What We Build, Builds Us
The circular saw chewed up the chalk line as it cut into the plywood. When it reached the end of the board, a piece dropped free to my side, at the feet of a slender man in new shoes, a white helmet, and an orange safety vest. The man picked up the rectangular panel, carried it to the framed wall lying on the slab, and after positioning it carefully, fastened it with several outbursts of the nail gun. A large group of us lined up to lift the assembled wall off the ground and into the air, a satisfying finish to my first day as a Habitat for Humanity construction volunteer. That next week, every time I drove past the job site, I smiled at the wall, dignified in its simplicity and now visible from the road.
Founded in 1976, Habitat is a nonprofit with a mission to bring neighbors together to build affordable housing in their communities. The organization grew out of Koinonia Farm, an interracial intentional community started by Baptist minister Clarence Jordan in the heart of the segregated Deep South. Jordan seeded the fertile ground of this experiment with his Christian faith and anarchist spirit. Koinonia is a Greek word that appears in the New Testament 19 times and means deep and abiding fellowship. The farm welcomed Black and White alike, treating everyone as equals. Members were paid the same, shared in the income from cash crops, and prayed and ate together. It was a working demonstration plot that sidestepped central authority and took direct action to prefigure a new model of social and economic relations.
In 1968, a year before he died, Jordan outlined the concept of partnership housing in a letter to the farm community. “What the poor need,” he said, “is not charity but capital, not case workers but coworkers. And what the rich need,” he continued, “is a wise, honorable, and just way of divesting themselves of their overabundance.” Like Dorothy Day and the Berrigan brothers, Jordan engaged in innovative and sacred activism that calls on us to build the Kingdom of God here on earth.
The work that emerged as Habitat gestures toward something larger than housing. Inside the four walls of a home there is open space in which to enact a new paradigm, one that may not conform to modern expectations. It serves as an oasis in the desert of late-stage capitalism, a source of living waters from which to drink. Home is a place to pioneer collective liberation—the deepest revolution there is.
Shih-t’ou, an 8th-century Chinese Buddhist teacher, writes:
I’ve built a grass hut where there’s nothing of value…
The person in the hut lives here calmly,
Not stuck to inside, outside, or in between…
Living here he no longer works to get free.
Since I started to volunteer, the smell of sawdust reminds me that freedom is an inside job.
This way of life is transmitted and learned through close contact. Cultural historian Ivan Illich says that dwelling, unlike architecture, is an art of the people because no two communities dwell alike. We pick up this art form while moving through life, refining our style as we pass from one initiation to the next, the same way a child learns their mother tongue, through imitation and trial and error.
The built environment, especially home and its intimacy, is integral to our formation. “Inhabitation is a highly dynamic process,” says futurist Stewart Brand in his book How Buildings Learn. “The building and its occupants jointly are the new system. The dwelling and the dwellers must shape and reshape themselves to each other until there’s some kind of tolerable fit.”
With intention, we can incline both our habits and our habitat toward freedom, shaping and being shaped by what we build.