It's Only New Once
Finding meaning and gratitude in the familiar
Years ago, I read an article by Gracy Olmstead, reviewing a book by theologian James K.A. Smith, about “liturgy.” That’s a churchy word; but the article was really not about Christian worship but about applying the idea of liturgy—habit, ritual—to everyday life. There’s some stuff about church and Christian education and the Gospel, but what I really remember is this bit:
Quotidian home practices matter, too: a family that regularly gathers around the dinner table is practicing a liturgy. So, too, the family in which gardening or other household chores are done together, bringing order and beauty to the home and its surroundings. Such practices help shape and cultivate the life within.
I was not married at the time, but I remember thinking, that’s going to be our home one day.
And I guess it is. In the morning, making breakfast, I noticed the other day how fixed of a routine I had gotten myself into. Heat a pan, crack an egg, dry hands with a kitchen rag, wash a random implement from dinner or unload the dishwasher, start the kettle, fry the egg.
I couldn’t help think of the priest at Mass as I rinsed my hands and used the rag (“Wash me, O Lord, from my iniquity and cleanse me from my sin”), or kneeled to grab the dish soap out of the cabinet under the sink (genuflecting before the altar). I don’t mean that in a flippant way. The Last Supper, after all, was a meal, and the Mass is the Last Supper. These are ritualized versions of everyday things.
The Catholic idea that ordinary physical objects can be means of grace strikes some people as superstitious. I prefer to think of it as enchanted. It seems to me to imbue the world with meaning. If God made everything, how can you not think something like this?
So those habits and routines are liturgy. They lift up the ordinary; they turn repetition into a kind of prayer. Instead of saying “How can you just recite 10 Hail Marys and call that prayer?” I would say, maybe even cracking that egg and grabbing that dish soap every morning is a kind of prayer.
I understand how idealistic this can sound, when it’s 10pm and the kitchen still needs to be wiped down and you’re exhausted and the cat litter box hasn’t been scooped out. And yet, I find that elevating these tasks and routines in my head makes actually doing them easier.
Maybe this is a bunch of mumbo-jumbo; analogies based on fairy tales. But, you know, I don’t think so.
I’m thinking about all of this because my wife and I have been in our new house for a little over half a year now. We love it; we like the finished basement, the extra living room—unfurnished for now, just to enjoy the sense of extra space!—the larger kitchen, the fancier fridge, the garden.
Gardening is one of those things with difficulty levels. There’s “keep the beds reasonably free of weeds and maybe cut back the plants in fall,” and then there’s “learn the pruning technicalities and fertilizing and division schedules for all the perennials.” I had never even heard of plant division before we bought our first new garden plants. I’m not sure my parents’ garden, which in its current iteration has come back bigger every year for over a decade now, was ever “properly” pruned or divided. Plants can take a lot of punishment.
Growing herbs and vegetables to eat is also easier said than done; my cilantro plants all bolted before I realized they were ready to harvest. Our asparagus are supposed to go two years with no harvesting. If you think fishing is a test of patience, try gardening.
We don’t have a window by the sink, because the kitchen is facing interior walls. But we have a set of bay windows just beyond the main counter. I think of my parents’ house, with a small window over the sink looking out over the deck, which looks out over forest. And I remember that feeling of waking up early, heading downstairs, and just looking out at that quiet little piece of land and feeling thankful. That’s how I’d put it now, anyway. And I’d like to feel more thankful for what I now have.
I think about how my parents, and a lot of my friends’ parents, were the first generation in their families to own a house, or at least a big house with some appreciable land. Some of them, as kids, moved to an old suburban house on a postage-stamp lot. But when they grew up and moved out to New Jersey from the city or Long Island or wherever, that was new. They were taking part in the latest chapter of being, two or three generations back, an immigrant family coming to America. There was a certain progression there. To have an Italian peasant father or grandfather, and then to work your way up to a house on an acre or two, somewhere far from the hustle and bustle you grew up with—what a thing that must have been.
For my parents and my friend’s parents, leaving the old city or first-ring suburb in their late 20s or early 30s and moving out to a big, recently built house on a piece of forested land in central New Jersey must have been absolutely breathtaking. I can’t imagine the feeling of pride and of being blessed that they must have had. It’s like seeing something new and amazing for the first time: like seeing Star Wars in the theater in 1977, but 100 times that.
I cannot experience that. I grew up in a house. It was normal to me. Whatever scrimping and saving it took to get there was invisible to me, either because I was a kid or because it had already occurred. Growing up in a big house was the most ordinary thing in the world to me.
This changes everything. It’s much harder to work to get something back than it is to get it for the first time. And it’s much harder to appreciate keeping what you have than it is to appreicate attaining it for the first time.
What a lot of people call “entitlement” is really—to the extent that it’s a real Millennial/Gen-Z thing—the weirdness of being told that you have to “earn” the only thing you ever knew. How do you feel gratitude for your baseline, your normal? Our parents shielded us from the work they did, but then expected us to do it ourselves, as if some instinct would kick in when we turned some magic number—18 or 22 or 25.
But it doesn’t, necessarily. And all the hectoring and scolding in the world doesn’t change the fact that 1) houses were normal for those of us who grew up middle- or upper-middle class, and 2) they’ve gone up in price tremendously since our parents bought theirs.
When I went off to college, I lived in a dorm for four years, then an apartment for two, then a condo for five. But all along, I wanted to eventually buy a house, and beyond that, I just sort of assumed I would. I never really saw myself as an apartment dweller or condo owner. I saw myself, to the extent that I thought about it, as a temporarily displaced homeowner. Working my way towards owning a house (which, I hardly have to say, I didn’t do all on my own) was more of an arc than a ladder. Of course, I didn’t own my parents’ house. But I grew up in it.
So no matter what I think or how I think about it, when my wife and I bought our house, it meant returning to the basic domestic situation I knew for the first 18 years of my life. It is simply not possible for me to experience being the first person in my family to own a house. Gratitude is an intellectual thing; I have to work to feel the gratitude I want to feel and know I should feel.
As I think about all of this, I also think about the conflicted feelings I detect in folks from my parents’ generation. It seems like they want us to enjoy a better standard of living than they did, but also to adopt a work ethic that is impossible to summon when you do not know real adversity.
I get the sense that some people view economic progress as itself a kind of entitlement; as if, in making affluence easy, we have engaged in a kind of cheating. Flatscreen televisions and smartphones and avocado toast feel like unnecessary luxuries, despite the fact that their costs are increasingly small percentages of the cost of housing.
But all of this—at least for a moment—melts away when I wake up early, hear the staircase creak as I go downstairs, look out at a squirrel in the yard, and hear the birdsong. I might have to use my imagination to see it all for the first time. But that idea of liturgy—it’s metaphysical. It allows you to understand each day and each task not as new, per se, but as a series of participations in the same thing.
So, in some way, it might as well be the first time. And maybe, one day, it will feel like it.
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“They were taking part in the latest chapter of being, two or three generations back, an immigrant family coming to America. There was a certain progression there. To have an Italian peasant father or grandfather, and then to work your way up to a house on an acre or two, somewhere far from the hustle and bustle you grew up with—what a thing that must have been.”
Great piece. It may be a constant of generational turnover that recent history isn’t taught to kids, because the people old enough to be teaching kids history can’t conceive of their own formative years as being “history” yet. We only come to understand where our parents came from as we come of age, and the years leading up to their own birth start to enter the historical narrative.
My dad’s family was part of the great American migration to California in the ‘60s, before the ‘70s degrowth movement choked off the construction of new housing. They moved from frigid Minnesota into a shiny new suburban subdivision on the fringe of the LA metro area. His parents had descended from Polish and Italian immigrants, growing up during the depression in a small Chicago apartment, and in a cabin in rural Montana, respectively. The progression from that kind of childhood deprivation, to the sun and warmth and space of a suburban home in SoCal must have felt like such an apotheosis of “the American dream.” My mom’s family correspondingly moved from Ohio to Florida. Ah, the ways air conditioning, cheap oil, and suburban commuter highways will reshape a nation.
My parents were once again a part of a mass immigration when they left California, joining the boom of the Portland area in the ‘90s. They got in early, but over the course of that decade the sentiment of “damn Californians driving up housing prices” took Portland by storm, just as it has continued to spread in the intervening decades. As an ambitious kid who grew up in a sleepy little suburb of sleepy little Portland, I’ve now reversed their move and am living in San Francisco—just another droplet in the wave of young people moving from suburbs to cities. All these individual decisions to move to a particular place are so personal, and yet put together they’re all pieces in the story of the nation.
Interesting read! I've been thinking about this a lot recently, as someone who grew up in a Long Island suburb and has seen the housing development happening there with larger and larger single-family homes being built each time I return, dwarfing my parent's turn-of-the-century California ranch in comparison.
I think there is an added component of what each generation finds important when it comes to housing, similar to the thesis of this piece. Whereas millennial's parents wanted to have their own land to spread out on, anecdotally my friends and I have all left the suburbs in search of walkable, semi-urban or urban environments (in my case even returning to the part of the city my family moved from in favor of the suburbs). I wonder if the extreme rate of development happening around my hometown will translate well to what the next generation of homebuyers and beyond will be looking for when it comes time to buy, if they're not already priced out.