Years ago, I realized that if my children wanted to feel like their house was a home, I needed to be intentional about making our physical shelter a place of spiritual refuge. I began to see the Holy Spirit as the indwelling person of the Trinity—the one who makes His home within the believer. I began to see how Christ’s incarnation meant He chose to be at home with us. I began to see every example of God’s promise to shelter His people and be their refuge. The work of homemaker suddenly became holy work. My perspective had completely changed.

On one of our many trips to the public library, I stumbled across a children’s picture book by Mary Anne Hoberman entitled A House is a House for Me. Hoberman takes readers on an enchanting journey through nature pointing out the universality of home, repeating on almost every page “a house is a house for me.” Her delightful conclusion invites children to begin seeing their world differently:

And once you get started in thinking this way,
It seems that whatever you see
Is either a house or it lives in a house,
And a house is a house for me!  

Just one read-through and this book became a favorite of mine because it spoke to the importance of home: all things have a place to belong—somewhere they fit.

Books like Hoberman’s help prepare children for universal themes, like home, that they will encounter on a deeper level later in their education. In fact, during a recent reread of The Odyssey, I was struck by this theme of home, which brought back to mind Hoberman’s picture book. In Homer’s poem, we see the role home plays in shaping who people become, and the refuge a home offers to those who belong there. All ideas captured by Hoberman’s line “A house is a house for me!” In fact, while Odysseus suffers at Troy, it is his longing to get home that causes his true suffering. “I miss my family. I have been gone so long it hurts” he laments (7.152).

All those waiting for Odysseus are similarly heartbroken by their suffering. Penelope laments, “I can hardly bear my grief. I miss him all the time—that man, my husband, whose story is so famous throughout Greece” (1.342-343). Her remembering seems only to make the absence harder to bear. She refuses to see herself as a widow. She won’t mourn him. She expects his return. This hope she perpetuates becomes an image of her homekeeping. There will be a home for Odysseus to return to because she is keeping it. Penelope, the virtuous, has decided to make a house, a home. Somewhere people want to come back to.

What started as a change in my biblical perspective on homemaking, and later reinforced by reading a picture book about home to my children, came full circle for me in Homer’s portrayal of Penelope. There is virtue in home keeping. There is value in making a house a home. Both of these books serve for me as a poignant reminder that although my people will leave home, they are not gone forever.

Mandi Gerth serves alongside a dedicated team of classical educators at Coram Deo Academy in Dallas, Texas, where she currently teaches fourth grade. She and her husband have labored for over twenty years to build a family culture for their five children that values books, baseball, museums, home-cooked meals, and conversation about ideas.