The Metaphor of the HouseRead Time 10 min

In her book, “This War is the Passion,” Carryl Houselander writes, “Christ asks for a home in your soul, where he can be at rest with you, where he can talk easily to you, where you and he, alone together, can laugh and be silent and be delighted with one another.”

At the end of the Sermon on the Mount in the Gospel of Matthew, Jesus says, “Everyone then who hears these words of mine and does them will be like a wise man who built his house upon the rock; and the rain fell, and the floods came, and the winds blew and beat upon that house, but it did not fall, because it had been founded on the rock. And everyone who hears these words of mine and does not do them will be like a foolish man who built his house upon the sand; and the rain fell, and the floods came, and the winds blew and beat against that house and it fell and great was the fall of it.”

I listen to a lot of interviews with secular artists, and there are many of them who grew up with some kind of Christianity and then left their faith. I’ve noticed a number of them who point to the lynchpin of their departure as the time when they got to know non-Christians who were simply and genuinely good people. One of them talked about an exercise in his youth group that was explicitly meant to teach the students to not be friends with non-Christians because of the likelihood that they would be corrupted by them. That turns out to be a strangely inverted self-fulfilling prophecy — not because the advice is sound but because it is so deeply flawed.

When I’m not paying much attention to the parable of the two foundations, I tend to think it’s about the difference between Christians and non-Christians and overlook the fact that for those of us who are practicing Catholics, there is a much more urgent metaphor. As Catholics of goodwill, it is still remarkably easy to build our house on something other than God.

All the external practices of our faith — the sacraments and the spiritual readings, the liturgical forms and the social teachings, the devotional practices and the Catholic community events — all of it is good and much of it is absolutely vital. But if any one of those things becomes the actual foundation of our faith, everything else will get misaligned. Our faith is about the living God and our relationship with him, and we need all kinds of teachings and practices in place to help keep us actively present in that relationship. But all those things are the walls of the home, not the foundation. If we try to make anything other than God into our foundation, everything else will get thrown out of whack and we’ll end up teaching people things like “non-Christians will corrupt you.”

And it makes sense. If our foundation is, for example, the moral teachings of the Church, instead of Jesus, we might be so anxious about perfectly following the rules that we think a person who doesn’t know the rules is a danger to our ability to follow them and consequently miss the beauty of encountering another person, created by God. As if that weren’t bad enough, once we do inevitably encounter a person who isn’t Catholic and discover that they are, in fact, good, it will shake the very foundations of our house. If being a moral person is the foundation and people can be moral without knowing God, what will that do to the rest of our faith? It turns out that that house is built on sand. If our foundation is Christ, however, we can encounter non-Christians as they are: people God created out of love. We can approach them with love and with wonder at the vast beauty of God’s creation where even people who do not know him can be so beautiful and good. And from that place of genuine love, we even more urgently desire that they too will come into relationship with God. God, who is love, is the only secure foundation.

I think this is why people use the language of “reconstruction.” At a human level at least, if the structure of the faith has been built on something other than God, it might require a full demolition in order to start from a new and better foundation. But of course, in God’s great mercy, we don’t have to rely on our human strength for the renovations of our interior home. The psalmist says, “Unless the Lord builds the house, those who build it labor in vain.” No matter how poorly my house is constructed, the Lord’s mercy can do all the reconstruction I need. I have encountered some storms in my life that felt like they might destroy the house of my faith. But when the rain let up and the wind settled, I found that what had actually happened was the demolition of the aspects of my faith that needed renovation anyways. My foundation had remained, and God was able to rebuild in a way that kept the essential things intact and my relationship with them stronger.

With the wrong foundation, any storm will throw our whole house into disarray. And even if we manage to keep it standing, we will spend all of our time on upkeep and none of our time doing what the house is meant for. But with God as our foundation, our home will not only withstand the storms, it will be ready for its intended purpose: to be at home with Christ, to be at rest with him, to be alone together, to laugh and be silent and be delighted with one another.