Theologian Natalia Marandiuc explores the meaning of home and the authenticity of self in a world of both beautiful and toxic difference.
Theologian Natalia Marandiuc explores the meaning of home and the authenticity of self in a world of both beautiful and toxic difference. She is Assistant Professor of Christian Theology at Southern Methodist University's Perkins School of Theology, and author of The Goodness of Home: Human and Divine Love and the Making of the Self.
Show Notes
Evan Rosa: For the Life of the World is a production of the Yale Center for Faith & Culture. For more information, visit faith.yale.edu.
Natalia Marandiuc: Difference is constitutive of who we are and what we are. And while differences are multifarious and beautiful, this is precisely where human lives are broken. But human lives on account of human loves can be fortified and they can be fortified to resist the structures of injustice, to resist the structures of inequities, to resist the structures of harm and rebuild old human structures of life to work justice, to work equity.
Evan Rosa: This is For the Life of the World, a podcast about seeking and living a life worthy of our humanity. I'm Evan Rosa with the Yale Center for Faith & Culture. Human difference is both a gift and a problem. We're created by God with an affirmed particularity. We are individually unique and distinct as persons, but when differences rendered in the ugly and fallen dynamics of power hierarchies and structural injustice, we're reminded that human individuality means that differences are not neutral or equivalent. That's when we see the toxicity of difference.
Today, we're joined by Natalia Marandiuc, a theologian at Perkins School of Theology at Southern Methodist University and author of The Goodness of Home: Human and Divine Love and the Making of the Self. That element of home is of central importance to both the goodness and the toxicity of difference. And talking about home could scarcely be more relevant than now, given the literal and metaphorical homelessness that the pandemic has wrought. Check the show notes for this episode to go back and listen to Miroslav Volf and Ryan McAnnally-Linz discuss the promise and peril of home.
In her book, Natalia writes that the globalized world suffers from an impoverishment of heart. "The poverty of heart and the poverty of relations have much to do with the struggles of the contemporary self to maintain itself in the face of an avalanche of demands and the cancerous growth of work intensity, competition, information, tasks, and extreme mobility." And I would note, she wrote that before 2020 exacerbated everything. "Home," she says, "is not merely our physically located abode or domicile. Home is inherently relational, defined in terms of relationships of attachment and belonging and infused with human and divine love."
In this conversation, Natalia shares with us some of her views on the meaning of home, attachment, the self, and helps us see how matters of justice and oppression are deeply connected to the formation of human identity, our attachment relationships, and thereby, our very homeless.
Natalia, thanks so much for joining us. And I think the work that you've been doing on home is probably never been more relevant. And yet everyone's experience of home is very different right now. Home is fraught place. it's different when you're stuck there than when you're free to come and go. It's also different due to the economics of your own family life. All sorts of people still do have to leave home for work whether because they're essential workers, or just the demands of life require it. I wonder if you could start off just by talking about what home means to you, and like what you're thinking about now that home is such a strange place.
Natalia Marandiuc: Certainly, I wrote this book titled The Goodness of Home, thinking particularly about how home grows in us, and we grow in spaces that we call home relationally, rather than spatially or rather than exclusively spatially. I focus on the relational dimension because space is relative. Space is relative in an age of migration when spaces can be fractured and sometimes remain fragments of memory in people's lives. So, I look at home as a space of love, a space of love among people, but particularly love among people that is elevated by the presence of God within human relations of love.
So I refer to home in terms of a triad that includes the anthropological dimension of people relating to each other, and particularly people relating to each other in a strong way, what they call attachment loves, loves that are a bit more intimate than simply the universal love for neighbor, the kind of care that we owe to all human creatures. I'm referring rather to the kind of relations that shape us deeply, and shape us deeply because we know each other, we see each other's face, in terms. And within these spaces, God is present because God chooses to be present within the space shaped by human participants in these sorts of relations. And when we love the right way, that is when God is in fact present. Now I called the home this sort of triad, which in Kierkegaard's terms, will include human participants, and the third term, the divine term that elevates human loves, sanctifies them, and gives them the sort of stability that fits the metaphor of home. It gives human relationships a sort of sturdiness that Earth alone would be incapable of.
Evan Rosa: Yeah. So that's really interesting. So most people, when they think of home, they're really only thinking about the domicile, the space itself. By construing home as relations, it really offers a different perspective on quarantine and lockdown. It offers a perspective that at once can either probably complicate it or make it better, improve it for people. It might complicate it in so far as now, people are forced into perhaps more tense relations, where they could have left home to avoid in the past. Now they're stuck. Maybe it's improved for other people in so far as that kind of contact provides more ample space, more time together, or at least, a different kind of quality of relation. That seems to me to be a kind of opportunity for solace in a time like this.
So I talk about the relationships of attachments that constitute our home that generates the formation of our subjectivity and the way in which we home each other.
Evan Rosa: Homing each other is really interesting. Yes. What is it? It's a verb for you there, right?
So I used the term home as a noun and as a verb. In fact, I use the word self also as a noun and as a verb. So we home each other. We self each other and we self the world. Also the world selves us through these narrow gateways, these intimate laboratories that attachment relationships constitute. Now, at the time such as this time confined in physical spaces that are more narrow—the spaces of our houses or apartments. We might be tempted to call that sort of confinement to home. But, the way I talk about home in these relational ways, and using the neuropsychology of attachment, this is actually not a confinement. But rather, these are the kind of relations that anchor us, so as to be able to go out and about in the world and make it a place of more justice, a place of increased goodness and returned to our places of nourishment, to our attachment homes that give us the nurture that we need in order to have the strength to keep going and do more number of things. So in other words, home conceived in this way is a place that we come back to though away from. It's a dynamic that allows for continuities and discontinuities. So it's not a prison, but it's a place of nurture.
Evan Rosa: And when you have that foundation of attachment where you call it a sort of narrow gate, a way of interacting with another person and then thereby being self-ed— receiving a self and cultivating a self in this kind of relational nexus at home. It's interesting to think about that through the lens of human agency, where your variabilities and your experience of the world and your action in the world is cultivated and produced in this web of relationships.
The arguments that I make is that our agency, and in fact our freedom, is not just a given, but something that grows. We grow into our freedom and into our agency. Through these relations of belonging. To be yourself is not just a static reality, but rather a progression, a becoming. And the kind of freedom that we exercise is also not just a static capacity, but rather dynamic unfolding that keeps going, and it keeps going through these relations that nurture us. And they are not a mere anthropological set of data. They have this quality of deep shaping because, they take their creative power from the creative power of God.
Natalia Marandiuc: God Godself inhabits human relations of love, human attachment, therefore there is a dual creative act that is not just defined by fiat but rather is a participative act, continuous act in which we can participate with God. And that is exactly where our agency comes through. This is what most fundamentally our agency is about, to participate in the shaping, the creative act of God, to co-create with God. The world of human selves and the world in which we live and move and have our being is a world of enormous differences. And these differences are both good —it's part of the goodness of creation—and they are also the place where creation is fallen. Of course, our differences are of multiple kinds, but they are not all equal. And that is where injustice creeps in. This is where our lives are broken.
We are people of multiple ethnicities and multiple races. And of course, race as such is a constructed category, and yet it is a powerful category that functions in the world to destroy our lives in the way in which it is deployed. Difference is constitutive of who we are and what we are. And while differences are multifarious and beautiful, and perhaps at the core of what is beautiful in the world is that the world is indeed so much permeated by diversity in every sense of the word, this is precisely where the world and human lives are broken, are malfunctioning. And in being so, we are further harming and malforming each other. So instead of rightly participating in the formation of each other, into selfing each other the right way, we often participate in the malformation and dis-selfing of each other.
Evan Rosa: Yeah. So that same creative agency that's there, that agency can be used for better or worse, for formation toward flourishing, or maybe malformation toward trauma and...
Natalia Marandiuc: Right. So there are ways in which we can build each other up in Kierkegaard's term. We build the other into her becoming, more herself, or the very opposite of that. So in the contemporary context where we see racial differences, gender differences, economic differences, ability differences, and so many other kinds of differences, these are not neutral differences. These are not simply ways of describing the beauty of the world, but rather people are being treated differently on account of their gender, on account of the way in which they are racialized, on account of how they are perceived, intersectionally. So, the way in which, perhaps, one presents in the world makes a massive difference in terms of the possibilities that such a person would have to be selfed in the world or to be destroyed in and through. The world ended up the way in which there are mis-attachments and there are malformations. And, rather than having possibilities of attachment, there are possibilities only of indifference or destruction.
I think what my book contributes with is envisioning a different narrative by going back to a different story of origin, retrieving the goodness of difference as such and giving the possibility of healing the pernicious dimension of how differences function in the world. So my argument is that we are creatures of love having come into the world to the creative loving power of God. And we as human beings who are inextricably part of the human relations, then co-participate with God, not only in solving and creating the self of others continuously, but also healing these toxic ways in which differences function in the world.
Natalia Marandiuc: God loves us and gives us the unique identity of our existence, of our intersectional difference in whatever terms. What I want to say by this is that while God's love is universally given to all of us, it's uniquely given to each one of us in our own particularity. So God creates you and God creates me in a different way. God's love has a directionality and the singularity and the specificity that is, in a certain qualified sense of the word, not uniform because it creates different sorts of people. So when we love each other the right way, we participate in God's flows of love that already have a directionality into the human difference of each person's life.
Evan Rosa: So are you describing a process whereby a multiplicity of particular individuals that have been given their own unique distinct identity in God are now given the opportunity to form relationships and connect? And that's where the differences start butting up against each other, right?
Natalia Marandiuc: That's true, but the way in which they butt against each other is not necessarily the best way in which we are to relate to one another, but rather to celebrate difference and to Not to pull each other into our own imagination even about human differences as such, because that will be colonizing another person. And in fact, we can harm each other both by indifference and by colonizing, suffocating another person with our own way of being in the world rather than upholding the other person in her own unique way of life. And so, the way in which I'm using creatively in my work arguments for the formation and the unfolding of subjectivity is by envisioning that God's love can be conceptualized as coming from God, God self into the world, something like a river that keeps flowing and yet it flows and keeps coming toward us continuously.
And yet it has a directionality in and toward each particular life. So if I care properly about a fellow human being, say my daughter or my mother or my aunt who raised me—I was raised by someone else, not my own mother, so I formed an attachment with someone who's not biologically my parents —but loving such a person is jumping into the river that comes from God, the river of love as it were that already goes toward that person. So I co-participate with God in something that already has a power. And in so doing, I self myself and self the other person.
It's also the kind of fluid grounding that is of infinite strength because of its divine origin and of its divine quality. And yet it is also enabling the finiteness of my own gesture of going towards the other person to have its own value, to have its own unique value. So it's an interweaving of human agency and divine grounding of human agency that comes together in order to create human subjectivity, upholds human subjectivity, and ultimately heal it.
Evan Rosa: This is really beautiful language for talking about what the self is and what human relationships are when they are surrounded by—I love this—the fluid grounding of God's love.
Natalia Marandiuc: So this kind of power that comes to us in a soft way, I think the metaphor of water perhaps has a fluidity and the softness to it that enables the imagination and freeze the imagination to picture, possibilities rather than a stark and rigid metaphysics.
So this soft and yet infinitely strong power of God, power of divine love that comes towards us, keeps coming and we co-participate in it—that I would argue is stronger than the strength of the injustices, the structural injustice and the structural inequities that keep human differences in toxic places. That toxicity can be cleansed away literally in the divine river of love, if I were to keep the poetic metaphor. But metaphors aside, there is a difference in power. Creative power of God is the same kind of power that has the possibilities of redirecting pernicious side of living into human differences so that we have the strength to reorient our lives, and we weave the fabric of human relations.
Evan Rosa: One of my questions here is if there is healing that emerges from reweaving, as you say, or if there is an opportunity for healing something that is structural, that's created at a different level—it's not at the level of individual personal agency, but when you look at misogyny or racism or ableism, this sort of toxicity is in the structure as well. How does your view of home and attachment and divine love contribute to solving a structural problem?
Natalia Marandiuc: It's precisely through this participation in God's love that our subjectivities are fortified—a fortified subjectivity through the presence of God, pneumatologically, and ultimately Christologically, because the presence of the Spirit within human lives and within human loves is on the basis of the incarnation. And yet the incarnation entails the sending of the Spirit and the sending of the spirit is consequential for the ways in which, I argue, human lives on the count of human loves can be fortified, and they can be fortified to resist the structures of injustice, to resist the structures of inequities, to resist the structures of harm, and rebuild human structures of life toward justice, toward equity.
Evan Rosa: What I love about this is the way that it's that creative model again, right? You're rediscovering not just in one's individual self, but through the presence of God binding together these relations that create new homes even, right? Like it creates a home wherever these relationships are found and in so doing, it's operating at a structural level. So it's resisting all that malformed formation and destruction.
Natalia Marandiuc: If you envision that the anthropological grid is broken, the web of human relationality is broken. It's not woven together the right way. We are imprisoned in this malfunctioning way of existence whereby we don't love rightly. And in fact, we often don't love at all. So here comes the way in which we are given the power to remake the structure of life into which we participate to remake ourselves, to remake each other. My argument is for a love-rich theological anthropology. And it's a proposal for the becoming of the self and the healing of the self. It's a fortified, robust enough self empowered by the love of God, which inhabits human loves to resist structures of sexist, structures of queer phobia, structures of racism, structures of patriarchy, and instead, participate in a living structure of love that is ultimately sourced in the infinite love that circulates within the Trinity and is poured into the human fabric of relationality, and makes it a fabric of justice making and equity making. I propose then that envisioning a theological anthropology argumented by the presence of the Spirit, which has Christic origins, has the power to crack the insidious systemic injustices of gender inequities and racist oppression and all the other intersectional forms of oppression.
Now, what does this mean concretely? It means reformation of our imagination at one level and a reformation of our ability to act in the world. So, in a sense, perhaps, this is the mysterious ways in which we remain resilient and we are not ultimately crushed. We might be broken, but not ultimately crushed the way in which the little immigrant girl who was thrown into a cage would not be entirely destroyed by that reality, but in some mysterious way, she would be able to reweave herself by receiving, from wherever it is given, the love that reshapes and reforms our own possibilities of becoming and not being utterly destroyed.
What I want to suggest is that this has a dimension of moral demand—a call. It's a call to participate in God's justice making in the world. We are to partner with God, live into God's power, live into the kind of reformed imagination that God gives us, ultimately, in the story of the gospel—the call to be on the giving side and the healing possibilities that are radically present on the receiving side. Putting these two together gives precisely the kind of picture that I'm trying to argue for, namely, that we home each other and we self each other. And the concept of home, the concept of the self, and the concept of love are a triads that cannot be ultimately divorced.
Evan Rosa: That's beautiful. Natalia, thank you for presenting this kind of hopeful image of what it means to not just be at home, but to be home to others right now.
Natalia Marandiuc: Thank you very much.
Evan Rosa: The closing paragraph of Natalia's book, The Goodness of Home, is really helpful to wrap things up for today. So here it is:
"Human loves are indeed the earthly homes for which the heart longs in which, according to ancient Hebrew poetic prophecy, God personally rests. This interstitial space between those who love is not empty. God is Holy present, resting in the arc between the two people. This divinely indwelled space, which far from pulling the lovers away from each other, links them together in the strongest way possible. This is our attachment home contoured anthropologically as well as pneumatological. God is present in it as spirit, and we are present in it as love oriented creatures whose identities are marked in a strong sense by the love that is forwarded from God to other human beings. It is a space of double belonging, both to our earthly loves and to the love of God, which together co-create the human self."
So there it is for today. May you find home and may you be home for someone else. Thanks for listening.
For the Life of the World is a production of the Yale Center for Faith & Culture at Yale Divinity School. This episode featured theologian, Natalia Marandiuc. I'm Evan Rosa and I edited the show and produced it along with Ryan McAnnally-Linz. For more information, visit us online at faith.yale.edu. We produce a new episode every Saturday and you can subscribe through any podcast app.
Thanks for listening this week. We've been asking you to support us and we will continue to do that because we're delighted that you are listeners and we want to send it to more people. Three ways you can help us today: share the show with a friend by text or email or just talk about it, post it on your social feed, or you could open up Apple Podcasts and leave a positive review and rating. It's really all for the sake of growing this community of people who believe in seeking a life that is worthy of our humanity and sharing it with others. So thanks for that support for listening and we'll be back next week.