A new view of home

It can be helpful to expand one’s overall definition of home – to consider it as something more than a physical place. While we might need to focus on the practicalities of home building, home repair, along with home buying and selling, there’s a bigger, spiritual view that home is truly about. It’s a perspective that can also throw healing light on issues such as home loss and homelessness.

Jesus encouraged people, “Lay up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where neither moth nor rust doth corrupt” (Matthew 6:20). The home that is a heavenly treasure is far more than even the most loved house, tent, or mansion. Christian Science teaches that we each as God’s valued children have an inseparable oneness with God, divine Spirit, which means that the consciousness of being in God’s presence is our true and invulnerable home.

This is a home that is fully and beautifully furnished­ – not with physical things, but with a multitude of spiritual elements. We as spiritual ideas of Mind, another name for God, have this spiritual home, including all of its good furnishings. Spiritual joy, rest, nourishment, and activity are just some of them! These spiritual elements not only comfort us, but they also strengthen us and even impel us to help others. “The man of God may be perfect, throughly furnished unto all good works,” as the Bible puts it (II Timothy 3:17).

Our permanent, forever abode is our oneness with God. We are never truly away from this home. It cannot be taken from us or destroyed. Our habitation here in the all-presence of heaven is assured.

Understanding this expanded view of home, even if only a glimpse, brings such confidence. An article from the Christian Science Sentinel, a sister publication to the Monitor, describes how a family proved this to be true in a beautiful way (see Vicki A. Turpen, “What we gained when we lost everything,” February 22, 1999). The writer’s storage shed and partially-built house had burned to the ground.

As a Christian Scientist, her prayers took her to the book “Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures.” She notes where the author, Monitor founder Mary Baker Eddy, writes, “Home is the dearest spot on earth, and it should be the centre, though not the boundary, of the affections” (p. 58).

Through prayer, the family found a contractor to quickly rebuild their house, but the writer also says the center of home “is a spiritual idea, not a physical structure. As each family member recognized this spiritual truth, the feeling of loss was replaced with the assurance that God was still present and accountable. No human loss could erase this fact. Our home became a much happier, healthier place than it had been, and over the next few years it became a haven for other young people who were attracted to our family because of the qualities the children expressed.”

Into our heavenly home, none of the world’s fears gain entrance. Divine consciousness, the basic substance of our holy abode, always remains pure. We have the right to rejoice often then, because, as the 91st Psalm puts it, we continuously and safely “abide under the shadow of the Almighty” and dwell in “the secret place of the most High” (verse 1).

From our heavenly home, is there ever a moving day? Absolutely not. Mrs. Eddy once said to the members of her household: “Home is not a place but a power. We find home when we arrive at the full understanding of God” (Irving C. Tomlinson, “Twelve Years with Mary Baker Eddy,” Amplified Edition, p. 211).

As God’s ideas, we dwell permanently and safely in God. There is no departing from, nor losing, this heavenly home, since God is ever present. We can increasingly become conscious of, and be so grateful for, how we each – all around the world – are truly God’s ideas, forever residing in the perfect spiritual home that is God.