What Makes A Home? Creating a ‘Thin Space’
Estimated reading time: 8 minutes
Over the weekend I was at an event I’ve been going to four times a year for about five years. I have friends there, and a space where I belong. I am free to be who I am, and be accepted and loved for who I am. It has been another home for me, especially during times when I really needed somewhere to feel that I belonged.
However, the last few times I have been I have struggled to find a place. It has felt a bit more distant, a bit more performative, a bit less engaged. But this last weekend there was a moment when I looked around and saw the hundreds of campfires, heard songs and stories and laughter echoing over the field. I sat around a campfire with dozens and dozens of people. I sang with them and watched them dance. I spoke with friends and laughed and I was simply present in that space.
Except being truly, properly, present in a space is not a simple thing. I felt at home. When I came home at the end of the weekend, I wasn’t simply leaving an event and coming home, I was leaving one home to go to another. Two very different homes, but both places I belong.
The very first article I got published in an academic journal was all about understanding the difference between being roofless and homeless. I’ve been wondering again what makes a home. What makes my home, mine? Not just somewhere that I belong, but something that belongs to me.
More Than Just A Space
Your home is more than just somewhere you live. It has a specific existence as a distinct experience. Your home is subjective to you, it cannot be enforced by another. It is the place where, in one way or another, you belong. It is where you are free to be yourself, to let your guard down, to be honest and open.
Not having a home is far more than not having somewhere to stay. There are lots of people with houses, flats, or somewhere else they can stay and live and sleep. They might even share it with friends or family. But that doesn’t make it a home. If you don’t feel like you belong, if you feel like you can’t be yourself, if you feel unsafe, then it isn’t a home.
A home is a sacred thing. There is a reason why the majority of cultures for (potentially tens of) thousands of years have had strict laws and customs around hospitality. Because our homes, the places where we feel at home, are an extension of our self, at the same time as informing and shaping who we are. There is a movement between us and our home, where we each create the other. Part of that is because of our memories.
Living In Your Memories
The scholar Russel Belk developed the idea of the ‘extended self’ where a person’s sense of identity is extended beyond their inner life to include their possessions, key locations, and special people. In short, the theory argues that we invest our memories, and thus also part of our sense of self into objects outside of ourself. We also frame and shape ourselves around people or ideals that we want to be like. Between these two things – imbuing memory and mimetic development – who we are is shaped, formed, and held, by more than just ‘what is in our head.’
Our home is part of that. A place is our home because we have invested our energy, memory, and sense of self, into it, and because it represents or demonstrates who we are trying to be. As we imbue a place with our memories, with our self, we shape it. Physically, with decorations, objects, and possessions, but also through how we exist in it. But that place also shapes us, through how we act, where we are physically located, and how it relates to others coming into that place.
But a home doesn’t have to be a place. A home can also be a person. We can feel at home with a person for exactly the same reason that we do in a place. Because we have become attached to them at a very deep and profound level. We have imbued our memories, emotions, hopes and dreams, and part of our sense of self, into that person. This can become a bad and dangerous thing, but when done healthily, it can be an incredibly beautiful thing.
When we are home, whether that is in a place, or with a person, we are living in our memories. That person or place, our home, is telling us that we belong, that we are accepted, that we are loved, that we are safe.
Being Safe
Being safe is one of the most fundamental drives for any human. We need to feel safe to be able to function properly. Not only in a place, but with the people around us. Whether we feel safe or not is one of the most important aspects of whether we will feel at home or not.
If you do not feel safe, you will not feel at home.
This includes physical safety, but it also includes psychological and emotional safety. This is why you can have somewhere to stay, or you can be with friends and family, and still not feel at home. Because you do not feel safe there.
It is also why loosing a home can be one of the most painful things possible. Losing a home means losing safety and security, losing a place where you belong, losing a person that you can be truly yourself with.
To make a home, or for a person to make you feel at home, we have to feel safe.
Creating A Thin Space
A home becomes a thin space.
What is a thin space? It is a term taken from the spirituality of Celtic Christianity where the idea is that there are places where the gap between the physical and the spiritual is closer, or thinner, and so makes it easier to feel connected to God and a spiritual reality in the world. They are places of truth, revelation, and recognition that the world is more mysterious and mystical than we might at first expect. They can be churches where people have prayed for hundreds of years. Or they can be a very personal kind of thin place, a spot or a location where you have become so open to the deeper reality of the world, the ‘deep magic’ that Aslan talks about in The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe (by C. S. Lewis), that it becomes easier to do so.
There are also people who become thin spaces for us. People that, when we are together, it is easier to sense and experience those deeper realities. Where love is close at hand, where truth is made easy, where belonging and beauty and acceptance all go together. In those places, time and space and spirit and reality all bend together towards a hidden reality.
In the 2 Kings 6, Elisha and his servant are surrounded by an enemy Army. Elisha turns to his servant and asks God to open his eyes, and the servant sees an army of Angels surrounding them. Or in Genesis 28:16, after a dream, Jacob recognises that God was in a place even though he had not realised that before. There is a hidden depth to reality that most of us, including myself, learn to ignore and put to one side as we grow us.
Our home is that kind of place. Our home becomes a thin space through our memories, through our love, through our safety, through our recognition of truth and beauty and the hidden depths to life that are only experienced in the most profound but often simple ways. Whether it is with a person, or in a place, when we are home, the numinous quality of life is revealed to us in a way that does not normally happen.
Making Our Home In The Wilderness
There are going to be times in life when things feel too much. When everything is falling apart. Or when stress and anxiety are overcoming us. Life is not always going to be easy, and there will be times when we don’t feel safe, don’t feel seen, don’t feel that we belong.
In those times, we need to find the place in the wilderness where we can make our home. Maybe that is a particular space in the world that you can go to. Maybe it is a person you can be with. Maybe, when there is nothing else, it is the space you make inside your own head.
I think a home is something we make, we share, we receive, and we discover. We make it by imbuing our memories, emotions, and hopes into a place or person. We share it, because it does not just belong to us, but is something that creates the opportunity for encounter with the other, whether than is another person, or with God. We receive it, because our sense of being at home also comes from how we are seen and loved by the people around us. And we discover it, because our home is not just something we make or chose, it is a gift to accept and explore and grow within.
Maybe you have lots of places that feel like home. Maybe there is a particular person that makes you feel at home. Or maybe you can feel at home whereever you are because home is something you carry with you. Whatever home is for you, I hope it allows you to find the hidden reality of the world and experience the wonder and beauty that we only know when we are at home.
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