Made for Here

For roughly twenty-five years, I have been researching around one persistent question: What does a human life require in order to remain recognizably human in the fullest sense—embodied, relational, rooted, purposeful, capable of worship, work, affection, responsibility, and joy? The question first took hold while my wife and I were homeschooling our two oldest children. Somewhere along the way, I encountered John Senior’s The Death of Christian Culture, with its now-famous list of the thousand good books through which children and adults might enter the imaginative inheritance of Western civilization. That led naturally to finding and reading The Restoration of Christian Culture, and from Senior the trail began branching in every direction.

Senior pointed toward E. F. Schumacher, who argued in Small Is Beautiful that the proper scale of human activity matters. Along the way came Josef Pieper on leisure and contemplation, Alasdair MacIntyre on practices and traditions, Servais Pinckaers on freedom and virtue, Stratford Caldecott on beauty, education, and cosmic order, and David L. Schindler on gift, love, and the meaning of creation.

There were many others: saints and popes, philosophers and theologians, economists and ecologists, farmers and fishermen, poets and schoolteachers. Some were Catholic, some were not, and some would have disagreed sharply with one another. They all had something important to say about human nature, scale, and pace. I have never felt obligated to reject a truth merely because it was discovered outside the boundaries of my own tribe. Truth has a rightful place wherever it is found. Together, these writers helped me perceive what I came to think of as a golden thread winding through their works. Human beings do flourish within a proper scale and pace. We need limits, leisure, meaningful work, beauty, memory, belonging, contact with creation, and communities small enough for responsibility to have a name.

Many of the arrangements surrounding us routinely violate these needs. We live at highway pace and experience the landscape at highway scale. We move quickly through spaces designed for circulation, consumption, storage, and administration while growing less certain that we belong anywhere. We have become masters at producing convenience and very poor at producing home. We possess more ways to communicate and fewer places where we are truly known. We can obtain almost anything without leaving the house, yet we increasingly lack the skills, relationships, and confidence required to make, repair, grow, tend, teach, or govern much of anything ourselves.

This book has taken many forms during the years I have carried it in my mind and as chapters scattered across several potential books. Something of each remains here. The reading shaped the argument, Catholic social doctrine supplies much of its moral architecture, and practical action remains essential. Yet the aim has become both humbler and, I think, more fundamental.

I am not setting out to renew Christian culture. I would, of course, be delighted to see Christian culture renewed. I am Catholic, I believe the faith is true, and I make no effort to conceal the Catholic imagination from which this book proceeds. But cultures cannot be restored by announcing that we intend to restore them, and people cannot be argued into a culture they no longer possess the habits to inhabit. Before we can restore Christian culture, we first need to recover the ability to have a culture at all. We need to learn how to become neighbors again, to keep households, make places, share work, practice hospitality, care for land, form children, honor elders, repair what is broken, and accept responsibility for things beyond our own satisfaction. That is the wider purpose of this book.

Some of the people who recover these practices will already be Catholic. Some may become Catholic. Some may never enter the Church but will become better neighbors, parents, teachers, craftspeople, citizens, cultivators, and stewards. Perhaps a number of them will become very good Catholics and contribute to the renewal of Christian culture.

That would be a beautiful fruit. It is not a result I can manufacture, and it is not the burden I intend to place upon every reader. My more immediate hope is that we recover forms of life in which truth, goodness, beauty, love, and responsibility can once again be recognized because they have taken material form around us.

A person who has never experienced a real feast may struggle to understand the Eucharistic imagination. A child raised through screens and scheduled activities may have difficulty entering silence, wonder, and contemplation. A family without meaningful work, shared memory, or a common table may find the language of communion increasingly abstract. But grace is not limited by these conditions, and human beings are still human beings. We receive spiritual realities through bodies, symbols, places, habits, relationships, and time. Catholicism is not an escape from creaturely life; it is the great affirmation that God entered it. The Incarnation gives us reason to take ordinary human life seriously. Food, soil, buildings, songs, work, rest, neighborhoods, animals, tools, stories, seasons, and tables are not peripheral to the spiritual life. They are among the materials through which persons are formed and love becomes visible.

This book begins not with a program for saving civilization but with restoring the proper size of things. It asks what happens when institutions, technologies, economies, and built environments become too large, fast, distant, or abstract for ordinary people to understand and influence. It asks what human beings need, how spaces become places, and how passive consumers might become active cultivators. It explores gratitude, attention, affection, stewardship, solidarity, subsidiarity, work, leisure, household life, parish life, education, economy, community, and creation. These subjects are not separate compartments. They form an ecology of human life in which changes to one part affect the others.

The central conversion running through the book is from consumption toward cultivation. The consumer asks what the world can provide, whether it satisfies, and where a better option can be purchased. The cultivator asks what has been entrusted, what condition it is in, and what attention, work, restraint, or love might help it flourish. Cultivation is not limited to gardening. We cultivate soil, but we also cultivate households, skills, friendships, institutions, memories, traditions, neighborhoods, and souls. We inherit things we did not create, work upon them for a time, and hand them to people we may never meet.

This is what stewardship means. A steward is neither an absolute owner nor a passive caretaker waiting for instructions. He receives real authority over something that remains, at the deepest level, a gift. The steward must act, judge, improve, protect, and sometimes prune or repair. He may enjoy what has been entrusted, but he cannot treat it as though its only purpose were his private use. He is accountable for the condition in which the gift will be handed forward. This is why the book repeatedly returns to limits. No one is meant to carry the whole world upon his shoulders. We are meant to cultivate faithfully the portion of the world that has been entrusted to us.

That portion may include a household, a classroom, a parish ministry, a patch of land, a workplace, a neighborhood, an aging parent, a craft, a civic office, or a child who needs to be shown how to do something useful. The work may appear small when compared with the scale of the world’s troubles. Smallness does not make it insignificant. The alternative is often paralysis. We are exposed each day to more suffering, controversy, information, misinformation, disinformation, and moral demand than any person can process. We feel implicated in everything and capable of nothing.

A proper sense of responsibility restores proportion. It asks what is mine to do, what belongs to another person, what requires a community, and what must be carried by institutions operating at a larger scale. It teaches us to help without taking over and to step back without walking away. The suggestions in this book are therefore not a blueprint for one ideal lifestyle. A retired gardener in Indiana, a young family in an apartment, a parish priest, a schoolteacher, and a disabled person living with extensive support will cultivate differently. Human scale is not uniformity. The question is whether each person can recover some meaningful participation in the world around him. Can he make, tend, repair, produce, teach, welcome, protect, or give something? Can she become more than a client, customer, spectator, patient, employee, voter, or user?

The practices offered here are modest because human change is modest before it becomes cultural. Cook a meal, learn a name, repair an object, plant something, invite someone in, teach a skill, walk the neighborhood, recover a tradition, attend a meeting, or assume one responsibility that has been left to someone else. These acts do not save the world in isolation, but they form people capable of sharing a world.

I have invented no grand philosophy here. The bricks were baked long before I arrived. My work has been simply to gather them, notice how they fit together, and build a road toward the reader’s door. This road leads away from abstraction and toward inhabitation. It leads from spaces to places, from audience toward membership, from consumption toward cultivation, and from concern for humanity in general toward faithful love of people with names and addresses.

Will this lead to some future renewal of Christian culture? Perhaps it will simply help a few families recover its table, a parish remember its neighborhood, a citizen accept responsibility for a place, or a person to discover that he is not helpless before the machinery of modern life. That is enough reason to begin. We do not need to carry the whole world, we only need to learn how to inhabit our part of it faithfully—together.