Turning a House Into a Home

“A chair is still a chair even when there’s no one sitting there…but a chair is not a house…and a house is not a home when there’s no one there to hold you tight and no one there you can kiss good night….” So go the opening lyrics of the ’60s song, A House is Not a Home, popularized by Dionne Warwick.

Houses vs. Homes

These lines speak volumes about the difference between a house and a home. You can buy a house furnished with state-of-the-art appliances, a large swimming pool, and a rose garden to die for, or a penthouse offering a breathtaking view of the city skyline, but you certainly can’t buy a home when the concept of home has been abused by real estate developers and agents, or when there is no love in it.

One can reminisce about an old ancestral house where family gatherings were held but it will remain just that – a structure and not a home – unless it becomes a place of sharing. In an article I once read by Fr. Joseph Galdon, S.J., he noted that sharing is sometimes more demanding than giving. “It’s easy to give things, but it’s often very painful and difficult to share. A home is a shared adventure of love…it is made up of very different people. There is Mommy and there is Daddy and there are the children – brothers and sisters…each one of them needs the other,” he says.

It has often been said that children need the love and presence of their parents. No doubt about it, but parents also need their children. And we’re not talking specifically about the time parents are in their sunset years and become wheelchair-bound or bed-ridden. Fr. Galdon reasons that young parents need their children because who is going to challenge parents to love and sacrifice when they have no one except themselves to think of?

Threats to the Family

The song’s lyrics also say a lot about the state of affairs in countless families. I once heard a teenager say that the place where she lived was anything but a home (even if she had all the modern amenities she needed) because her parents had separated and she had lived alone with her grandfather. When she was younger, she said she and her parents rarely ate together, never did things together, never had fun together. Her father was always away for long periods of time as part of his job as a salesman, and her mother would rather play mahjong with her amigas (friends) or attend social functions than play with her or read her bedtime stories.

In this age, where family members ought to live in love, peace, and harmony, the home has encountered all sorts of threats to its stability. We live in a culture of death that advocates abortion, euthanasia, and artificial contraception, as well as divorce, single parenthood, pornography, the drug menace, same-sex unions, alcoholism, unbridled materialism, and instant gratification pushed by consumerism.

Filipino Families

In many Filipino homes, children grow up feeling abandoned by their parents who have found employment overseas. A popular Filipino preacher once said in a Sunday homily that young children don’t care a whit about all the material comforts provided to them by their OFW (overseas Filipino workers) fathers or mothers and never understand why their parents have to be away for a long time to work for the family. No matter how the parents explain to their children why they have to be in Singapore, Saudi Arabia, or Hong Kong to bring home the bacon, the children just think they’ve been abandoned!

I’ve read recent news accounts of a father terribly abusing his daughter, a woman stabbing to death a drug-crazed or drunken husband, and siblings suing each other over inheritance and family property while their aging widowed mother lies comatose in the hospital! We couldn’t agree more with August Strindberg, author of The Son of a Servant, who wrote: “The family has become a home of all social evil, a charitable institution for comfortable women, an anchorage for house-fathers, and a hell for children.”

And our hectic and stressful lifestyles have systematically abolished the family Angelus and dinner time. The home has become a mere boarding house where people go to bathe, change, and sleep. Siblings hardly know each other and are a no-show at family reunions as they slave in different continents. During the rare times they’re together, they waste no time in trooping off to a theme park or a beach but they barely talk or ask about what goes on in each other’s lives.

Compassion and Forgiveness

So how do we turn our house into a home? The answer is not as simple as it sounds. In fact, it’s a difficult and painstaking process – one that involves a person’s resolve to forgive (because the home ought to be a place of good forgivers), to be compassionate, understanding and patient, to remain faithful, and to have a firm purpose of amendment when one has done wrong.

Parents, says columnist and author Fr. Bel San Luis, SVD, are expected to constantly show good example. “If they are given to alcoholism, infidelity, quarrelling, and fighting, what can be expected of the children? But where the parents give good example, obedience is not rendered out of fear of punishment, but rather out of love. Children, on the other hand, are expected to honor, respect, and obey their parents even when they have failings and shortcomings,” he says.

A feature article titled “That Old House” by Elise Chisolm condensed by the Catholic Digest says this about what makes a home: “A new deck, another bathroom and larger kitchens are not always the things that make a house a home. It’s the loved ones inside who bring about the theater of happiness…such as a sullen or joyous ‘Mom, I’m home!’” (That reminds me of my husband’s “Girls!” as he eagerly calls to me and our only daughter as soon as he gets home.)