Co-Creating a Homely House

Michie · 2025-05-01T09:28:20-0500

At the beginning of Book Two of The Fellowship of the Ring, J.R.R. Tolkien gives a description of Elrond’s “Last Homely House east of the Sea.”

That house was, as Bilbo had long ago reported, ‘a perfect house, whether you like food or sleep or story-telling or singing, or just sitting and thinking best, or a pleasant mixture of them all’. Merely to be there was a cure for weariness, fear, and sadness. (Book II, Ch. 1)

Tolkien sums up in a few short lines, what it means for a home to be a home. It is a place where a person can simply be cared for, nourished, and restored, where the cares of the world are softened and one can feel oneself whole again before going out into the world once more. We might ask, how does one go about making one’s dwelling a “homely house”? And as Christians, we also ask ourselves how we live up to the ideal of home that our late Holy Father Francis held out in his encyclical Amoris Laetitia when he quoted Psalm 128:

Blessed is every one who fears the Lord,
who walks in his ways!
You shall eat the fruit of the labor of your hands;
you shall be happy, and it shall be well with you.
Your wife will be like a fruitful vine
within your house;
your children will be like olive shoots
around your table.
Lo, thus shall the man be blessed
who fears the Lord.
The Lord bless you from Zion!
May you see the prosperity of Jerusalem
all the days of your life!
May you see your children’s children!
Peace be upon Israel! (Psalm 128:1-6)

This biblical family, as Francis writes, is “sitting around the festive table” and at “the centre we see the father and mother, a couple with their personal story of love” (AL, 9). He tells us that “the couple that loves and begets life is a true, living icon [. . .] capable of revealing God the Creator and Saviour,” and “for this reason, fruitful love becomes a symbol of God’s inner life” (AL, 11).

Continued below.