Stone Houses

"Some people live without anything and have everything. The example that always comes to mind for me is in Africa, where I preached. This little old black African man and I prayed together after a long session. He prayed with such tenderness, saying, "O Lord, help us never to move into stone houses." And everybody echoed, "Yes, Lord. Yes, Lord." Afterward I asked the missionaries what he had meant. "Well," a priest said, "look at the villages. They're all door-less thatch huts. And so as long as you live a simple life in a thatch hut with no doors, you don't know where your family ends and where the next family begins. You move in and out of one another's lives, and it's all really one family. And there's no possessing, there's no mine and thine; it's ours. It's a world of community."

"Once the first stone hut is built in a village," the missionary continued, "very quickly a door and locks are put on it. Immediately the world of mine and thine is created. The entire social worldview, the entire understanding of self, changes."

We've got to realize the world of stone huts is the only world you and I have ever known. We've paid a price for that inheritance. We can't reverse it. We're not going to live in thatch huts, and I'm not here to say we should. But we've got to know what we've given up by the so-called technological advances of this very sophisticated society. It's one reason why we are producing neurotic and psychotic people at such an unbelievable rate. Teen suicides, for example, doubled in the 1980s. Crime in general has increased 500 percent since 1960! We've chosen security over solidarity in First World countries, in Western Europe and North America. Jesus said, "You can't serve God and mammon." I'd say you can't see God very well if you spend too much time inside your stone house."
- Richard Rohr, from Letting Go: A Spirituality of Subtraction

Having grown up in Africa, this devotion really made a lot of sense to me. It reminded me where I came from, and how I have deviated from it. I have always physically lived in a stone house, and for most of my life, I have also metaphorically lived in a stone house, too. I think that I have strived for much of my life to live in community, and not in isolation, but these thoughts from Richard Rohr put words and a picture to that desire. I choose now to intentionally live in community. I think that, often, when we are in intentional isolation, we can become so introspective and reflective that we then find it difficult to reach out beyond ourselves. This is a lesson I need to be reminded of frequently.