: Hallowed Be This House (or Splendor In the Ordinary)

I was so excited to read Hallowed Be This House: Finding Signs of Heaven in Your Home, because I am a Thomas Howard devotee. The first book of his I read was On Being Catholic, when I was in college, and now I press it into the hands of all my Catholic friends.

Howard, a convert, has an elegant writing style that befits his profession (he was an English professor), and I have to admit, this is part of what draws me to him. I know that might not be for everyone.

But this little book is definitely for everyone, because we all have some place we call home, whether it’s a bedroom, a dorm room, an apartment, or an estate. Howard takes each room in the house and methodically addresses the things we do there, and how we can incorporate our faith into things like dusting, bathing, and sleeping.

Howard acknowledges, early on, that this may sound preposterous. “It is hard to see ourselves as walking daily among the hallows–that is, as carrying on the commonplace routines of our ordinary life in the presence of mighty mysteries that would ravish and terrify us if this veil of ordinariness were suddenly stripped away.” Somehow, Howard says, “we have gotten swept into a millrace, and it’s nonstop flailing and thrashing just to keep ourselves from drowning.”

I can relate to this. I live alone, but even then, the housework piles up. How can one person, for example, have so many dishes? How can there be so many trash cans to empty? How can the papers breed and multiply all over my kitchen table, like the brooms in Fantasia? Has some Sorcerer’s apprentice bewitched my house?

I don’t think so. I’m caught in the millrace Howard talks about. But how do we get out of it?

Howard has gentle answers for these questions. He takes us slowly through the house, starting with the door, and ending with the bedroom, and, with his unique perspective, talks about how we can hallow our houses–how we can make them holy.

Howard suggests that a closed door, for example, protects us from “mere randomness and clutter.” The living room is a place where a family practices charity to each other; we learn the rules of order for living together in a household.

I found a point in the living room chapter to be rather evocative. It’s when Howard talks about the purpose of rules. The example he uses is Peter, the son, wanting several pieces of chocolate. The parent says he may have one. Peter protests this. Who hasn’t seen this happen? Who hasn’t been that child, wanting more chocolate?

But the chocolate isn’t just chocolate: it’s a lesson between love and making someone happy. The child thinks that more chocolate will make him happy. The parent knows it will not lead to good results. Howard brings this to bear on religion, and our relationship with God. “Left to his own way, he will choose the bogus, and land in surfeit and slavery (hell); led in mine, he will deny the bogus and choose the real, and find mastery and liberty (heaven). His way will lead him to the pestilent bog, mine to the glittering summit.”

All this from a discussion about the living room!

In the chapter on the Kitchen, Howard talks about housework and the daily routines of life as acts of love, which, of course, they are. Laundry is done because people in the house care about the others, so they have clean clothes to wear. The dishes are done so that people have clean plates and cups to use when they are hungry or thirsty. Food is cooked to satisfy others. Everything in the daily routine is really an act of love, either for the family, or for the place, or for both. “Nobody,” Howard writes, “supposes for a moment that it will be all ecstatic. Learning to love is like learning anything else: A great deal of it is a matter of fumbling through the steps until they become automatic and habitual…the saints would tell us that their freedom and joy stand at the far end of long years of getting into habits of Charity. It is not all ecstatic….but handed to us from hour to hour, year to year, in muted, plain forms.”

That’s what my dishes are tonight–muted, plain forms. So is the sweeping and the vacuuming and the dusting and the mopping, and the changing of bedsheets, and balancing the checkbook. Is it all fun? Well, no. We all know that unlike playing house, actually keeping house is not as lovely as Disney’s Snow White would make it seem.

But Howard tells us that the things we do every day are things of eternity–God is in them all. St.Teresa of Avila said she found God amid the pots and pans, and Benedictines have ora et labora–prayer and work–as their motto. Members of Opus Dei commit their every action every day to God. When St. Paul tells us to “pray constantly,” this is what he means, what Howard presents to us here. We can pray constantly by doing these small things with great love (as Bl. Teresa of Calcutta often exhorted).

So now I’m going to unload the dishwasher, then load it again, and start another cycle. And then do battle with the papers on the table. Because that’s part of housekeeping, and they’re my responsibility. Service, as Howard writes, is behind the scenes, and so is all this. But God, and our families, see it.

Emily has been scribbling down words since she was old enough to hold a pen, but now does most of her scribbling at Catholic Poster Girl. A lifelong Catholic, she received her BA in English Literature and Political Science from Capital University, in her hometown of Columbus, in 2004. She has one godson and is the oldest of three kids.

Beatitudes for Wives

Just Like Mary

Book Club::Hallowed Be This House

10 Comments

Marcia February 13, 2013

Thank you so much for the previews, ladies! That’s because I haven’t started on the book, but I am raring to. I just want to finish “The Story of a Soul,” first because I will ask my daughter to read it, and I want to be able to properly guide her.

Anyway… from what you have shared, it does seem good to start with the perspectives/ attitudes of faith, quiet service, fortitude, and cheerfulness. I do love Teresa’s term, “intentional living.” It must be how our Blessed Mother lived while she lovingly served and looked after the needs of the Holy Family. Truly, she “pondered all these in her heart,” because that was where she conversed with God as she went about doing seemingly mundane tasks around the house.

It is a good time to be thankful that the Lord has blessed us with homes to live in and to take care of, and be enriched by His love as we do so.

‘Can’t wait to get started on the book
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Jenny February 6, 2013

Thank you for this thoughtful post Emily.

Right before the quote about the “hallows” I had highlighted a couple of sentences…”No matter what holy places there are for Christians (and some give more weight to this than others), any Christian, when the chips are down, knows that his own body, like that of Mary, is God’s earthly sanctuary. It is to this temple that a Christian must give his most serious attentions. It is more important for this to be swept and attended to than for the church building to be tidy.

I think this is a key point among faithful women in the church. It is easier to volunteer to help clean the church than to keep our own “Domestic Church” clean. Cleaning our own home seems so ordinary, so mundane.

Ordinariness, in a word, open out onto mystery, and the thing that men are supposed to do with mystery is to hallow it, for it all belongs to the Holy One.

I loved that quote! Especially in light of thinking the care we give our own home is so dreadfully ordinary. And there is another one…

The secular, or the profane, which is how we usually think of our ordinariness, is actually holiness unrecognized.

And one more along the lines of the ordinariness..

Holy things are ordinary things perceived in their true light, that is, as bearers of the divine mysteries and glory to us. Looked at this way, eating becomes eucharistic, and working becomes the opus dei the “work of God”, and loving becomes an image of the City of God.

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Nikita February 6, 2013

I need to read this book, it would seem this would help me especially for this newlywed who does nothing more than cleans.

Em, this was a wonderful column!
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- Emily February 8, 2013
  
  Thanks, hon!
  The cleaning is constant, isn’t it? It’s amazing how much of it there is ALWAYS to do.
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Theresa February 6, 2013

Oh…one more thing. I loved in the beginning when he talks about a constant *dying to self*. We die to self when we let someone cut in front of us in traffic…the farmer dies to self when he sacrifices time and labor to grow food for us…the mother dies to self when she cooks dinner for her family even though she is exhausted. I thought this was a great reflection.
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- Emily February 8, 2013
  
  “Dying to self” is so a propos, esp. with Lent almost here. Does anyone else feel like they have a “limit” on this they need to expand? Like, OK, I’ll let you go in front of me in traffic. I’ll smile at you when you unload your two carts at the grocery store and proceed to haggle over the price of an item while I wait with my 20 items behind you. But then, it’s like, I am OUT of patience! I know I need to fix this…
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  - Theresa February 8, 2013
    
    I am right there with you…with gritted teeth haha! Driving really gets me especially living in a major city. I guess each time we will be tried more and more.
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  - Angela Pea February 8, 2013
    
    Um, yeah! I’ll just straight up tell you guys, I live out in the boonies, but I work in Ft. Worth – and every single major interstate and highway in the Dallas/Fort Worth area has some sort of construction going on right now. Every. Blasted. One. (Yes, I have access to construction data as part of my job…) Downtown Ft. Worth is completely torn up right now with utility work and the construction of not one, but TWO new buildings. Some of these annoying projects I actually designed myself. I think I should have made better temporary traffic routing. It’s a major inconvenience to drive anywhere – and I totally lose my patience every day. I honor the unwritten “alternate merge” rule, you know, taking turns while three lanes funnel down to one. There are always these incredibly Me First Rude folks driving expensive sport cars who just speed down the closed lane and then cut in front. Yes, I let them in, but mercy, I just want to ram the back end of their cars with my van and scream “Towanda!!” a-la the parking lot scene from Fried Green Tomatoes!
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    - Emily February 8, 2013
      
      THAT PARKING LOT SCENE!!!!! Oh my gosh I want to re-enact that on a daily basis…..especially when people take my parking spot in front of my house….
      
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Theresa February 6, 2013

Yay! My copy came in yesterday at the library! I really like it so far. I didn’t read Living Room yet but got up to that chapter.

The quote you shared about it being hard to see that we walk *among the hallows* really struck me when I read it…like WOW!

These little things we do day in and day out…they ARE sacred. I know that…but…it’s so easy to forget when you get into *auto mode* or you start rushing around because you spend too much time on Pinterest and the bathroom should of been finished an hour ago.

It really is about intentional living…slowing down…and entering each moment with all our being…aware of His Presence.

I found the chapter on the door interesting. Our garage is detached so we don’t come through the garage or anything but we do have a mudroom in the back that we frequently use especially when bringing in groceries. I thought how important it is to keep our main entrance…where we welcome guests…simple and neat. I like to keep a candle lit on the radiator next to the door and I have an icon hanging over that area. Our steps to upstairs are there as soon as you walk in so I try to keep the steps free of shoes LOL! There is a closet to hang coats too.

I look forward to hearing from others. We are head to our art museum class but will check in later.
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