Artificiality of Appearance

Just today my house went on the market.  Over the last few months, my wife has been diligently devoting herself to "minimizing" the house in preparation for showing it.  "Minimizing" is the term realtors use as shorthand for "removing all things that make the house personal"-- pictures on the fridge, decorations, items of personal yet questionable taste.  The goal in minimizing is to make your home as neutral as possible-- white towels, minimal decorations, no personalized touches like photographs, religious decorations, etc.  Essentially, you are stripping your house of anything that makes it a home.

What you are aiming for in minimizing the house is creating an artificial appearance of a home without the actual content of the home.  All the appearances of a home are there: couches, beds, tables, bookshelves.  But the content of "home" is purposely hidden away; all of the very things that potential buyers long to create for themselves within those walls are deemed inappropriate to have out when showing the house.

This makes no sense to me.  When looking at houses, the last thing I want to see is a pristine, untouched, artificial environment.  When we were the potential buyers of this house, I loved that the closets were stuffed with clothes and old VHS tapes.  I loved that the kids' rooms were covered with posters and toys.  Seeing how someone else made a home within these walls made me want to make a home here as well.  The houses I liked the least were the ones that were completely empty.  Those were just... houses.  I didn't want a house, I wanted a home.

But this minimizing mentality seems to be the way our culture functions.  We covet appearances but hate to deal with the sloppy realities of actual content.  We want our houses to look like homes but without the inconveniences of clutter and disarray.  We want our relationships to look healthy but without the inconveniences of the hard and painful labor that makes relationships thrive.  We want our churches to look hip and relevant without the inconveniences of truly listening and thereby knowing the cries of people's hearts.

This is one of the many things I appreciated about Hans Urs von Balthasar.  The whole of his theology (primarily but not limited to his theological aesthetics) insists on the absolute inseparability of form and content.  He argues that, in the person of Jesus Christ, the appearance of Christ in the world cannot be separated out from the content-- the identity-- of who Christ is as God Incarnate.   If Christ is, as Balthasar elsewhere argues (namely in his Theology of History), the norm of history (and, I would content, of reality itself) then Christians have a responsibility to counter the world's obsession with mere appearance.  Christians who have any sacramental understanding know that appearance is epiphanic-- appearances, forms, are the vehicles for the revelation and the unveiling of deeper realities.  So, even in something as simple and prosaic as a house, the appearance of "home" can and should be something that opens up as an epiphanic revelation of a specific content: the reality of "home", not just within the four walls of a domicile, but within the divine bosom from which the heavens and the earth are spun.  As Sheldon Vanauken puts it so well, "Heaven must be a coming home".  By stripping appearance of its content, we are stripping form of its epiphanic vocation and missing an opportunity to reveal, sacramentally, something of divine reality.

... and that is why I'm not picking up my socks off of the floor before realtors bring people by!

:)