Temporary housing

This is a strange week for my father. Only ever knowing Broyhill mid-20th-century bedrooms consisting of mattress and box spring on metal frame, mahogany chest of drawers and matching dresser with mirror, topped with Hummels and framed graduation photos, he is currently sleeping 8 inches closer to the floor and looking up at furniture like gouged eye sockets. We have snatched away the bed frame and drawers to my house. We are disassembling his quarters piecemeal.

My most disturbing scene in the film Saving Private Ryan occurs when a group of GIs are caught in an invisible nest of German SS troops in Ramelle. The town is an abandoned ruin, but somehow a French family clings to life in the second story of a building that has been sheared clean in half through the center of the kitchen. The table has a tablecloth, the chairs are in place, the rug on the floor is straight, as if the house is being kept in good order. It is such that if you were to turn your back to the gaping hole exposed to the rainy street, you could pretend to yourself that everything was still normal.

The other parts of Spielberg’s 1998 World War II movie are merely battles, deaths, and carnage. But this vignette about the family home goes straight to the Jungian unconscious, to “the division of soul and spirit, of joints and marrow” and the deepest fears of man—the fear that maybe, just maybe, we are not safe in our own carefully constructed dwellings; the suspicion is that we move about in the midst of flimsy props.

We are all in temporary housing. My father is feeling it more than most at this particular time, but all will know it. His wife is gone and you would have thought it wouldn’t change everything, but the very walls and closets look foreign now: “He returns no more to his house, nor does his place know him anymore” (Job 7:10).

The wise man sees the truth my father is seeing in his stripteased room, and longs to put on incorruptibility.

C.S. Lewis’ The Great Divorce opens, not coincidentally, on a mean and empty street, in the rain. A stranger asks his neighbor on the bus about the curiously ever-expanding and ever-thinning town. The man replies, “You’ve only got to think a house and there it is. That’s how the town keeps on growing.” More inquiries elicit a description of Napoleon’s house: “He’d built himself a huge house all in the Empire style—rows of windows flaming with light, though it only shows as a pin prick from where I live.” The neighbor then lets his inquirer in on a secret: “What’s the trouble about this place? … The trouble is they have no Needs. You get everything you want (not very good quality, of course) by just imagining it.”

The ad hoc tour guide speaks better than he knows. The reason people don’t seek after God is because we have everything we want—“not very good quality, of course,” but the illusion of security and safety. Until the wife dies and the curtains come down and the props of sofa and Monet reproductions and oriental rugs are removed like after an off-off-Broadway play, and then our utter vulnerability is exposed.

The wise man sees the truth my father is seeing in his stripteased room, and longs to put on incorruptibility (1 Corinthians 15:53). “For while we are still in this tent, we groan, being burdened—not that we would be unclothed, but that we would be further clothed, so that what is mortal may be swallowed up by life” (2 Corinthians 5:4).

The Savior of the world was born in temporary housing, with lowing cattle, immediate reminder to the Son of Man Himself that “here we have no lasting city” (Hebrews 13:14). After Bethlehem will be a flight to Egypt, then flights into deserted places (Mark 1:45), and not even the semipermanency of the accommodations of birds and foxes (Luke 9:58). All so that you and I will never suffer home insecurity again.

“In my Father’s house are many rooms. If it were not so, would I have told you that I go to prepare a place for you? And if I go and prepare a place for you, I will come again and will take you to myself, that where I am you may be also” (John 14:2-3).

Mail aseupeterson@wng.org