In the days when community was richer and faith was deeper, a new home would be blessed and its doorsills anointed with oil, or honey, or blood. Before the explosion of churches, some homes even had altars. The first temple, in fact, was called the Mishkan: a place of divine dwelling. In English we call it a tabernacle: a tent. The first church in the Abrahamic faiths, in other words, was a home. God chose to live among his people. Home, in this earlier understanding was more than a venue for eating and sleeping. It was a holy place.
Somewhere along the way we forgot this. We began to think that God was out there--in heaven, a sunset, an ornate temple, a megachurch. We forgot that he has always come to us where we are, to dwell with us. We began to think of him as being somewhere else, and told ourselves that we had to get dressed up, put on smiles, and go out to find him. We forgot that home was meant to be a sacred place because we were meant to be sacred.
We have made the home a luxury living and playing space, and forsaken some of the sacred in our lives. In the midst of greater comfort, we complain that we don't eat meals together as often as we should, and that our children are lured by distractions--computers, television, telephones--away from the family, and into their separate rooms. Perhaps part of the reason is that we have outsourced sacredness to our churches, and in so doing we have relinquished the sanctifying power of the home. We have forsaken much of what binds us to God. The altars and anointed doorways are gone, and now we must search for him in the shadows and corners.
Tony Woodlief,
Somewhere More Holy: Stories from A Bewildered Father, Stumbling Husband, Reluctant Handyman, and Prodigal Son, pp. 30-31
Let’s also set aside the popular defense of this national obsession, which is that throwing or catching or kicking a ball in front of shouting adults “builds character.” Data from the Josephson Institute, which regularly surveys high school students, reveals that athletes—by their own admission—are more likely than non-athletes to cheat on tests, while substantial numbers approve not only of cheating in games, but injuring opponents.
These views are far greater among big-money sport hopefuls—basketball and football players—majorities of whom admit to bullying classmates.
That’s not to say that sports can’t build character, just that the data indicate character is better among children who stay away from big-money sports. If character building is really what parents are after, we’re more likely to instill it by helping our children start a landscaping business, or a charity that assists the disabled, or any number of labors that are both more humbling and more valuable than waging artificial wars on meticulously maintained playgrounds.
. . . The millions of parents dragging their families from one sporting event to another aren’t doing it for character building.
Maybe the problem is that not everyone knows the world is getting better. Maybe we should tell the growing ranks of schoolchildren smoking marijuana that there’s no need to check out, because things are great. Maybe suicide wouldn’t be the third-highest cause of death in American teens and early twenty-somethings if only someone told them how much progress the human race has made.
Things have never been better in the realm of the measurable. But the human soul has no gauge. It has no quantity and so no self-respecting scholar will come near it. This world is better than it has ever been, so long as we forget that we have souls, and hearts that beat despite being broken.
This is not a brief against progress. I have the luxury of this lament because I do not have to spend all my hours scratching out subsistence. I am only trying to say that something has gone missing. We aren’t measuring wrong things, it’s just that we’ve forgotten what is immeasurable. And if we cannot remember this part of humanity, we will turn every good thing against ourselves.
Tony Woodlief,
"Past Where Legs Can Carry"
