By Emily Malloy
Saturday. The day of the most intense work on our little farm and in the house. It is an all-hands-on-deck work day. Little tasks are completed during the week, but Saturday is the day it culminates with everyone. While we work outside, the sun beams with an indiscriminate ferocity upon the Mississippi soil. My husband hacks through undergrowth to forge a path in the woods to make room for a fence line with a few kids while I tend to the garden and animals.
Not all Saturdays are the same, but the intentionality of our work is. Whether the task at hand is home repairs, farm projects, or common chores, it is the work of the family together. Our home life wasn’t always like this, but has been something my husband and I have cultivated over time. This intentional shift has paid off with an immeasurable wealth of bonding of those within our household through an interdependence of work, respect, and love.
This is our home and our bit of earth. These are our animals, our gardens. This is our miniature economy on a dead end country road. We must be good stewards of these blessings; ours is a responsibility we cannot shirk. It is an endeavor we hope to fill with love and pass onto our children. As quitting time approaches, it is easy to see that it was a day wonderfully spent. Exhaustively spent, but filled with a quality time between our family unlike any other, nonetheless.
The Oxford Dictionary defines an economy as the "wealth and resources of a country or region, especially in terms of the production and consumption of goods and services" or the "careful management of available resources." It also defines the word home as "the place where one lives permanently, especially as a member of a family or household."
The notions of home and economy, to the Ancient Greeks, were intimately coupled. In fact, the word oikonomia, from which the word economy comes, was defined as the “management of a household.”
The phrase “home economy” has a decreasing presence in our modern lexicon and is a notion far from the modern mind, perhaps because the subject is no longer taught in school. What are the economics of the home exactly? This is a question I have been asked repeatedly. I have the sense that the asker intuits that home economics is more significant than the high school classroom requirements of toting around a flour-sack-baby in the days of yore. The knowledge afforded by home economics classes has become a relic of the past and now, as a full generation has come of age since its disappearance, many feel the gap in relevant education for real life.
Home economics is something that can be understood rather simply: it is the micro-economy of the household wherein the attentive use of God-given resources maintain the place of the family. Even more simply put: it is the work of the home that sustains the family. It can be taken a step further and said that the endeavor of managing the household well, in terms of resourcefulness and development of virtue, is a wholly Catholic one. It is living out virtue and vocation. Any opportunity to die to self and grow in virtue in accordance with our vocation is a holy endeavor, one that the management of the household provides. We, as Catholics, need to conscientiously cultivate a flourishing home economy.
The Catechism of the Catholic Church states that "the development of economic activity and growth in production are meant to provide for the needs of human beings. Economic life is not meant solely to multiply goods produced and increase profit or power; it is ordered first of all to the service of persons, of the whole man, and of the entire human community" (CCC 2426). As it relates to the household, the Catechism states that "the Christian home is the place where children receive the first proclamation of the faith. For this reason the family home is rightly called "'the domestic church,' a community of grace and prayer, a school of human virtues and of Christian charity" (CCC 1666).
People are the main drivers of an economy of any size: what the people value, how they live, and utilize their resources. To understand how to better manage the household economy we must grasp why it is so important for the Catholic household. As the faithful are acutely aware, the home is indispensable to the life of faith. We get a sense that the well-being of any given culture is based upon the way of life of individual homes. The management of the resources and relationships between those of the household are what forms this culture built upon either virtue or vice, or as we see too often in modernity: indifference.
Over the last several decades, what was once the shared life and work of the household has been increasingly fractured and outsourced. It is more commonplace to not have a homemade dinner at the table as a family, but out on the run. Small unskilled house projects are mostly completed by hiring out. We often no longer clean and care for our own homes. We are steeped within the throw away culture filled with cheap goods that are purchased, broken, discarded, and replaced with an object of the same poor quality with little thought of repairing instead. And perhaps most regrettably, time spent as a family has significantly decreased over the years as each member spends the majority of the day somewhere else. It comes as no surprise that a home culture and economy are foreign concepts; we are a culture seldom at home.
A well-managed household is driven by the assumption of responsibility to an unspoken debt of gratitude owed to God for our home places and the people who reside in them. From the dawning of time, when Eden was home to mankind, God's commands gave us certain responsibilities. Even though man no longer resides in Eden, the duty of stewardship remains. There is gratifying work found in re-focusing on the home as a place of work and culture. To reclaim stewardship of the home, we must reassert our place within it as caretaker and invite the other members of the household to participate in the work.
And in part two, I will discuss the simple and practical foundation upon which the important work of the family can be built by establishing a home economy and culture.