I am online looking at a house for sale at 45 Wetzel Road, just outside the old town of Macungie, Pennsylvania. The house sits chockablock on a little-used tertiary road and is a remarkable historic stone home set on approximately 6.7 acres. It has “exposed stone, massive timbers, wide-plank floors and deep window openings [that] speak to the home’s origins” way back in 1793. It is in the Lehigh Valley and is surrounded by mountains—fishing, hunting, skiing. It is not cheap, but neither is it out of reach at $749,900. What a wonderful place to live.
And this is the devil talking.
The internet is full of such longing for houses and property far away.
The devil speaks also in a map that is circulating on the internet, a map that allows you to rank all the states you’d like to live in. This first came up on my friend Rod Dreher’s Substack. Rod voted that he would live in a small number of states all below the Mason-Dixon line. His comment box became a charming give-and-take about readers’ love of their state, region, town, but also about other states and regions and towns, speaking of our natural wanderlust.
I say this is the devil speaking because such speculations feed into the natural American wanderlust, which is not necessarily a good thing for us or for our families.
Our ancestors landed here and then mostly kept on going. One of my branches came to the Plymouth Colony and kept moving west. Another came to colonial Virginia and kept moving west.
We look at this great big country, and it is like a big box of chocolates. The Pacific Northwest? Southern California? Arizona! New York City! The big city. Small towns! A nice farm. So on and on and on. I know a young lady who thinks she might want to live in Colorado “for the skiing.”
The devil does not want us to settle down. He always wants us to be slightly dissatisfied with where we are. Go get that better job and look at those beautiful houses we could afford in Spokane! Look at how green that grass is!
I explore this proposition in my new book, Not Just for Kings: Cultivating a 500-Year Vision for Your Family (Sophia Institute Press).
I argue for something I never did: stay where you are. The day I graduated from the University of Missouri in Columbia, I tucked my belongings and my girlfriend into my 1972 Mercury Montego Brougham and nosed that car along Interstate 70 until I got to Washington DC. I left behind friends, family, history, roots, and a 100+ year-old family farm a few hours north. That car did not last; alas, it was a good one. Neither did the girlfriend. I only lived in Washington DC for two years.
I argue there are ten secrets to protecting and projecting your family through the ages, among them fecundity, fidelity, saga, magnanimity, compact, intention, daring, and one of them is “stability,” closely related to kith and kin.
We live in an age of cultural snipers who are gathered all around us and like to pick us off one by one, but they can’t pick us off one by one if we are together and not moving hither, thither, and yon. Hemingway said, “a man alone ain’t got no chance.” The cultural snipers want us to be isolated. And so does the devil.
Stability means sinking deep roots and then connecting to other deep roots of what I call Kith, an old word that works better than “community,” which has become so degraded in our day. Kith are those like us, who have the same faith, the same mission, the same understandings of the age that we live in and the age to come. We band together with them. And we stay. And then our children intermarry and give us even more reasons to stay. And we are more than nuclear families; our aunts and uncles are around, as are that magical thing called cousins. We hope grandma and grandpa are also nearby.
I now live with my wife and daughters in Northern Virginia, where such a Kith has grown up. Dozens of mission-oriented families all around. I call it the Great Northern Virginia Clan. Across the mighty Potomac is the Great Montgomery County Clan. There is a Clan down in Alexandria/Arlington and out west in Front Royal.
In fact, there are such Catholic Clans, new Catholic ghettoes all over the county; St. Louis, Cincinnati, Dallas, Orange County, Chicago, and on and on. Together, we make a tribe committed to rebuilding and preserving, protecting, and projecting our families and the great Greco-Roman-Christian West through the ages.
Staying is not a hard-and-fast rule. You may have to move, but if you do, you must find a similar Clan. Tuck in with them. They will welcome you. But, for the most part, we must stay and not dream of a different life. This is your life, right here and now, and it is the lives of our children and theirs and theirs and theirs. This is where we make our stand.
Stay.
