How Big is Your Family? by Bro. David Steindl-Rast O.S.B.

How wide is the reach of our belonging?  Can we stretch it to the furthest reaches of God’s household?

Shaker tradition has a saying that puts the idea of contemplation as simply as it can be put: “Hearts to God, hands to work.”  That is how Shakers lived.  We need only to look at a Shaker chair for proof that they understood contemplation.  “Hearts to God” means attention to the guiding vision.  “Hands to work” means making that vision a reality.  The inseparable splicing of vision and action makes contemplation what it is.  In love’s world of prayer, the vision is a deep awareness of belonging; the action puts the consequences of that belonging into practice.  Love’s action is an expression of thanksgiving for the insights of love’s vision.  This is what the Romans called “gratias agere,” not merely thanking, but acting out one’s gratefulness.  With a heart turned to God, love sees: I belong.  With hands turned to work, love acts accordingly.

The Romans had a word for love, which expressed precisely that attitude.  It is the Latin word pietas.  We could translate it as “family affection,” an attitude that springs from a sense of belonging and expresses itself in acting accordingly.  Pietas is, in the first place, the attitude of the pater familias.  The family belongs to the father from whom it receives its name.  Pietas gives rights and duties to the pius pater.  But pietas is an attitude shared by every member of the household and relating each to each.  Husband and wife may love one another with passion and desire, but the bond that holds them most strongly and most deeply together is pietas.  So is the love of brothers and sisters for each and the love between children and parents.  But pietas extends also to servants and slaves, to anyone who belongs to the household.  As a household they are related to the ancestors of the family and to the guardian spirits, the lares, by the same pietas that embraces the household pets, the farm animals, the land, the tools, the furniture, and other heirlooms.  We have no concept like that in English.

If we could put the vigor of the Latin pietas into our words “pity” and “piety,” which derive from it, our concepts of compassion and devotion would surely be enriched.  They hinge on the notion of belonging.  We cannot revive a word at will.  But we must recover the sense of belonging that coined the word pietas.

It is fascinating to trace the process by which archaic societies make a stranger welcome.  It teaches us much about love, about belonging, and about gratitude.  An outsider is strange in the sense of being unfamiliar, of not belonging to the family.  But what is unfamiliar is strange also in the sense of being suspicious.  The stranger is suspect of being an enemy.  Being aware of this suspicion, a stranger with good intentions will carry gifts.  They are not a price to be paid but a free present.  Will they be accepted?  If so, the give-and-take of gratitude forges a bond of mutual belonging.  The one who was a stranger is now a guest.  And guests belong to the household.  In their regard the bond of pietas has a special sacredness.  When we become aware that every stranger is gift, strangers need no longer go through a gift-giving ritual to be accepted.  We will welcome them, and this hospitality of the heart will be a celebration of the bond that unites giver and receiver in thanksgiving.

When we lift our hearts to God, whom we call “Our Father in heaven,” we see that we belong to a household that embraces all creatures, the Earth Household in Gary Snyder’s powerful poetic term.  And if we put our hands to work in service of that Earth Household, this contemplative matching of vision by action will spread God’s peace “on earth as it is in heaven.”  The crucial question is: How big is our family?  How wide is the reach of our belonging?  Can we stretch it to the furthest reaches of God’s household?  Will our care and concern stretch to embrace all members of this Earth Household — humans, animals, plants, whom we now still consider strange?  The survival of all of us may well depend on our answer.

Peace is the fruit of love.  The “yes” to our belonging to God’s great household is the seed from which peace unfolds.  D.H. Lawrence suggests this in a poem which he entitled “PAX,” the Latin word for “peace.”  There is a close link between the Roman concepts of pax and pietas.  This poem hinges on the link between the two.

All that matters is to be at one with the living God
To be a creature in the house of the God of Life.

Like a cat asleep on a chair
at peace, in peace
and at one with the master of the house, with the
mistress,
at home, at home in the house of the living,
sleeping on the hearth, and yawning before the
fire.

Sleeping on the hearth of the living world,
yawning at home before the fire of life
feeling the presence of the living God
like a great reassurance
a deep calm in the heart
a presence
as of a master sitting at the board
in his own and greater being,
in the house of life.                 

When we read this poem aloud, it has the power of an incantation.  Its repetitions seem to put us under a spell — not a spell that binds us, but a freeing spell.  “At one…at peace, in peace and at one…at home.”  This incantation makes us relax.  It makes us settle down into “a deep calm in the heart.”  It is like a homecoming to “the house of life,” to “the house of the living,” to “the house of the God of life,” where we belong, where we are truly at home.  In all their calm, these lines are alive with dynamic power.  They have fire in them.  Even the yawning of the cat is a “yawning before the fire.”  The yawning of any self-respecting cat is part of a whole ritual of stretching and arching that is full of vitality.  When we yawn not with boredom or fatigue but with “a deep calm in the heart,” it is a “yawning before the fire of life.”  “Life” is a key word in this poem.  Five times “life” and “living” are repeated.  The calm of true peace is not a dead silence but the live stillness of a bright burning flame.         

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