shabbat shalom e1632150218186

Shabbat Shalom

by

in

I forgot about living rooms.
That safe space:
That secure domestic feeling of a welcoming home.

I lost it long ago, perhaps, or never had it.
I don’t ever remember the feeling of having been safe or welcome;
the comfortable tedium of a warm and loving nest.

There were rooms, in many houses. But, they were hunting grounds for predators, toxic dumping grounds for the neurotic, and suffocating fields of threat and violence: rivalry, aggression, and oppression. Theatres of cruelty and abuse: domination, degradation, and humiliation.

Home is the cradle of human love.
Home is the nursery of the embodied soul.
Family is the climbing frame for the psyche’s growth.
Family is the nest from which we must fly or fall.

Establishing and re-establishing the sense of safety, domesticity: of home, is crucial to psychological peace, self-confidence, and self-dignity.

If you’ve escaped your childhood dungeon too,
built your own home and rediscovered the living room,
even if there’s nobody to share it with,
light a candle and eat with God.