Defining “home” is a surprisingly difficult task. Home looks different for different people and, even more ambiguous, home can change for each of us throughout our lifetimes. Sometimes it’s a place, sometimes it’s a person, and sometimes it’s an undefinable sense of belonging. But what if home is supposed to be more than something we simply define? Could we actually be called to become a home for each other? Natalia Marandiuc believes so.

Natalia joined Evan Rosa on For the Life of the World to discuss the meaning of home, the self, and our agency to create. Home, Natalia demonstrates, may house a deeper call to love and embrace diversity.

Home as a Space of Love

Natalia starts by sharing about her own idea of home as a strange place. In her book, The Goodness of Home, she focused on how home grows in us, and we grow in homes relationally, rather than spatially. “Space is relative in an age of migration when spaces can be fractured and sometimes remain fragments of memory in people's lives,” she shares. “I look at home as a space of love, a space of love among people, but particularly love among people that is elevated by the presence of God within human relations of love.”

Home, as it includes both human participants and God’s willing presence, shapes a sturdiness and dynamism that Earth alone is incapable of creating, Natalia shares. This dynamism of home leads her to use the word as both a noun and verb.

“I look at home as a space of love, a space of love among people, but particularly love among people that is elevated by the presence of God within human relations of love.”

This dynamism of home leads her to use the word as both a noun and verb.

I used the term home as a noun and as a verb. In fact, I use the word self also as a noun and as a verb. So we “home” each other. We “self” each other and we “self” the world… these are the kind of relations that anchor us, so as to be able to go out and about in the world and make it a place of more justice, a place of increased goodness and returned to our places of nourishment, to, to our attachment homes that give us the nurture that we need in order to have the strength to keep going and do a number of things. In other words, home conceived in this way is a place that we come back to though away from. It's a dynamic that allows for continuities and discontinuities. So it's not a prison, it's a place of nurture.

The World of Enormous Differences

Individual experiences and agency within the world, Natalia shares, are cultivated and produced by our web of relationships. “Our agency, and in fact our freedom,” she shares, “is not just a given, but something that grows through these relations of belonging. To be yourself is not just a static reality, but rather a progression, a becoming.”

Natalia explains that the most fundamental expression of our agency is to co-create with God, to participate in our own shaping. This, she shares, is where our differences arise: differences that are a part of the goodness of creation, yet also reveal where creation is fallen.

“To be yourself is not just a static reality, but rather a progression, a becoming.”

“While differences are multifarious and beautiful,” Natalia shares, “and perhaps at the core of what is beautiful in the world is that the world is indeed so much permeated by diversity in every sense of the word, this is precisely where the world and human lives are broken, are malfunctioning. And in being so, we are further harming and malforming each other.”

A Love-Rich Theological Anthropology

The solution to this, Natalia suggests, is to share and co-create in the healing process, as well. As each person comes from God’s love, power that is “soft and yet infinitely strong,” she shares that we each have the unique capacity to channel value and healing through the fluidity of God’s love directly to another person.

She shares that the “power of divine love that comes towards us, keeps coming and we co-participate in it: that I would argue is stronger than the strength of the injustices, the structural injustice and the structural inequities that keep human differences in toxic places. That toxicity can be cleansed away literally in the divine river of love.”

We each have the unique capacity to channel value and healing through the fluidity of God’s love directly to another person.

Ultimately, Natalia argues for a “love-rich theological anthropology.”

It's a proposal for the becoming of the self and the healing of the self. It's a fortified, robust enough self, empowered by the love of God, which inhabits human loves to resist structures of sexism, structures of queer phobia, structures of racism, structures of patriarchy, and instead, to participate in a living structure of love that is ultimately sourced in the infinite love that circulates within the Trinity, and is poured into the human fabric of relationality.

Our call to participate in justice, to partner with God in healing, allows us to become home for each other.

To listen to more of Natalia’s conversation with Evan Rosa, listen to episode 24 of For the Life of the World.

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