"The Lebanese home needs the woman.. The Lebanese home without the woman is a graveyard... So do not make your homes graveyards, O women."
"Of all the things I have known — and how many they are — I have not known nor found anything sweeter or more beautiful than the hearth of my home."
This tender saying comes to my mind now; it expresses warmly the deep bonds that tie a human being to his home... and in it the story of the family is summed up wonderfully...
"The hearth of the home" — I am reminded of it now by this angry weather, this frost that whips the bones, and I feel as if between me and it there were a bond from all eternity, a bond that draws me to that friendly corner of my house every evening, where I fasten my eyes on the fire blazing up in red flame and turn my palms over its warm glow, and in great rapture I feel an air of happiness flooding my whole life — a divine happiness that a person cannot feel except in the corners of his home, this little great kingdom, where selfishness collapses and the paints that society imposes upon us fall away, and the human being — above all the woman — remains face to face with her clear self and with the truth of that self, and all the goodness, beauty, and tenderness in it.
And what happiness is purer than the happiness one of us finds, in the fullness of security, calm, and rest, in contemplating the beauty of this little kingdom... in the order and design of this kingdom, and finally in managing the affairs of this kingdom and the affairs of its subjects...
And what happiness can the sensible, wise woman — this kingdom which God crowned with His right hand. What happiness, I say, can a woman find deeper than her inward feeling that now, in her home, she is the keeper of the dearest and most precious of the gifts God has given the earth... that she alone is trusted with the human race, watching over it with her heart and the light of her eyes.. and that she is at the same time trusted with the happiness of all humanity, through her family, her husband, and her children...
My little kingdom, my home — your home, O woman: it is the corner where you sit for hours of your night and hours of your day, upon a little throne of hearts, reading a book, if you wish, from which you order the affairs of the little kingdom. It is the corner where you sit with your child, without
any boredom or weariness, teaching him his lessons with woman's wondrous patience, and rearing him for life as the best hand rears a tender seedling...
My home — your home, O woman: it is the corner where you sit in these cold days, spinning out of your tenderness and love wool for the chests of your children and their husbands...
And it is, O woman, this good smell rising from the delicious food your hands have cooked... and it is this beautiful bouquet of roses — and if roses are scarce, then this bunch of lovely wildflowers — spreading through the house that pleasant something in which the eye and the soul find rest.
*
Never once have I thought of the home and the family in Lebanon without feeling that many things, outside the compass of the soul, have begun to threaten the Lebanese home and the Lebanese family.
I cannot now define those factors that threaten family life in Lebanon, but I feel them deeply. I feel that something sacred has begun to fade from our life... and that is "love of the home" — and our ignorance of the ruin this neglect brings upon the constructive causes of the spirit in the nation.
It may be the Western wave that beats against our life, so that a strong spray of it strikes us...
In the West, a disintegration has struck the family at its very core. It is no longer today one body bound firmly together, but scattered parts here and there, some in the factory and some in the office, and rarely do these scattered members meet, even at the evening hour, when the nights grow sweet and the evening talk grows sweet.
The bond between fathers and their children has become feeble, no longer held together by the cords of understanding and love; and the result is that boys and girls, in their
passion for