Evan Rosa: For the Life of the World is produced by the Yale Center for Faith & Culture. For more information visit faith.yale.edu. 

Hello friends. During a part of this episode on the complicated nature of home during a pandemic, the topic of domestic violence comes up. Now, this is a serious and sensitive matter. If you or someone you know is suffering from abuse, call the National Domestic Violence Hotline at +1 800-799-7233. Or, if you're unable to speak safely, you can log into thehotline.org. Or text "Love is" to 22522.

Miroslav Volf: End up being these places where intimate relationship that can be extraordinarily beautiful can also deeply sour. And people are in constant feuds, constant competition, never being satisfied, undermining each other. And that can turn that into living hell for many, many people. 

Human beings are living things that develop, but that's change. And that's why home has to be this living and breathing reality. Relationships are that, I think. 

Evan Rosa: This is For the Life of the World, a podcast about seeking and living a life worthy of our humanity. In this conversation, Miroslav Volf and Ryan McAnnally-Linz observe the fraught and tense and ambivalent nature of our houses and homes. Even the very meaning of home. This isn't all very new and strange-feeling in a time of shelter-in-place, homeschooling, remote-working, pandemic. They hit so many good topics and explain them conversationally. Home is a paradox. Home as an essentially permeable and porous breathing organism. How crisis upsets the resonance of the beautiful ordinary, and explanation of the ambivalence of home, a place of hospitality and hostility. And finally a concluding meditation on the parable of the prodigal son, "the un-homing of home" from Miroslav. Definitely hang around for that at the end. Here's Ryan to queue things up.

Ryan McAnnally-Linz: I'm Ryan McAnnally-Linz with the Yale Center for Faith & Culture. Around the world today, people are moving less. Apple recently released data from their Maps that shows that searches for routes in the United States are down something like 37-45%. We just aren't going as many places as usual. And as a result, most of us are at home more. One thing that that's done is, in a lot of ways, made the outside world feel less real. Because you see it less. I don't take my son to school every day. And so I don't visit the coffee shop where I buy him his morning muffin and I don't see the same buildings. I don't pass the same parks. The whole structure of the social world that I live in is less visible to me because I'm passing through it less.

I think in general, our experience of the world outside our homes, the world outside ourselves and our most immediate environs, has been fundamentally altered by this situation of quarantine, of staying at home, of social distancing. It makes everything seem distant, mediated. But the really surprising thing to me is that even home feels less real. It's less home-like and you'd think, "We're spending so much time at home. It should feel like the realest thing right now. It should feel especially like home." But for me, at least, it doesn't. And I wonder why that is. Is it because, strangely, we're seeing more of it and so seeing new things? Is it because we're doing different things there? We're working at home, a lot of us. Or something like that. Or is it that there's an ambivalence to the very meaning of home that was always there, hiding in plain sight, and we're just seeing it now?

Today Miroslav Volf and I discuss all the ways that COVID reveals realities that have already been there, shows us our world in a new light and sometimes not a very flattering one. For instance, there are all these inequalities that at some level we knew about, but under these new conditions, they're just so much clearer when you're told to shelter in place and some people have no place to stay. When education suddenly moves 100% online and some people have no internet connection. When we're staying at home, and some people's houses are palaces and others are hovels. Some of us are able to stay at home. Some of us have to go out to work, have to risk our health and the health of our families.

In a similar way, I think COVID reveals something like the promise and the perils of home itself. It's so obvious now the ways that home can be a place of shelter and safety in a time of crisis. But homes can also be places of really deep tension, of boredom, of hostility, even violence. Precisely the sort of intimacy and closeness that can make homes such good things also makes us vulnerable to their breakdown.

That's all the sort of stuff that COVID reveals, that this crisis shows us about our world and throws into sharper relief. But paradoxically COVID also hides exactly some of the things that it reveals. Those without internet access just don't show up in our lives anymore. Their only presence is in the form of their absence. The world starts to shrink to our neighborhood or apartment building. There are these vacant streets that don't have people on them. The world outside the home starts to come to us really only through the same sort of media that we use for entertainment and the line between the two starts to get blurred. We no longer see the unhoused people of our cities if we're shut inside. 

Maybe most disturbingly, the violence that all too often happens in homes can get covered over when all of us are staying at home. There are bruises that don't get seen and the avenues for escape or for respite seem like they're closed off. If you're suffering from abuse right now, please do take advantage of those resources that we mentioned at the beginning of the show and that you can find in the show notes. And look, if you're finding that your behavior towards your partner or your children is changing in these times in ways that are worrying or disturbing, you can call that same number and get some help too. 

On this episode of For the Life of the World, Miroslav Volf and I take some time to discuss the place I'm in right now; the place you're probably listening from. That ambivalent, promising, also often threatening place called home.

The physical place of our homes is even more salient, even more a big feature of our life, then it already may have been. But it's also because of that, that the kind of quality and character of home has changed. We're doing things that we didn't do before. We're having to live in ways that we really weren't prepared for in our homes. And I'm finding in my own experience that this shifts the way home appears in my life and raises a bunch of questions and sometimes problems that I think it's worth spending some time trying to sort out. And Miroslav, I was wondering, you know, what sorts of questions are your mind? What sort of observations have you made as you've been, I think, similarly, having this new relation to the physical space of your house over these past few weeks?

Miroslav Volf: Yeah, that's a very good question: how the relationship to the lived space changes with the changes that happened in the outside. I suppose, I realized that home needs tending. And obviously it's difficult to tend home when you are spending so much time in it, especially if other activities are happening at home. And that entails certain kinds of disruption. But I feel that, it's very quickly that what used to be "home" turns to be something like, "space in which you feel slightly uneasy" and uneasy also because it should be home, but, it has become a kind of parody of itself. And that may be because people are there, spend more time together, leave traces of themselves all over the place, work and live under pressure, and then don't have enough emotional and other energy in order to attend to the home. But I feel that home, as a physical space, could be such an incredible respite and refuge but it can easily become exactly opposite. Kind of a chaotic space in which I am disoriented and which always calls to me. What home does offer to me: you know, I'm at home, and there's this thing that needs to be done, and this thing that needs to be done at home, and then I think, "Oh my God, when will I get to all of this?" And then I don't get to enjoy the goodness of it because it's always calling for me to do something else. And I think that kind of feeling is exacerbated when, in under crisis situations, one is forced to spend more time at home. 

Ryan McAnnally-Linz: It's strange. You know, like, home is certainly a thing that needs to take, it needs time to develop. You move into a new apartment; it isn't automatically home. Even when you stock it with all of your things that go into making a place a home, it takes time and a space. And so you might have the thought that, "Well, if you're spending more time in a space, it's going to feel more homey." My experience so far has been that that's not entirely true. Well, it can be almost alienating to have this kind of enforced being at home, enforced being in the house. And maybe the little things get amplified more. 

Miroslav Volf: Well, one of the things that struck me in the recent issue of The New Yorker, a lot of it was about experiences of a variety of folks living under the COVID regime, when there's this one cartoon that comes from Brooklyn. And there's this disarray in what everybody there thought was a home, and suddenly, after just a few days, it becomes this disorienting thing. And I think, so, we need on the one hand, a home as respite. We're kind of assaulted, right? And we need an environment that is suitable for us to letting down our guards. Thinking that we are, that we can just relax for awhile. And when living in it disrupts it and makes it even more difficult to have a sense of belonging, I think it exacerbates the sense of alienation. 

You know, one of the things I was struck by is how many artists, and at least two of them personal friends, friends of mine, have started to do, kind of, YouTube, Instagram, other kinds of presentation. Where they invite folks into their studios and they show how they create something or how they look at a thing, an object, and how they translate the careful observation and internalization of that on that object and transfer it onto paper. A very good example is Mako Fujimura. He's got regular posts live from Mako's studio. And, it seemed to me so interesting that objects of beauty have become important for us. We want to nurture the space that is beautiful with which we can resonate.

We can't resonate with so much that's going on outside because streets are empty. And, we feel that people who we encounter, even though we don't want to experience them this way, there's a kind of uncertainty to whether I'm seen as a threat and whether I see them as a threat. And that's a very unsettling space to be. And a space with which we do not resonate and from which we shy away. And home is supposed to be this place in which we resonate: resonate with things that are at home. They're our things, they speak to us. They've spoken to us over the time, if we had this, all these conversations with them. And they can be a table, they can be a piece of art. They can be a knife that I use all the time. All sorts of things. Objects of this sort are home, elements of home, when they resonate. And yet. under crisis situation, they start not to resonate. 

I mean, I recall in former Yugoslavia during the war, in the 1990s, when many refugees had to leave their own homes and then end up in the homes of relatives, often two or three families living in the same space... it was incredibly hard. Almost like a home that was occupied. And that's by people who you like, people who you want to help, people who are there because you have extended hospitality to them and who appreciate that. And nonetheless, there was this sense of struggle and difficulty and alienation. Because something of the ordinariness of the ordinary, expected of the ordinary, that speaks of the ordinary, that I feel at home, and I can relax into it, and, it will stay like that for a while, is missing. I think that physical spaces often do that for us.

One more thought about my own experience, which occurred to me for the first time: I live in a home which has a yard, which has this typical New England stone fence. And I find myself-- there's a one portion of the fence, a lot of portions of the fence, kind of falling apart a little bit --and I find myself every day going out, spending time with my daughter, and mending that fence. I want to set it right. Why do I spend so much time wanting to make this nice, where I normally don't spend very much time in the garden, and I'm not terribly keen on work? I can do it and I can enjoy it, but not every single day almost, when it isn't raining! And I think it has something to do with this sense of, "Oh, this, could speak to me more and I need things to speak to me. I need home to be home." 

Ryan McAnnally-Linz: That's interesting. I, well, my kids actually, have been really into doing decorative things in the house these past few weeks. I think that same sort of impulse. And then I'm feeling like the individual house that I live in is being severed from the network of home spaces. You know, my neighborhood and my city, broader Connecticut, all of that sort of stuff, they give it its intelligibility. That's to say, the meaning and residents of this one place depend on it being set in a bunch of contexts. I'm finding things don't have the same meaning they should have. That there's some sort of... there's kind of this... it feels like living in a snow globe, in some sort of way. There's like a lack of permeability. 

And it's weird because this is precisely a time when global phenomena are impinging like crazy on particular places and the way we're able to inhabit them. But at the same time, all of those outside events seem really muted and distant. You know, it's hard to know how to relate to the particular place when its relation to everything else is so transformed. I'm worrying about the ways that what's outside starts to feel less real. It's getting harder for me to imagine other people's experiences as I'm so located in one place, and the world seems in some sense to shrink a little bit. So I can know I'm reading way too much news. I think that's relatively common these days. Somehow it feels more distant than usual, because things that aren't happening in this space aren't part of my daily, like, actual physical engagement with the world. 

Miroslav Volf: No, I think it makes sense. I think different, but if I heard you rightly, you're describing a sense that home, part of what home is, is what is being brought in and taken out all the time. It's a kind of breathing organism, that has open doors and open windows. Occasionally open. People come in, an amount of things come in. The world, it's connected with the world. That's true of its physicality as being set, but it's true also of people who come in and come out, and they bring certain... they bring themselves, as having been outside, into the home. And then they go out as having been at home. And that's part of the experience of home. Rather than thinking of home, simply as this self-enclosed thing. It's actually that traversing is essential to the character of home. And then there's a certain... when that traversing cannot happen, that there happens also alienation of the home itself. Because it isn't what it was, or what one expects it to be. 

I found that heightening the need to make the home to be home. Which is to say, to somehow create it as a familiar, as beautiful, as something in which I could feel more at home than I already have and something that I don't want to disappear. And I remember, when I bought my house, my dad was chuckling as I was so proudly telling him about how I'm owner of this house. And, he tells me, "Miroslav, you know, a house needs a servant, not a master." I think the other way of putting it was, he told me, "You think you own this place? This place owns you." 

So, a kind of sense that one needs to attend to home. If one doesn't attend to home, it will never be what it's supposed to be. And of course we can overdo it and we can become slaves of our homes. But nonetheless, something like "attending to" is a condition to feeling at home, even though, under a crisis situation, even though I would want to have a place where other people come into, and I'm not only there but I have guests visiting. I want to bring other experiences into home. So just just what you were describing. 

Ryan McAnnally-Linz: Yeah, it's interesting. One of the things I've been worrying about as I've been observing this for myself-- you know, there are a lot of ways in which the coronavirus pandemic has been revealing inequities that were already there. Who has a place to be, and who doesn't? Inequities in the health system. All of these sorts of things at one level are getting more clear. There's a revelation happening at a social level, a cultural level. On the flip side, the insularity of everyday experience, for me at least, has involved a risk that COVID is also then hiding these exact same things that it's revealing.

You know, you you've talked a lot about, in our conversations, about the ambivalence of home. And I'm wondering if this, again, shows up the ways that it's a real challenge to relate to home rightly in ordinary times and how much more so than in this kind of extraordinary situation that we're in.

Miroslav Volf: You're right to say that corona time, or any crisis for that matter, is revelatory of those inequalities. But I think it's even more. I think it deepens those inequalities. When things are tough, those who don't have get even less than those who have, they continue to have and have more. Us being under pressure, can hide this. Like when celebrities say, "Oh, COVID is a great equalizer." Well, it's an equalizer in the sense that equally a virus attacks one and the other, but how we process this, how much we are exposed to it and so forth, we are not equal at all in this regard. And it's almost laughable when one thinks of it that way. 

I think there's also ambivalence that happens in the social space of home. We talked about it just a little bit, earlier on, where home is supposed to be this, some kind of place of refuge where the pressures are a bit lessened. And yet, not just as a physical space, but also as a social space, home ends up being a deeply, deeply, ambivalent place. Conflicts, old conflicts, that have been brewing and now can come to the surface because everybody's in the same place. New conflicts arise. Cases of domestic violence have been reported very, very frequently and, from all around the world, that increase in reported cases of domestic violence, especially against women. And that seems to me to also make the situation in which we are, tense. So, maybe you can say regular ordinary ambivalence of home is heightened. Home is a good place where we have deep relationship, or we find respite. Home is on the other hand a place where there are tensions. That's how it's true in ordinary times, but it's even more so on both counts true in the times of pressure. 

Ryan McAnnally-Linz: Maybe it's worth staying here on this topic and saying a little bit more about this tension. When you talk about the ambivalence of home, what exactly do you mean? 

Miroslav Volf: Well, there are two sides of experience that we have with home. On the one hand, home is this place that has been cordoned off from the dangers that come at us from various sides. Whether that's the danger of elements, or it's the danger of intruders, it's a kind of safe place. And it's a safe place that is also full of deep resonances and deep memories. We are attached to those places because we spend time in the places. Places speak. Home speaks to us, or things at home speak to us. People at home are the ones on which we can rely, to which we have a strong sense of affection. And especially we've had this experience when we were growing up as small children. I think of my daughter Mira right now. I mean, she is in the third heaven right now! Mother and father are there, at home and she has everything that she needs around, and she's just totally thriving and singing the entire time. She has this experience of home right now which is just this pure positivity.

On the other hand, we have experiences of home that are highly negatively charged. At one point, when I was talking about violence in the world, I have said, you know, the violence that happens in battlefields is nothing compared to the amount of violence, and sometimes even ferocity of violence, that takes place in homes as well. Homes end up being these places where intimate relationship that can be extraordinarily beautiful can also deeply sour and people are in constant feuds, constant competition, never being satisfied, undermining each other. And that can turn into living hell for many, many people. 

The same is true also of home as a physical space. We can make this space to be a beautiful one in which we enjoy what we, aesthetically, what we experience. Or it can deteriorate to this worst place that you've seen, that you've ever seen, a kind of artificially created parody of some kind of a beauty. There's ugliness of falsely lived life in that space. And I think that's what I think is an ambivalence of home. I think such ambivalence is present in our ordinary experience, and sometimes more, sometimes less. But that kind of ambivalence, I think, is heightened when we live in times of crisis. Whether that's a COVID pandemic, or in some situation when you have an influx of migrants into places. One town to the next, as I experienced in former Yugoslavia during the war, you see that. That there is a tension. There's both something really good that's happening and there's something also profoundly disorienting, and even often deeply evil 

Ryan McAnnally-Linz: There this parallel with the ambivalence of the ways, some of the ways, that we try to secure and protect that first side. Those kinds of good experiences of home, the home as a shelter and a place of residence and things like that. Some of the ways that we try to protect and secure that wind up themselves being ambivalent because, they can, say, turn the home into a fortress. Or, you know, some people's efforts at securing the goodness of the home in that way can wind up turning it into a prison for other people, a restrictiveness, that doesn't allow for openness towards the outside.

One of the ways that I think COVID is potentially dangerous here-- the idea of contagion is so literally there for us right now that I worry that the metaphor of contagion is going to be even more powerful than it has been in the past as we move forward. We're habituating ourselves to thinking of homes as places that need to be protected from infection from outside.

Miroslav Volf: Yeah. I agree with you. I think we think that we can create homes as this oasis where the real life happens. And then there's an evil world that is outside. And to a certain degree, I believe something like that can occur. But if you don't think simply of it as a contrast in contrasting terms, and when, if you think a private life matters, but public life does not matter, that just doesn't work that way. It hasn't worked. And sociological studies show very clearly how the outside world comes into the home, and the conflicts of the outside world also infect homes. So I think as one needs to work on the wholeness of home, and strengthening the positive side of home, that cannot be at the expense of what happens outside.

Ryan McAnnally-Linz: Homes depend on interchange with the outside. If you treat home too much as an island or an oasis, it starts to lose its intelligibility. What matters on the inside starts to feel strangely hollow if it's not connected to some sort of broader social life. And it's felt to me a little bit like COVID puts us so risk of living in snowglobes, where it feels restricted and, in some ways, artificial, and like it doesn't have its point of reference that it needs from outside.

Miroslav Volf: This kind of ambivalence can be very easily seen throughout biblical traditions. From the home that the garden of Eden was for Adam and Eve, to the home that figures so prominently in Christian imagination, which is the home in the story of the prodigal son, which Jesus tells. 

And, ambivalence is very clear in the story of the garden in Eden. This is a kind of Edenic, idyllic situation in some ways. And yet it is a site of the first murder, it is the sites of inordinate desire that undoes the goodness of the thing, that brings in the shame, that brings in recrimination. And so you see the tensions emerging at a very beginning of the primal history.

And you see a similar thing in the story of the prodigal son. And one way to read this story, and I've tried to do some of it in Exclusion and Embrace, one way to read it is to see, well, it's a story of un-homing of the home, right? 

And in some ways, a younger brother goes into the far country and the home is no longer what it was. And, it is no longer what it was because he didn't like what the home was. For the father in the story, the child has gone in the far country and home isn't what it was, it has to be transformed or it will be un-home. Or for the older brother, when the prodigal returns, rules have to be observed and if rules aren't properly observed, this isn't a home, by can't return that home with the prodigal, my prodigal brother being part of it. 

So you can see how its ambivalences are there, how the negative side of home emerges, but you see also a story of how homes can be maintained. What it takes to have a home, and the most surprising thing is, I think, that the father gives the prodigal the freedom to go. And then the prodigal also returns. Home cannot be prisons. And if home is a prison, just by the sheer fact of being that, it can remain intact, but will not be a home if somebody feels in prisoned in it. 

There's also a sense that home has to involve a kind of transformation of individual members of the household. The father is a very good example for that, where he was a father of two boys and one of them left. And now he has to think of himself as a father of a prodigal. That's a major shift in the identity, that can result in anger, that can result in a kind of destruction of relationships. And yet the father manages this continuity of the relationship even when the son is estranged. And that's why home can be then reconstituted. So, there's a kind of dynamic sense of identity of who one is. The same happens with the prodigal. He also shifts and changes under the experiences of being in the foreign, far country and becomes much more attuned to others within the home. And in terms of the older brother: rules, probably some rules must, but if they're inflexible, if they're unbendable, they will undo a home. Because human beings aren't machines, human beings aren't numbers. Human beings are living things that develop and that change. And that's why home has to be this living and breathing reality. Relationships that are dynamic. 

And I think that's a challenge before which we face. That's why homes are so incredibly beautiful! Because there's this dynamism and possibility of the intimacy of following changes and shifts in life of people, in participating in them that can be a really fresh and dynamic and extraordinary. But that's why homes are so hard, so hard to do. I think the best way to start practicing is probably not in the COVID time. That's when we are oppressed by so many other things. And yet it's precisely in those settings that we need homes the most. That we can do them, if we do them well, know how to do well, we will do them well also in a crisis time. And they will then serve an important purpose for us.

Ryan McAnnally-Linz: One of the really great things about the story of the prodigal son is the way it offers us multiple perspectives to inhabit. There's the younger son; the father who misses him, and yearns for him to come home; there's the resentful older son; there are these servants who are witnessing all of this happen.

It gives us, I think, a pattern for imagining our relations to home. And maybe your perspective, maybe where you need to be imagining, isn't one of those characters in the story, but I think the story is open to that too. There may be some sense in which it's true that we're all in this together, but this is really different for each of us. And what that means is that we all have a common task, but it doesn't look the same. Each of us has to discern the activity and the leading of God in the homes that we find ourselves in. That's all we've got for you today. Thanks so much for listening.

Evan Rosa: For the Life of the World is a production of the Yale Center for Faith & Culture at Yale Divinity School. This episode featured theologians Miroslav Volf and Ryan McAnnally-Linz. You can follow them on Twitter at @MiroslavVolf and @RJMLinz. I'm Evan Rosa and I edited and produced the show. 

For more information visit us online faith.yale.edu and subscribe to the show wherever you listen to podcasts. If you're looking for a way to support us, it could be as simple as telling a friend, leaving a rating and review in Apple podcasts, or sharing the show on your social feeds or forwarding an email. Thanks for listening, and we'll be back next week.

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