At Home We Are Equals

B ecause of the Sermon on the Mount and a few parables shared by Jesus, our Christ-haunted culture inherits a suspicion of the wealthy and powerful, along with a certain conviction that God reserves something special for the poor, that he sees in them a dignity that the worldly don’t recognize. This spiritual impulse has been occasionally plugged in, hijacked, or transmogrified into modern political ideologies that seek to organize our hatreds and justify our violent impulses. That’s how it came to be that Luigi Mangione’s alleged wanton murder of a health-insurance CEO, which redistributed nothing but a father’s body into a graveyard, came to be romanticized and admiringly joked about.

And that same impulse has sparked some of the uglier reactions to the wildfires of California. The fires have consumed some of the most desirable neighborhoods in America. Many of these single-family homes were built at the zenith of American residential architecture and craftsmanship. They were occupied by members of the upper middle class of Los Angeles, many of whom had purchased them before real estate inflation turned them into million-dollar properties. Some were occupied by truly wealthy celebrities. I’ve seen “screw ’em” sentiments justified by every ideological flavor. Christians who hate immoral Hollywood. Climate obsessives on Reddit’s r/collapse board exulting in the destruction of Mel Gibson’s home because he denies their preferred climate models. Progressives denigrating the undeserving rich. Conservatives gleefully telling Californians, “This is what you voted for.”

These reactions are morally ugly and fundamentally wrong. It’s true that some people living in Pasadena are so surpassingly wealthy that they have multiple residences. Or the ability to swiftly obtain new, luxe, and safe accommodations. It’s true that the fire fell on the homes of the righteous and unrighteous, as defined by your handy political compass. Houses are unequal. And those who have no place to rest are truly to be pitied.

But the experience of home — possessing one, losing one, growing up in one — is the great leveler. Like romantic love or grief, it is equally available whatever your station in life. For some, its realization in life is a gradual dawning awareness. For others it is a gift unappreciated until it is threatened in some way.

The wealthy may have amenities the poor don’t enjoy, but the feeling of a home is something else. It is the place sanctified by our most intimate loves, graced by our daily routines, however mundane, made humane merely by being occupied by humans and as the theater where their dramas, tragedies, and comedies play out. The shelter it gives us is not just physical but spiritual. The door shuts at night, the lights are dimmed or turned off. It is the place we seek to make peaceful, because it is a place of rest.

A house has defects of architecture, plumbing, and wiring. And many would be surprised how many rich men’s homes are drafty, leaky money pits. They’d be surprised how many celebrities satisfy themselves and spend millions on average-sized bungalows in Los Angeles, with ancient problems. A home’s defects are the result of our sins and fallen human nature. The tyrant father, the betrayal by a wife, the ingratitude of children can turn our homes away from their true purpose, or make them a misery. We feel these losses doubly so precisely because our intimate and family relations are the emotional structure that makes houses into homes. Good parents leading a good home are even more mindful of these faults than they are of a stopped drain. Good parents — good custodians of a home — might let a second bathroom go unused for months to save for a costly plumbing job. They would never let their children give each other the silent treatment for so long. The house’s needs can wait; the home’s needs are always urgent.

And yet, the house and home are bound together. The heights of growing children are marked on cheap builder-grade doorframes, or more princely ones. The places where we worry and make our life’s plans are unequal in every respect, except in the most important one, in which we are all equally vulnerable. The rich man’s treasured places are made dear to him not by the money spent, but by the time and the memories that were invested in it.

And the rich man’s home is valuable to me in another sense. In that its outward appearance — its material quality and beauty — dignifies the very concept of the home. If a wealthy man’s home is as full of love as my own, then his $5 million Tudor Revival is merely the transfigured version of any man’s poorer home. Mourning the loss of two of the more beautiful neighborhoods in the country to fire and fearing their replacement with modern functional and ugly duplexes is no different from mourning the lost beauty of a face that received disfiguring plastic surgery after a bad accident. Their horror exposes all the ways in which we are vulnerable.

And so I mourn even as fire consumes the valuables of  celebrities, hucksters, the agents, lawyers, the libs, and the climate deniers. They aren’t losing just real estate, but the physical treasure-houses of their memories and deepest longings. They have lost the places whose rhythms and sounds have the mysterious ability to slow their pulse, while exciting the heart. Their needs and mine, for home, are just exactly the same.