What Is An Ideal Home? 5/14/44
Scripture: Deuteronomy 6: 4-13a; Proverbs 20-23.
Though we haven’t had much publicity on it, nor have we promoted it particularly, the past week was designated as National Family Week in the Christian churches; and we were urged to observe it as such by the Federal Council of Churches, the International Council of Religious Education, The United Council of Church Women, and similar agencies.
But one thing we can still do, and are glad to do about it! We can observe the culmination of Family week in Mother’s Day. Countless sons and daughters delight in honoring their mothers this day. Young children delight in small gifts and lovely surprises for mothers. Grown men and women send messages of cheer and appreciation - sometimes from great distances - to their mothers. Hosts of mothers are remembered by soldier sons today in this year of continued necessity for soldiers, sailors, marines and airmen -- and some had to think far ahead in order to do it!
Not many specially-designated days of the year have so captured the imagination of hosts of people in our country as has Mother’s Day. It helps to crystallize expression of some of the affection which good sons and daughters have for their worthy mothers. And that is a sound motive.
It is possible to abuse the day a bit, by overemphasis on sentimentality. This is sometimes done, to the embarrassment and the distaste of some mothers themselves. Once in a while, I have run across a mother who dreads the Mother’s Day program at school, or in church, because she feels that the occasion flatters and embarrasses her with too much saccharine sweetness, or indiscriminately lumps all mothers together in mass praise, whether some deserve it or not.
But in a proper setting, there is a definite, valuable place for a thoughtful and appreciative consideration of family life and the mother’s position in it. Indeed, there is a great urgency about it!
Officials in government and workers in community welfare alike are deeply concerned about American families just now. With the tremendous shifting in population just now, uprooting families from familiar ties and surroundings, people are having difficulty in readjusting themselves. Thousands of children moving into defense areas on a temporary basis, have a hard time fitting into a new community. Some of them fall into mischief of one sort on another until they become morally delinquent and a problem to law enforcement officials. Others are simply lonesome, with a lack they cannot define. Hundreds are really neglected while both father and mother go off to war work all day long.
Two very young boys in a residence camp near a munitions plant asked a man who was driving for a ride into town several miles away one afternoon. Curious, the man asked, “What are you going to do in town?” “O, nothing,” they replied, “We just want to go to town for a while.” “Well, where is your father?” “Why, he’s at work.” “And your mother?” “She’s working, too.” “When does she get home?” “Maybe 5:30.” “Do you have any brothers or sisters?” “Yeah, there’s Jackie and the baby.” “Well, who’s taking care of them?” “O, Jackie is 7 now, so he can look out for himself and the baby while we go to town.”
Responsible observers tell us that this picture can be multiplied many, many times in every defense industry area of the country. Those youngsters were not yet in any kind of trouble, except sheer boredom. But they could be as soon as trouble showed up; and without parental guidance, the chances are very high that they will be before long. When mothers of young children go into war work as they do, more often than we in a stable community realize, the cost in neglect of their families is dangerously high for them and for this nation. And the community has to do something about these children in defense of the nation’s life. A nation has its very being in the character of its people. If the good character of any considerable number of the nation’s present, or future, citizens suffers, then the very ends for which this struggle is going on are defeated before victory comes in sight.
One great nation tried, during the past quarter of a century, to get rid of “stuffy” notions about family integrity, sacredness of marriage, and so on. All of that was thrown out with religion. Some years of experience brought a speedy return to some sort of family stability, and more recently religion has been approved again as a source of comfort and strength. These are no longer considered “opiates” of the people in Russia.
More recently, another nation, attempting to make itself the mightiest in the world, deliberately destroyed the integrity of the home; sowed distrust of parents in the minds of children; sought to make them instruments of the state alone. The effects have been disastrous for that nation and for the entire world. Germany will be long in recovering what was robbed from her character in that attack on her family life.
When the fathers and particularly the mothers, neglect the supervision and constant guidance of their young children, or when the state interferes with the integrity of the home, the health goes out of its body politic and deterioration sets in.
The integrity of our homes must be protected and strengthened. In a good home, it is right for children to appreciate their mothers, and fathers too. And no parent can escape the direct responsibility for care of the children, and for intelligent guiding concern in their youth which endures in loving interest through the years after they are grown and established, in turn, in their own homes.
The words of wisdom among the ancient Proverbs, were words tested by experience: “My son, keep thy father’s commandment, and forsake not the law of thy mother.
Bind them continually upon thine heart, and tie them about thy neck.
When thou goest, it shall lead thee; and when thou awakest, it shall talk with thee.
For the commandment is a lamp, and the law is a light; and reproofs of instructions are the way of life.”
These proverbs of wisdom for sons and daughters presuppose good and wise fathers and mothers, parents who know, love and observe the precepts of good people also tested by generations of experience.
“Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thine heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy might.
And these words --- shall be in thine heart;
And thou shalt teach them diligently unto thy children, and shalt talk of them when thou sittest in thine house, and when thou walkest by the way, and when thou liest down, and when thou risest up.”
The mother who has done that faithful teaching through the months and years, is deserving of high praise; likewise the father who is faithful to this splendid trust.
The parent who neglects it, and pamper the children or leave them to their own inexperienced devices, is not deserving of praise at all, but of condemnation.
The eulogizing of Mother’s Day becomes foolish if it is somehow applied to all mothers, for only the good mothers deserve it.
Recently the editor of the Wisconsin Rapids Daily Tribune gave us opportunity, through his columns, to re-read some of the late William Allen White’s solid and salty editorials. More than one of them had a considerable dash of pepper too!
Did you see the one which was reprinted on March 3rd that had to do with a worried mother whose 15-year-old daughter had disappeared while off alone on a shopping trip to a neighboring city? It was almost exactly thirty years ago that the great Kansas editor unburdened his bursting self on that matter of mothers.
“The mother business,” he remarked in exasperation, “is one of the most overadvertised lines in the world. Whenever a sob-squadder desires to turn on the faucet of our tears, he begins tremulous talk about mothers being the sacredest things alive. Good mothers are sacred; so are good fathers.” But then the irate Mr. White goes on to singe the distressing number of poor mothers, who happen to have begotten children, but are too shiftless to keep a house in order or meals well prepared, too lacking in character to make the children mind (let alone do any positive training of them), too lazy, ignorant, or thoughtless to keep the household out of debt, and so on.
“A mother,” he continues,” is the ‘holiest thing alive’ only when she is the embodiment of intelligent, consecrated love.”
To be good at her vocation she must know the job of home management and care of children, and she must work at it. The old crusader’s editorial makes spicy reading because of its homely insight and vehement heat.
Now, if we may presuppose a good mother, and an intelligently interested father and dutiful children, properly cared for and not robbed of either the affection or the guidance of their parents, what is an ideal home like?
Of course it is a place and a company that surrounds all of its members with an environment in which they may grow well. The home in which a child’s character has its roots is more important by far than the soil of a flower garden.
Though one may be uncertain for a time what a child may become, it is astonishing to see so many characteristics of his parents appear in him when he matures into manhood. Our parents determine by what they are, not only our blood and physical features, but also many other things. Like home, like children.
When he was President of Princeton University, Woodrow Wilson once startled a body of alumni by saying: “Some of you write and ask us why we don’t make more of your boys. I will tell you the main reason -- because they are your boys.”
If it is so important, then, what are a few of the marks of an ideal home?
1) For one thing, in an ideal home the children will share in the chores of the home. Mother can’t be honored by being left to drudge at all of the jobs of the household, and it isn’t good for the children, either. The first place for children to learn responsible participation is in the work of the home. The realities of the world’s work are too much for the youth who has not learned their beginnings at household tasks in the kitchen, in the garden, in the care of his own room and person. Some words of Tolstoy would make a fine motto for a good home: “Let your children do all they can for themselves; carry their own water; fill their own jugs, wash up, arrange their own rooms; clean their boots and clothes, lay the table.” Even though modern conveniences have removed some of the chores of Tolstoy’s home, there are enough home duties left to enrich the experience of any well trained youngster.
2) A second, and less homely, mark of an ideal home will be that it surrounds the children with faith in their own highest possibilities. Instead of laughing at the childish ambitions, we will dream dreams with them and make visions come true. the phonograph was somebody’s dream until a boy grew up into the Edison who made it come true. “No fact is the whole of itself; its possibilities are the rest of it.” One of the things that made the unstable Simon Peter a rock was the fact that his Master called him a rock.
Because you love me, I have much achieved,
Had you despised me then I must have failed,
But since I knew you trusted, and believed,
I could not disappoint you, and so prevailed.
3) In the third place the ideal home is a training place for democracy. I know a home wherein the entire family discussed the pros and cons for a long time before the purchase of an automobile. Father preferred a Dodge; the boys (still in elementary and junior high school) preferred a Plymouth. The merits of both cars were discussed. The family budget was, too. And it was adequate, in that household, to meet the cost of either car. At length the matter was put to a family vote and the majority voted “Plymouth.” Father was a good enough family citizen to accept the decision and so that was the car he purchased. The interesting part of it all was the fact that he was more interested in that bit of training in democracy for the children than he was in the make of his next car!
Little instances of democratic training like that multiply into the maturing of a citizen for a democratic country. And no democracy can live without such people.
4) Again, our ideal home will be a gathering place for many varieties of people to its hearth. It is all to the good if, now and then, a Hindu, a Chinese, a Korean; a Hebrew, a Mohammedan; a doctor, a sea captain, an inventor - has a place at table with us. There is no finer broadening influence in the world than this personal acquaintance with people of other color, religion, or vocation than one’s own.
Is it not the Jewish Talmud which reflects such hospitality in these words: “Let thy houses be a gathering place for wise men; drink the words flowing from their mouth as a thirsty man drinks water.”
5) In the fifth place, the ideal home is that home which stimulates a taste for what is excellent - the reading, the hearing, of good storiess, great books, holy aspirations. Paul wrote, “We all with unveiled face, reflecting as a mirror the glory of the Lord, are transformed into the same image from glory to glory.” [II Corinthians 3: 18]. Many a soldier in a distant land dreams vividly the mental picture of his family with heads bowed for a moment as his father gives thanks at the table.
A Latin proverb says, “It matters much with whom you have lived.”
This then is our ideal home: a fellowship where all learn the sharing of chores and responsibilities; where children are surrounded with faith in their own highest possibilities; where there is training and practice in democracy; where many varieties of life are welcome, and where there is a taste for the excellent and holy.
Happy the Father and Mother whose family is raised in such an environment, and grateful their children who rightly, then, rise up and call them blessed!
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Delivered at Wisconsin Rapids, May 14,1944.