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Monday, January 8, 2018

The Fall of the House of Boughton


Some of you may remember a very old movie (older than I, in fact) called Mr. Blandings Builds his Dream House, starring Cary Grant (1948). A more recent movie that is rather like the first is The Money Pit, starring Tom Hanks (1986). In both movies, a young couple has invested in a dream house for their future which turns out to be a nightmare. I remember watching the Cary Grant movie a very long time ago on an afternoon TV matinee. It was my first realization that Cary Grant was actually funny. All that I knew of him beforehand was that he was the one who said, “Judy, Judy, Judy”. Unable to find this online so far, I looked up The Money Pit instead and watched that one this morning. Hanks is also quite funny in this comedy of disasters as a young man trying to hold together a house that is self-destructing all around him while at the same time maintaining a marriage that is far more important to him than the money or the house. “The foundation is the important thing,” the building contractor tells Hanks toward the end of the story. “If you have a good foundation, everything else can be repaired.”

It’s an endearing sort of moral, and it may even be true. But the reason these two movies came to mind in the first place is that upon awakening this morning, after a rather sleepless night punctuated by pains and discomforts for which there seems no end of modulation, it occurred to me that my body is like the cursed house in these movies, falling apart bit by bit, beam by beam, from floor to ceiling to plumbing to wiring. Every evening, I go to bed in the hope that the night crew of time and rest will have mended some parts of the crumbling structure by morning, only to find upon waking that new holes have appeared, new pipes have cracked, that the floors are sagging and the timbers are groaning and that the latter condition is now worse than the former. Oh, the foundation is still solid—I’m still here, aren’t?—but all the parts above ground are tipped and skewed and leaning in quite an alarming manner.

Now, I don’t remember what ultimately happens with the house in the Grant movie. In the Hanks film, the thing is in a seemingly hopeless state, such that even the repairs are in need of repair. But when the foundation of the love itself is threatened, the house no longer matters to either the man or the woman. Repairs are finally effected, the structure made sound, but the foundation, the love that is the very reason for the house, has been undermined. Of course, it all turns out well in the end (this is, after all, a comedy). Love is restored and, with it, the house, the dream, and the future.

Would that life itself were a comedy. Or then again, perhaps it is. In 2 Corinthians, the apostle Paul speaks of dwellings in this manner: For we know that if our earthly house, this tent, is destroyed, we have a building from God, a house not made with hands, eternal in the heavens. For in this we groan, earnestly desiring to be clothed with our habitation which is from heaven, if indeed, having been clothed, we shall not be found naked. For we who are in this tent groan, being burdened, not because we want to be unclothed, but further clothed, that mortality may be swallowed up by life.

Some of my troubles may be reparable. I don’t know. If they are, they are only so for a time—and God knows what period of time. Deterioration remains a constant process, relentlessly undoing repair, relentlessly degrading that which has arisen from the initial foundation. The great hope from the beginning is for a structure not subject to dissolution, the eternal foundation sometimes known as love.  

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