The Homemaker

LED lights destroy living rooms, cultures, and peace of mind. But I probably should define my terms.

Let’s begin with what I mean by “well-educated.” A woman who is well-educated has not only drunk (sipped at the very least; gulped as from a firehose, even better) from the streams of truth, beauty, goodness, and liberty, but she also knows it’s source. She knows that there has been a great conversation going since creation, like a slip-stream into which she has plunged. (She has experienced that special and shared sensation, “Ah! This has been here all along and I never knew it!”). She has listened to the voices of its participants - those great minds of the past, the histories, the philosophies, the ideologies - and she has gleaned, sifted, weighed, and found the gold amidst the dross. She knows on whose shoulders she stands. She has the map of history in her mind and she’s marked the star on the chart that says, “You are here.” (By the way, if you haven’t gotten this from your education, then your education cannot be called such). She knows who she is and what she’s for. She goes about her day with that telos in mind. That phrase “goes about her day” will come up again later.

Define “culture.” Culture, as good Webster in 1828 defines it, actually comes from the word cultivate - to till, prepare, improve, or grow for the sake of something’s enrichment, productivity, correction, and sense of thriving. So the culture of our home, our town, our city, our nation is the process of our laboring hard to produce a rich and wonderful soil in which to live. This applies both to the grand scheme of a nation and to the microcosm the homemaker’s home. Both have a culture dependent on the growth of the mind not devoid of virtue.

Just as God built the world for us - with knowledge, wisdom, skill, beauty, and purpose - so homemakers build a home for their people. But they must be well-educated homemakers because they must build as God built - with knowledge, wisdom, skill, beauty, and purpose. Any one of these missing, and the house falls down. And, to go a step further, imagine the opposite! Many a woman has hacked away at a home with ignorance, folly, incompetence, ugliness, and mission drift…and worse yet, no mission at all. But a true homemaker must understand her craft and why it matters. One doesn’t set about building a bridge without knowing WHY the bridge needs to be built, and certainly one cannot build a bridge if one doesn’t know how to go about it. The robust education, of which Christ is in all and through all and for all, is the homemaker’s toolbox of tools for building the home; Christ is the blueprint and the why.

The current culture, black and smoking in the cauldron, is offered loudly to us by the purple-haired, cat-obsessed, screechy androgynous woman, whom you can see has no future. She has nothing to offer. She has no knowledge of history. No idea who she is or why she is here. She clearly doesn’t know what beauty is, and she refuses logic and truth. Thus, she has no tools and no why. She cannot build anything. Her only culture is one of death, like that of Leviticus’ mold-infested house, too far gone and fit only for razing. If she does attempt to make a house (which most of her kind don’t even try), the house can only evidence tatters, shambles, ruin, and rot.

"The homemaker, who takes upon herself to make a home come hell or high water, knows if she doesn’t shape her people, someone else will."

In contrast, the well-educated woman, the one who, remember, has conversed with the great ones of history, understands what built the Western mind, and comports herself with the dignity and beauty given to her by Wisdom himself - THIS woman can DO something with her house. SHE can build! Every truth, beauty, and goodness is at her disposal. These are her tools and she uses them with finesse, panache, grace, elegance, and wit. Her home is a stream of liberty. Her home is warm, inviting. She is the matron of a table full of rich conversation - feasts for the soul and the belly. She understands the times, she engages with thought, she reasons together with her husband, with her guests. She offers clear and logical conversation. It permeates the hearts and minds of her children and of her guests. Love and beauty are impressed upon those around her table, like a thumbprint in the clay. They leave changed, their eternal souls forever marked.

And so, “she goes about her day.” Day by day, the homemaker uses these magical tools at her disposal to do something very powerful - training arrows. Her children are her culture for which she labors, and she knows that like yeast, they will soon spread out into the world, changing the environments they touch, expanding the Kingdom. So she, sharp herself and continually keeping herself so, likewise sharpens them. Realize, she would have nothing to offer their little hearts and minds if she knew nothing! When the hard questions come (and they come early and fast), she will know what to say. Their hearts are hungry for truth, for the why, their eager eyes looking to her to order their world, to give them sturdy ground on which to stand. An un-educated woman might be able to say to her son, “We don’t do that. That is wrong.” And she would be right. But soon, he will ask “Why?” Can she tell him why is it wrong? And could she draw on samples from literature, or logic, or history that might help illustrate this to his little imagination? And might she recall that this thought has been thought before by so-and-so in the 17th century, or heralded in Ecclesiastes? Does she have a copiousness from which to draw? Can she truly sharpen those arrows, or will they suffer dullness until a usurper volunteers the sharpening?

Thus, the homemaker, who takes upon herself to make a home come hell or high water, knows if she doesn’t shape her people, someone else will. She knows that through her daily tasks runs this stream of wisdom and insight, knowledge and truth, goodness and beauty that pours out of her into her people. It happens humbly though, meal by meal, budget by budget, room by room, endeavor by endeavor, child by child. Her mind, her virtues, her soul is making future civilizations. She is creating a culture in which boys and girls are growing into men and women - brethren of the King who, like weapons of a mighty man, will not be inconsequential when their time comes. Every choice she makes for her home is a purposed one to create the atmosphere from which come straight-backed bold souls. Every choice - that correction, this art, that couch, these clothes, that menu, this number of babies, that house rule, these books, that wallpaper, those guests, these hugs, this music - is made in light of her education. Which means that the education better be good. If it isn’t, her home and her people in it may be grasping for handles on this world, for joy, for anything utterly satisfying. Worse, they may lose this bright-burning hunger altogether and find their appetites twisted for the enemy. But if it is - if her education really bore a wealth of wisdom and knowledge, virtue and liberty - not only will her home forge potent culture-makers, but she can never err in at least one thing (to end triumphantly on my first point): making sure that every lamp is fixed with that warm, jolly little bulb we call the incandescent that makes the outsider look through the windows and say as he passes, “Something magical is happening in there.”