Sermon given by Zan Spaihts-Mohns on August 16, 2020
Hestia is not the best known of the Greek gods. As goddess of the home and hearth, she had no place in the Iliad or the Odyssey. She took part in no wars. Modern Americans might know her Roman name, Vesta, in reference to the Vestal Virgins, the priestesses who tended her sacred fire, but most of us know little beyond that.
Hers was the domestic sphere, the keeping of the house and its central flame, which gave heat and light to the family, cooked its food and served as a gathering place. Her story lacked the glory and pathos, the power and poetry, of the other Greek and Roman gods; and so she is little more than a footnote in books of mythology.
And yet, in her time, she was perhaps the most ubiquitous goddess in Ancient Greece and Rome. She had a place in every home hearth, a central fire in every village; hers was the first bit of every offering, the last word of every prayer.
So it was with other hearth goddesses and kitchen gods, found across the world. Kamui Fuchi, of the Ainu people of Japan, lived in every household hearth, and kept watch over the running of the household and the family’s relationships; and more, she was the conduit by which people might speak to the spirits. Ong Tao, kitchen god of Vietnamese tradition, was also the family’s advocate to the gods and the bearer of their messages to heaven. And so many across Europe—Brigid of the Irish Celts, Frigg of the Norse and German peoples, Matka Gambia of the ancient Slavs, and more.
Never the most storied gods and goddesses, yet among the most honored in their times; they kept watch over the work of the home, and in doing so, they showed it to be sacred.
* * *
Zoroastrianism is the oldest known continuously practiced faith on earth, stretching back some four thousand years. In Zoroastrianism, God, named Ahura Mazda, created the world as an act of putting things in order. He placed the the sky and the stars in their places; he placed the land, the water, the fire. Here, the first plant; here, the first cow; here, the first human, and now a guardian spirit for each spirit. All was perfect, orderly, in its right place.
But a power of chaos and wrongness corrupted that perfect creation, and though God’s forces fought chaos back, the fight is never quite done. This is the role of humanity. With each passing day and night, the world slips a bit toward disorder and corruption; and so each day, humankind must work to restore the world to order and rightness, and so aid Ahura Mazda in his great work.
My grandmother was a devoted Christian all her life, but I think she would have liked this Zoroastrian idea.
My grandmother cleaned as if it were as necessary as breathing. When she visited our house, when I was a child, you could find her puttering at any odd moment, sweeping or dusting or washing dishes at the sink. For a time, my mother felt this as a judgment, a silent commentary that her house was not sufficiently well kept. But after a while, it became clear that to my grandmother, this was a pleasant way of passing the time. She had few hobbies, but she was rarely idle. This was a woman who routinely ironed her socks, all her life. Even in her later years, living in a retirement community where professional cleaning was provided, she could often be found out on the grounds, weeding the flower beds. The work of making everything clean and beautiful simply satisfied her soul.
She loved jigsaw puzzles, too, and I think it came from a similar impulse: the sweet satisfaction of taking a pile of chaos and carefully sorting and building it until it became a beautiful world.
* * *
I have received many beautiful gifts passed down my maternal line, but I must confess: this urge to make tidy was not one of them.
When I have a spare hour, I’d often prefer to get out under the sky, or play a game with my children, than to scrub and straighten. I’m happy enough to paint the walls when the need arises, but the dishes and the laundry and all the rest? Oh, they are endless.
On paper, I am a homemaker. My days revolve around the care and feeding of my family. I feel incredibly lucky to be able to give this tune to my children! But I’ve always had plenty of other things to do, especially since my kids started school—bits of freelance work, plus teaching and committee work for our church, and my own projects. Despite being a “homemaker,” I tend to let the actual work of making a home slip down my priority list a bit. Of course I know that it’s important, but there’s so much more I need and want to do!
Have you ever known a feeling like that? When the laundry needs washing, and the floor needs sweeping, and the gutter needs cleaning, but you have to go to work, and there are only so many hours in the week? When it feels like every weekend is a choice between catching up on housework or finally getting some quality time with friends and family? Or when you hunger for time to get out and explore the world, or to dig deep into a book or a project that calls to you, but the faucet is leaking or the lawn is too long? Have you ever felt trapped by that constant cycle of demand my mother calls “the tyranny of dinner?”
Do you know that feeling?
A century ago people thought technology would free us from constant work to enjoy great hours of leisure. But somehow, despite our computers and machines, we work longer hours now than we did in the heyday of the labor movement. We work more hours now than medieval peasants! And so, still, there never seems to be enough time, and housework must wrestle with leisure for the hours left over.
* * *
This past March, keeping home began to take on a different meaning. We were asked to stay home as much as possible. For some of us, paid work stopped. For others, jobs became something done at home—perhaps alone; or perhaps in the midst of pets or children or roommates, a household that now had nowhere else to spill out.
Home, for those fortunate enough to have one, has become a refuge from disease. But it also feels at times like the world had shrunk to these walls.
For me, it suddenly seemed like the work of the house was all there was. A few months into the pandemic, I talked to a friend on the phone, and I told her, “I feel like I’ve suddenly transformed into a stereotypical 1950s housewife. My children are with me constantly, and we never go anywhere, and I feel like I do nothing but prepare food for people and clean up after them and remind them to do their homework.”
“Yes!” She answered. “My whole industry has shut down and my son is at home and it’s all on me. And I know I should be grateful that my husband can still work, but I feel like June Cleaver and I keep thinking, ‘this is not what I signed up for!’”
Our culture—particularly among its middle and upper classes—does not love the work of maintaining the home. Of course, we adore the well-kept home itself: the peace and beauty of the pristine, well-decorated space. We love the well-kept home, and there are Pinterest boards and magazines and entire TV shows devoted to them. But we do not honor those who do the work of keeping it up.
Instead, we idolize those who devote their hours and years to other pursuits: the writers and scientists, the artists and musicians, the athletes and activists. We wonder over their lives and accomplishments, and perhaps aspire to be like them. If you ask a child what they want to be when they grow up, chances are they will name one of these.
But how often do we pause to remember that many male artists and scholars had their homes cared for by women in their lives? Henry David Thoreau’s mother did his laundry during the two years he lived at Walden Pond, while Dylan Thomas was looked after by his wife, as were so many others. For women it was often a matter of wealth rather than gender; as essayist Elaine Blair puts it, Virginia “Woolf’s famous formulation that a woman writer must have £500 a year and the solitude of her own room in which to write presumes implicitly that there will be servants to make the writer’s meals and clean her house.”
Slowly, we are becoming more aware of the ways that gender, social class, and race shape our lives, and limit or open our possibilities. Yet many of us still aspire to lives that are possible only if someone else will do the everyday work of the home.
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Yet, for most of human history, across the world, this was the devoted and expected life work of half the human population. It is one of the oldest and most universal experiences of human life.
And it was widely seen as sacred. Hestia, Brigid, Frigg, Ong Tao, and Kamui Fuchi brought a divine grace to domestic life.
This is not to say that people of earlier times didn’t long for relief from the endless work just as we sometimes do, if not more so. The Scottish legend of the brownie perhaps illustrates this best, the fond imagining of a faerie creature who would come into your house at night and do all the hardest, dreariest work, unasked and unpaid. Yes, people throughout time have wished for relief from this work. But at least there was a greater dignity and sanctity accorded to their task.
I wonder what it would look like for us to do the same now?
I would not take back a century of progress in women’s independence, nor lose whatever gains we may have made so far in racial equality (however much more there is to do). But the need for domestic work will continue even in the most egalitarian society. And while the hearth has become the less romantic furnace and stove, the work of the house has not changed so very much.
What would it mean, to honor all those who keep our homes? To honor the importance of everyone having a home, and to make that a baseline value of our society? And to see this most universal of work as sacred, and part of the ongoing work of re-making and re-ordering the world?
I don’t expect to become good at it all at once, or maybe ever. But I do hope to learn, in this most home-centered time, to sigh less and smile more over the daily tasks. I hope that when I pick up the sponge, or the broom, I will do so in knowledge that the work of my hands is the work of human hands throughout history. That this work is a constant of human existence for as long as we have built shelters to call home.
In this very home-centered time, may we all learn to rise in the morning knowing that part of the work of the day is to restore order once more. May we know this as all of our work, every member of the family. And may we find, in this re-making of the world, a touch of divinity and grace.