Finding home.

A Reflection for the Feast of the Dedication of the Lateran Basilica in Rome

Find today’s readings here.

I find it fascinating how much time and how many resources were dedicated to the construction of early churches.

I sometimes wonder if these churches, the first physical homes of God, would have been built at all if today’s modern amenities were at the disposal of their founders. Would they have opted, for example, to hold Mass over Zoom and DoorDash the eucharist to communicants while taking collections via QR code rather than wicker basket?

I suspect not, mostly because I do not think practicality was a virtue these founders held highly. Take the Lateran Basilica in Rome; the oldest church in the West and the namesake for today’s feast. The structure has been rebuilt, refurbished, and restored nearly ten times since its original construction in 324 A.D.

Where’s the sense in that? Could they not have just as easily built a sturdy box out of travertine and quick lime, and, when that was worn away, scraped it from its surface and built a new one in its place? And what exactly makes the Lateran Basilica more worthy of a feast than the road-side, ranch-style parish I used to pass on my drive home from high school?

A final twist of the screw: What about its extravagance makes it more of a home?

Home is something I’ve been thinking about a lot over the past few months. Home, I’ve found, is a subject of constant contemplation for people who are living in but not from New York. There are ways to arrange your life here that manufacture home’s effect: I order my days into predictable routines, I buy myself warm bedding to sleep in, I begin to recognize faces in the elevator, I convince myself on very shallow terms that I am home.

All it takes is one small lapse in this narrative to disrupt the belief. I find myself commuting home under a shade of light I have not before, I happen upon an unplanned Sunday afternoon, I wonder where that fire truck is going, I become aware of where I am not.

What I am trying to explain is that home has a spiritual essence, irreducible to its architectural qualities or daily expectancies. Those early founders of the church were given a noble but impossible task: to create a building that radiated “home.”

The Lateran Basilica is, incredibly, still standing, and one of many residuals of the early church. We ourselves are that church’s legacy, its essence, that perishable, delicate, precious thing we call “home.”

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