ISSUE No. 70 | June 2026
WELCOME
If you’re new to CULTIVARE we welcome you! CULTIVARE is a monthly field guide for life and faith, brought to you by TEND. Each month we explore a specific “field” – a topic or theme through which we seek to cultivate contemplation, engagement, and deeper understanding. Our guiding questions are:
What are you cultivating in your life?
What fruit do you want your life to bear?
Each issue of CULTIVARE is structured into three parts:
Cultivate: Examines a specific “Field” or facet of life and offers questions to unearth and challenge our held perspective; along with concise kernels of truth which we call “Seeds.”
Irrigate: Explores the ways we nurture our understanding, which varies from individual to individual. We offer six means of irrigation: Art, Poetry, Profile, Film, Essay, and Books.
Germinate: Encourages practical ways to engage in becoming more fruitful and free in our lives.
Our name, CULTIVARE, in Spanish means “I will cultivate.” We hope each issue of our field guide will encourage you to do just that – cultivate new thoughts, actions, faith, hope, and fruitful living. We invite you to dig in and DIG DEEP!
FIELD
For we are partners working together for God, and you are God's field.
(I Corinthians 3:9)
Our theme this month is HOME. The idea of home—and our experience of it—profoundly shapes who we become. Home is a universal human experience, understood and longed for in every culture and every corner of the world. Author L. Frank Baum famously wrote, “There’s no place like home,” and those words continue to resonate deeply. But what is home? What comes to mind when you think of it? How has your experience of home shaped your identity, your relationships, and your understanding of God?
The word home encompasses far more than the word house. A house is a physical structure, a place of shelter and dwelling. A home may include a physical space, but it is also an emotional, spiritual, and relational space where individuals and families live, love, grow, and belong. Home is often characterized by a sense of security, familiarity, and acceptance. Unlike a house, a home transcends architecture. It is where we experience connection and comfort, refuge and rest.
Where have you experienced the deepest sense of belonging? Where have you found comfort in times of uncertainty? Where do you go to find refuge from the demands and complexities of life? These questions invite us to reflect not only on the places we inhabit but also on the people and relationships that help us feel truly at home.
Our belief in the significance of home also shapes how we respond to those who have lost it. It influences the way we view homelessness, migration, immigration, and displacement. Do our hearts respond with compassion when we encounter someone without a place to call home? Can we empathize with refugees and others who have been forced to leave behind familiar places and cherished memories? Have we explored our own family histories to learn the migration stories of those who came before us? Can we recall moments when we ourselves felt far from home—physically, emotionally, or spiritually? What thoughts, memories, and emotions do these questions stir within us?
In this issue, we profile Evelyn Underhill, a faithful follower of Christ whose life embodied a spirit of hospitality that invited others into a deeper sense of being at home in God. We also feature the work of Korean artist Do Ho Suh, whose remarkable textile installations explore themes of home, memory, identity, and belonging. Additionally, we spotlight the film The Lady in the Van, the true story of a woman who spent fifteen years living in a van parked in the driveway of a reluctant friend. Finally, we include John Tweeddale’s essay, “A Theology of the Home,” which offers a thoughtful and biblical “both/and” perspective on the meaning of home and our longing for it.
One of the most beloved stories in Scripture is the parable of the prodigal son—a story of leaving home and ultimately finding the way back. Through the extravagant love, grace, and compassion of the father, Jesus reveals a profound truth: our truest home is found in God, our Creator and loving Father. No matter how far we wander, God continually invites us into His presence, where we are known, welcomed, and loved.
As you reflect on this month’s theme, consider how God may be inviting you home—to a deeper understanding of who He is and who He created you to be. How might you experience more fully the peace, belonging, and security found in Him? And how might we, in turn, extend to others the hospitality, refuge, and welcome that make a place feel like home? (DG)
***
But Ruth replied, “Don’t urge me to leave you or to turn back from you. Where you go I will go, and where you stay I will stay. Your people will be my people and your God my God. Where you die I will die, and there I will be buried. May the Lord deal with me, be it ever so severely, if even death separates you and me.” (Ruth 1:16-17 NIV)
Lord, you have been our dwelling place in all generations. (Psalm 90:1 NRSV)
So [the younger son] got up and went to his father. But while he was still a long way off, his father saw him and was filled with compassion for him; he ran to his son, threw his arms around him and kissed him. (Luke 15:20 NIV)
Make yourselves at home in my love. (John 15:9 MSG)
***
TEND CAN HELP! If you would like to take tangible steps working toward a new chapter in your life TEND can help. Explore our offerings by clicking here:
SEEDS
A handful of quotes to contemplate and cultivate into your life
There's no place like home... (L. Frank Baum)
The place which Jesus takes in our soul he will nevermore vacate, for in us is his home of homes, and it is the greatest delight for him to dwell there…And the soul who thus contemplates is made like [the one] who is contemplated. (Julian of Norwich)
The home we long for and belong to is finally where Christ is. Home is Christ's kingdom, which exists both within us and among us as we wend our prodigal ways through the world in search of it. (Frederick Buechner)
What is home? My favorite definition is “a safe place,” a place where one is free from attack, a place where one experiences secure relationships and affirmation. It's a place where people share and understand each other. Its relationships are nurturing. The people in it do not need to be perfect; instead, they need to be honest, loving, supportive, recognizing a common humanity that makes all of us vulnerable. (Gladys Hunt)
Wasn’t that the definition of home? Not where you are from, but where you are wanted. (Abraham Verghese)
Your home is living space, not storage space. (Francine Jay)
God is at home, it’s we who have gone out for a walk. (Meister Eckhart)
Home isn’t where you're from, it’s where you find light when all grows dark. (Pierce Brown)
We are all strangers in a strange land, longing for home, but not quite knowing what or where home is. We glimpse it sometimes in our dreams, or as we turn a corner, and suddenly there is a strange, sweet familiarity that vanishes almost as soon as it comes. (Madeleine L’Engle)
At the end of the day, it isn’t where I came from. Maybe home is somewhere I’m going and never have been before. (Warsan Shire)
ART
Artist of the Month
Do Ho Suh
Do Ho Suh is a contemporary installation artist born in Seoul, South Korea in 1962. After earning a BFA and MFA in Korean painting at Seoul National University, he began a BFA in painting at the Rhode Island School of Design in Providence, and later an MFA in sculpture at Yale. Moving away from Seoul initiated his exploration of the “notion of home for the first time. It could therefore be said that home started to exist for me once I no longer had it. But if that is the case, where and when does home exist?” He has since lived in NYC, Berlin, and London where his personal history of migration would manifest into stunning ephemeral displays of space, place, and its relationship to memories of home. He currently lives in London where he recently had a solo exhibition at the Tate Modern called Walk the House.
The title “Walk the House” refers to the traditional Korean homes called hanok, which were intentionally constructed with disassembly, transport, and reassembly in mind; to “walk the house” means to move it and reassemble it in a new location. Suh’s parents built their hanok in 1971 when most were being destroyed to make way for high-rises. It stars as a major piece in his series of works called Rubbings/Loving. Encasing the entirety of the home in mulberry paper (a traditional Korean pulp used for paper and fabric), Suh rubbed graphite to reveal the house’s surface textures. His Rubbings/Loving: Seoul Home took 9 years to complete. It was cut apart and reassembled for a number of exhibitions including the recent Tate survey of his work.
While living in London, Suh maintained his NYC studio apartment so he could return and make rubbings similar to those in Rubbing/Loving: Seoul Home, except this time, he rubbed the interior. where he returned to for over 3 years papering and rubbing the interior. Suh explains the emotional connection between his work and his memories of a home: “The process of rubbing is literally caressing the surface with the pencil and it’s a gesture of loving. And I’m constantly reminded by the details of the space. Like the times that I spent there and little things I thought I completely forgot about. And when I discover those things it’s quite delightful. Hopefully I can take these things with me and it will become the veil of memories.” Suh’s landlord and friend of over twenty years, Arthur, passed away during the project. He was a part of what had made that space home. In his fabric works, Suh repeatedly replicates the staircase that connected their two homes.
Suh’s first 1:1 replication of a home in fabric was of the hanok he grew up in. To express longing and desire, he uses translucent colored fabrics in “transporting memory of space so it’s a kind of intangible quality…like a veil.” When home is no longer a specific time and place, what might we still carry with us? Suh’s work speaks to this by making memories into physical objects, objects made out of materials that can capture the non-physical home we still hold within: fabric, paper, and thread. There is a capacity to carry, remember, and re-imagine these works wherever he is in his own physical dislocation or migration—to walk the house. And as one walks his physical memories, one’s own memories and histories layer and flow onto his to experience what home is on individual and universal levels.
At the Tate exhibition, the center of the room beckons with a long tunnel shape of various thresholds and in-between spaces of Suh’s homes attached together. It is part of a series named Nest/s where one is invited to pass through various styles of architecture and details of traditional Korean and Western style homes. Suh says “I don’t see it as a shell or container so much as a passage or portal. Memory amalgamates in these spaces and memories shape our perceptions of them.” There is a blurring of boundaries between interior and exterior, between contrasting architectural styles, and between time periods that transcends linear existence. His work compels one to consider anew our relationship with the physical and emotional aspects of home and how we move through the world.
Explore more about the work of Do Ho Suh at the following sites:
Video Interview of Do Ho Suh and his work: View Now
Video of Do Ho Suh’s Walk the House exhibition: View Now
POETRY
The House of Belonging
ByDavid Whyte
I awoke
this morning
in the gold light
turning this way
and that
thinking for
a moment
it was one
day
like any other.
But
the veil had gone
from my
darkened heart
and
I thought
it must have been the quiet
candlelight
that filled my room,
it must have been
the first
easy rhythm
with which I breathed
myself to sleep,
it must have been
the prayer I said
speaking to the otherness
of the night.
And
I thought
this is the good day
you could
meet your love,
this is the gray day
someone close
to you could die.
This is the day
you realize
how easily the thread
is broken
between this world
and the next
and I found myself
sitting up
in the quiet pathway
of light,
the tawny
close grained cedar
burning round
me like fire
and all the angels of this housely
heaven ascending
through the first
roof of light
the sun has made.
This is the bright home
in which I live,
this is where
I ask
my friends
to come,
this is where I want
to love all the things
it has taken me so long
to learn to love.
This is the temple
of my adult aloneness
and I belong
to that aloneness
as I belong to my life.
There is no house
like the house of belonging.
PROFILE
Becoming the Table:
Evelyn Underhill and Helping Souls Find Home
By Greg Ehlert
Home does not always require a dining room with a table and physical space for guests. Instead, it simply requires a self that is wide enough to welcome others, including their questions, their darkness, and their hunger for God. Evelyn Underhill (1875-1941) embodied this hospitality so thoroughly that it was integrated into who she was as a person, not just how she lived. In fact, it became the outward expression of everything that constituted her interior life.
Underhill grew up in the Victorian Age in England. Bright, inquisitive, and ever-probing for truth, she was drawn early in her life to the mystical tradition. She studied people like Ruysbroeck, Julian of Norwich, and the anonymous author of The Cloud of Unknowing. In 1911, at the age of thirty-six, she published Mysticism, a landmark work that has never gone out of print. One archbishop said of her that she was the person who did more than anyone else to keep the spiritual life alive in Anglicanism between the two World Wars. She became the first woman to lecture in theology at Oxford, the first woman to lead an Anglican clergy retreat, and one of the first women to be included on Church of England commissions. In her lifetime, she wrote thirty-nine books, hundreds of articles, and thousands of letters.
Even more interesting than all of this is what happened to her in the middle of her life. World War I exposed the naïve optimism of her early theology. The philosophical and abstract mysticism she so carefully traced could not account for the brutality of the trenches. Under the leadership of Baron Friedrich von Huegel, the influential Catholic theologian who became her spiritual guide, she was led to places she never expected to go. She moved downward, into the tangible, human, and realities of poverty just around the corner. He told her that mystical experience must be grounded in community, the sacraments, and all sorts of works of mercy. He sent her to visit the poor in London’s East End and so, she went.
This was the fulcrum on which her life shifted. She maintained her mornings for writing and prayer but her afternoons became acts of home-making hospitality for others. She served directees, retreatants, the poor, and the spiritually lost and restless who wrote her letters from across England and beyond. She answered almost all of them. Her collected correspondence remains one of the most astounding examples of soul care in the twentieth century. Her patient, warm, unsparing words gave a sense of home to her recipients as she was deeply present to each person’s particular situation and needs.
Witnesses said that her face “lit up” at the invitation to hosting spiritual retreats at Pleshey in 1924. She created a rare, sacred space and was genuinely available to ordinary people. Her central theological conviction that every person is born with a capacity for God is what drove her efforts to offer every guest the experience of belonging. For her, the mystics were not some sort of spiritual “elite,” but spiritual cartographers helping to map a place where everyone belonged. The riches of the interior life, she wrote, are not revealed so that we may “sit in the sun parlor, be grateful for the excellent hospitality, and contemplate the glorious view.” We are sent out.
This sending-out was, finally, the posture of her helping others find their home in God. She welcomed people into the mystery not so that they could possess it, but so they could be indwelt and enlarged by it. In the process, she helped others become more human, more present, and more capable of love: more home. Even during the terrors of the Second World War, she maintained the humble and risky position that Christianity was a patch of reconciliation and peace, not of aggression and conflict. Peace, she believed, was not a withdrawal from the world but the deepest form of welcome the world can be offered.
Today, communities still form in her name and houses of prayer maintain her memory. Her hand-written letters helped countless strangers take next steps on their way home to God’s love and are still being read today. Evelyn Underhill never ran a soup kitchen or founded a religious institution, but what she accomplished is possibly more difficult and longer-lasting. She made herself available. She set a table at the intersection of heaven and earth and welcomed everyone home.
FILM
Each month we recommend films focused on our theme
Feature Film
The Lady in the Van
(2015)
Alan Bennett's story is based on the true story of Miss Mary Shepherd (played by a magnificent Maggie Smith), a woman of uncertain origins who “temporarily” parked her van in Bennett’s London driveway and proceeded to live there for 15 years. What begins as a begrudged favor becomes a relationship that will change both their lives. Filmed on the street and in the house where Bennett and Miss Shepherd lived all those years, it reunites acclaimed director Nicholas Hytner with iconic writer Alan Bennett (The Madness of King George, The History Boys) to bring this rare and touching portrait to the screen. Available on various streaming services.
Documentary
What it Takes to Make a Home
(29 minutes)
What does it mean to live in the city without a place you can call your own? What role can architects have in addressing homelessness? And how can cities become a better home for all? The film What It Takes to Make a Home follows a conversation between architects Michael Maltzan (Los Angeles) and Alexander Hagner (Vienna), who have been grappling with these questions over many years and through various projects. While the cities and the political and economic contexts in which Maltzan and Hagner work differ, both search for long-term strategies for housing instead of reacting with ad hoc solutions. Focussing on causes and conditions of the housing crisis, the film questions the role architects can play toward overcoming the stigmatization of people experiencing homelessness, in order to build more inclusive cities.
Short Films
Home
(2019)
by Anita Bruvere
8 minutes
Home is a true story of community, immigration, and diversity, told through the history of a single building. Fillmaker Anita Bruvere directed this animated short film that centers on the inhabitants of 19 Pincelet Street in East London over nearly 300 years. The house remains standing today and serves as a Museum of Immigration and Diversity.
Ted Talk
"Where Is Home?"
By Pico Iyer
14 minutes
More and more people worldwide are living in countries not considered their own. Writer Pico Iyer—who himself has three or four “origins”—meditates on the meaning of home, the joy of traveling and the serenity of standing still.
ESSAY
A Theology of the Home
By John Tweeddale
In our featured essay from Ligonier, John Tweeddale points us to the biblical “both/and” of the Christian home: it’s a safe space and a space of challenging growth. He explains how Christians can fall into two extremes when theologizing about home. First, they can equate the home with God’s kingdom, idolizing it as the answer to every problem. This constricts our understanding of the kingdom and neglects our work in the world: “when we settle for heaven on earth, we domesticate the kingdom according to our tastes and traditions. Yet some Christians can err in a second direction, using it as a retreat from virtue, a “neutral zone for acting upon baseless desires.”
Tweeddale calls us to put the home in its proper place, whether we’re single, parenting, or being parented. Our goal is intentional discipleship for the good of God’s kingdom. He calls us to “cultivate Christlike virtues that animate who we are in private and facilitate what we do in public.”
BOOKS
Each month we recommend a book (or two) focused on our theme
NON-FICTION
My Heart Christ’s Home
by Robert Boyd Munger
This vividly descriptive short book invites us to imagine what it means to have Jesus Christ come into the home of our hearts. Room by room, author Robert Boyd Munger encourages us to examine how Jesus can transform our entire lives, from our everyday struggles with sin to our deepest desires.
FICTION
Hannah Coulter
by Wendell Berry
Hannah, the now-elderly narrator, recounts the love she has for the land and for her community. She remembers each of her two husbands, and all places and community connections threatened by modern technologies. At risk is the whole culture of family farming. But her hope is redeemed when her wayward and once lost grandson, Virgil, returns to his rural home place to work the farm.
CHILDREN’S
Homecoming
Cynthia Voight
In Homecoming by Cynthia Voight, the four Tillerman siblings (ages 13, 10, 9, and 6) find themselves abandoned by their mother in a mall parking lot. The only way that they can hope to stay together is to find their way to distant family members, hoping someone will take them in. On their difficult journey to find a home, they learn about resilience, family, the kindness of some strangers, and themselves. It is great storytelling with memorable characters (this is the first of the 7-book Tillerman series) and their quest to find a physical home with food and stability, and a deeper hope for love and being wanted.
DIG DEEPER
Practical suggestions to help you go deeper into our theme
1. QUESTIONS FOR REFLECTION
Devote some time and thought to these reflective questions on our theme:
a. What are the main feelings and emotions that come to mind when you think of the word “home”?
b. When in your life have you felt at home?
c. Where did you feel safe, nurtured and content as a child or young person? Why did you feel, safe, nurtured, or content there?
d. Who are the people who make you feel most at home?
e. What is one practical change or improvement you could make right now that would increase your enjoyment of your home?
f. What feelings and experiences would you like to experience more of in your home?
g. Where do you experience a sense of being at home with God?
h. If a guest walked into your home, what would they guess are your top priorities in life just by looking around?
2. THIRD CULTURE KIDS AND THE LONGING FOR HOME
“Third culture kids” are kids who grow up in a different country than what they, their parents, or their passport might say is home. Living in a new country but knowing their citizenship is somewhere else, these kids don’t feel at home in either place, but instead forge blended identities in a mobile, expat community. In this article by author Tanya Crossman, we learn how third culture kids (TCKs) define home. Crossman surveyed almost 100 TCKs and found that “many TCKs go through life aching for a single place to call home, and knowing that what they long for is impossible.” They just don't feel at home anywhere. Yet they hope in Heaven perhaps more than the average American Christian; they visualize a multicultural, eternal, and real place that they can finally call home.
3. MUSIC VIDEO: YOU DID NOT HAVE A HOME by Rich Mullins
Jesus said that “foxes have dens and birds have nests, but the Son of Man has no place to lay his head” (Matthew 8:20). Legendary songwriter Rich Mullins imagined the implications of Jesus’ “homelessness” in the following song, recorded after Mullins’ death by his musician friends. Aside from the song’s questionable theology on why Jesus didn’t marry, we like how this quirky take on His earthly ministry highlights the ways He was countercultural. In this video Mullins’ song is performed by Rick Elias, Jimmy Abegg, and Mark Robertson.
4. GEN Z LONGS FOR HOME
For those born between 1997 and 2012, those called “Gen Z,” their entire upbringing has been within the digital age. Two trends in this cohort are nostalgia (especially for analog technology) and religious expression in traditional, bounded practices. In this article from First Things, Eddie Larow argues that this generation has also grown up with a kind of political progressivism that feels unstable. He submits that a pilgrim-like Christianity journeying toward an Augustinian City of God provides the spiritual rootedness that this generation longs for: “In Christ, the restless can find rest, the homeless can find home, and the nostalgic can find not just echoes of the past but a secure and eternal future.”
5. PRAYER FOR OUR HOMES
Dwell with us in this place, O Lord.
Dwell among us in these spaces,
in these rooms.
Be present at this table as we eat together.
Be present as we rise in the morning
and lie down at night.
Be present in our work here.
Be present in our play.
May your Spirit inhabit this home,
making of it a sanctuary
where hearts and lives are knit together,
where bonds of love are strengthened,
where mercy is learned and practiced.
May this our home be a harbor of
anchorage and refuge,
and a haven from which we journey forth
to do your work in your world.
May it be a garden of nourishment
in which our roots go deep
that we might bear fruit
for the nourishing of others.
Grant also, O Lord, that our days lived
gratefully within these temporary walls,
enjoying these momentary fellowships,
would serve to awaken within us a restless
longing for our truer home. Incline our
hearts ever toward the glories
of that better city, built by you, O God—
a city whose blessings are never-ending,
and whose fellowships are eternally
unbroken.
Amen.
(Abbreviated from prayer written by Douglas Kaine McKelvey)
ROOTED
But blessed is the one who trusts in the Lord,
whose confidence is in him.
They will be like a tree planted by the water
that sends out its roots by the stream.
It does not fear when heat comes;
its leaves are always green.
It has no worries in a year of drought
and never fails to bear fruit.
(Jeremiah 17:7-8 NIV)
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FIELD NOTES
Images used in order of appearance:
1. FIELD: Vincent Van Gogh, White House at Night, 1890. Hermitage Museum, Saint Petersburg, Russia.
2. SEEDS: Scott Erickson, House of Belonging. https://scottericksonartshop.com/products/house-of-belonging
3. ART: Julia Grassi, Photo of artist Do Ho Suh in his studio in London 2015. From the article, “Do Ho Suh: Threads to Liberty” https://elephant.art/ho-suh-threads-liberty/
Do Ho Suh, Walk the House, 2025. Tate Modern, London. Photo from the article “Do Ho Suh @ Tate Modern” https://www.londonartroundup.com/reviews/do-ho-suh-walk-the-house
Do Ho Suh, 348 West 22nd Street, 2011-15. Photo from https://www.lacma.org/art/exhibition/do-ho-suh-348-west-22nd-street
4. POETRY: Faith Ringgold, The Sunflower Quilting Bee at Arles, acrylic on canvas with pieced fabric border, 1991, ACA Galleries, New York, USA.
5. PROFILE: Photo of Evelyn Underhill, photographer unknown.
https://www.themarginalian.org/2023/04/28/evelyn-underhill-practical-mysticism/
6. FILM: AI-generated, ChatGPT.
7. ESSAY: Thomas Matthews Rooke, Naomi and Ruth, 1876-7. Tate collection, London.
8. BOOKS: Santiago Sauceda Gonzalez, Lake Chapala, Jocotepec, Jal., Mexico, 2023. https://www.pexels.com/photo/man-standing-on-the-coast-with-a-view-of-the-sea-at-sunset-15850668/
9. DIG DEEPER: Santiago Sauceda Gonzalez, Lake Chapala, Jocotepec, Jal., Mexico, 2023. https://www.pexels.com/photo/man-standing-on-the-coast-with-a-view-of-the-sea-at-sunset-15850668/
10. ROOTED: B.J.O. Nordfeldt, Christ Walking on Water, 1951. Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, D.C.
TEAM CULTIVARE: Duane Grobman (Editor), Greg Ehlert, Bonnie Fearer, Lisa Hertzog, Shinook Kang, Elizabeth Khorey, Michelle Lum, Olivia Mather, Andrew Massey, Rita McIntosh, Jason Pearson (Design: Pearpod.com)
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