Interior Educating

This is a recent post from the American Mothers of Utah Valley blog, written by Tamara Gilliland, who teaches at BYU. She came to our monthly meeting on Thursday night and spoke on the topic of:

Interior Educating
Hey all! Good to be with you and thanks for all who shared lovely insights on designing and maintaining our homes (and the many other great topics of the evening!) Here is the quote: “What good does it do to have a home in which children are unhappy hostages and adults are anxious spies?

What good does it do to plan a house to fit lots of cultural expectations, but not our family?” (from H. Wallace Goddard in “Celebrating Family Life: Adding Glory to Your Family’s Story” (manuscript))

And the mantra: The Purpose of the Task is to Strengthen the Relationship! (similar to The Point of the Project is the People!)

There was one other little thing I might have shared had we more time–a way of looking at the work of maintining home at three levels (which map well with degrees of glory!). I actually love to look at just about anything at these levels. The lowest level is the negative/destructive/take-energy-from-the-system way of thinking about and doing things. All about “me”. The middle is a neutral/status quo approach, where we keep careful track and balance of who has done how much, I give/you give transactions, etc. The highest is positive/proactive/creating-energy-for-the-system, fully self-less. Perspectives and approaches to “housework” might look like this:

+ A Sacred Duty/Blessing: Unite And Commune
0 A Necessary Evil: Divide And Conquer
- The Bane Of Life: Avoid At All Costs

So at the lower level, we contribute to home chaos without helping. At a step up, we see the need to take care of the chaos, but only as much as is neccisary and it’s only about chaos managment. We so efficiently get it “out of the way” that we miss all the good things it’s the way to. Higher is seeing the process as ritualistic and powerful, using it as a way to serve and express love, an experience that bonds us to family members (especially the more we do it side by side!), and a unique and symbolic training for our souls (maybe kind of a Karate Kid way of preparing us for things we may not fully understand just yet…?)

Finally, for those that said they’d love to dive deeper on the topic, a good starting place might be this article from BYU magazine: http://magazine.byu.edu/?act=view&a=151 (co-authored by Kathleen Bahr, one of the original developers of the BYU class I mentioned.) And, maybe you could even look into auditing that course (Home and Family Living, HFL 371) or any other great ones they offer (like HFL 100, which does use a textbook you might be able to get, too, called “Creating Home as a Sacred Center”). Happy “interior educating”! Tamara Gilliland