What Just Might Happen When Your House Burns Down

Spiritual lessons from an uncommon event

Very early Sunday morning, February 16^th, 2025, my house was hit by lightning. The strike started a fire, which engulfed the home within minutes, and then reduced it to ashes. It became quite the event in Forsyth County, Georgia, because “my house” is (was!) not only my home, but home to a community of 10 priests and three missionaries. Luckily, only seven of us lived in the structure that burned down (the others lived in nearby residences that were not damaged), and even more luckily, only one was at home when the fire occurred. No one was hurt or injured. My phone started pinging around 4:45 am that morning, and, at first, I thought “Your house just burned down” was a bad joke. It wasn’t.

What happens when your house burns down? I don’t know what others have experienced, and our case, of course, was exceptional. After all, the experience of losing nearly all one’s material possessions affects a community of priests in a much different way than it would, say, a young family with several children. We were all grown men, without an immediate family that depended on us, and we were all trained in adaptability, trust, and detachment from material things. As we said to ourselves, “Thank God that this happened to us, and not a young family: we should be able to deal with it much better.”

That being said, it is a once in a lifetime event, and one thing is to learn about detachment through prayer and practice in the little things, but another thing is to lose almost everything and learn it not abstractly but experientially. There is a difference between detaching yourself from this or that thing, but another is to find yourself suddenly without at least 95% of all those things that have accompanied you throughout many years. It has been almost a month now since that fire, but nearly every day I realize something else that I no longer have. (The latest revelation, just yesterday, was that I have lost all my medical records and prescriptions, and today I realized that I no longer have my “Compostela,” the document that proved that I walked over 400 miles on the Way to Santiago, Spain, way back in 2014.)

Being a priest, I don’t believe that fire was merely chance. For a Catholic Christian believer in an All-Powerful and All-Good God, there is no such thing as chance; chance or luck is substituted by the concept of Providence. We all believe, as St. Augustine once wrote, that “Nothing happens that the Almighty does not will should happen, either by permitting it or by himself doing it.” Or even more simply, as Fr. Stinissen wrote in his excellent book “Into Your Hands, Father”: “Everything that happens has a purpose in God’s plan.” Knowing that God permitted that fire, and that my task was to discover what good was meant to come of it, I offer you three brief truths I gleaned from that event. What might just happen if your house burns down? With the grace of God, maybe these three things.

1. A recognition of the ephemerality of material things

The first and most obvious grace that the loss of your home could provide is an experience of the ephemerality, fragility, and finally the insignificant importance of all material things. As I already mentioned, I know this might not be so obvious if a family were to lose their home in a fire, but for us priests, the fact that we lost nearly everything we owned was strangely relatively unimportant to us. Two of our priests were working at a youth retreat in northern Georgia at the time, and when they heard of the fire, they decided to stay to finish the retreat anyway. I was in meetings for our Congregation in a south of Atlanta suburb, and I too just decided to finish the meetings. And so it was for all of us. Even the one priest who was in the house when the fire began was intent upon not missing the 8 am Mass he had been scheduled to celebrate. And with borrowed clothing, he didn’t.

Why did we all just continue to work at our assigned tasks, when what could be considered a catastrophic event had just occurred in our lives? The answer was simply that it wasn’t a catastrophe. We had lost material “stuff,” but no one had been injured or hurt. Had that happened, if even one member of our community had died in the fire, or even been injured, our experience of the event would have changed completely. But the way it was, we were already (nervously, it must be said) joking about the event that evening. Songs from the internet started to be exchanged from phone to phone, like “We Didn’t Start the Fire” by Billy Joel, or “Thunderstruck” by AC DC.

What was the first grace we all received, or at least I know I received? The grace of realizing, in a very tangible way, that in the end material things are not what are important in my life. But what is important are people, or even more precisely, relationships. The outpouring of offers of prayers, concern, and real help – both material and personal – meant much more than whatever I had lost. I already knew it abstractly, but what I experienced was that as long as one had God and people as friends, the loss of material things, even my beloved library, didn’t matter that much. Genuine relationships make a man wealthy, not money or material things.

I permit myself to add one more idea, that may be something only I experienced as a grace. It was the grace of understanding the meaning of death as the ultimate culmination of our lives here on earth. For at least in my experience, losing 95% (99%?) of all my material things turned my mind to when I would undoubtedly lose 100%, the day of my death. If I must necessarily lose all the material goods I possess in a very short time – when I die – is not the experience of losing most of it now an unmerited grace of experience? It is the grace of experiencing the detachment that one day I must accept willingly, if God is to be pleased with my last day. Socrates, I believe, was correct when he said that the true philosopher is constantly training himself to desire death and be ready for it, not as something morbid, but as the door to the “undiscovered country” God has prepared for us. And Fr. Stinissen, in the book we have already quoted from, writes “Genuine spirituality begins when we are prepared to die.” We know we can’t take anything with us to heaven except our love for God and our neighbor. When your house burns down, you just might learn this.

2. An experience of the liberation of poverty

A second grace God offered us after our house fire was how actual poverty can open up an experience of a surprising sense of liberation. I offer an example of this. After news of the fire, one of my first reflections was “Oh no! I lost my library!” In my congregation, for the sake of our preaching and teaching, it is allowed to accumulate books for one’s personal library, to annotate them, and take them along when transferred to a new mission. I am a person of books, and they have accompanied me my entire adult life. I am still only realizing how much of the storehouse of knowledge and personal notes I had at my fingertips is now gone. Nevertheless, and to my considerable surprise, I also experienced that loss as a liberation! I no longer had to worry about managing too little bookshelf room, replacing borrowed books, rearranging misplaced books, and deciding which ones to take with me on my travels. Suddenly, all that work was gone.

As was so much more! Even a priest with a vow of poverty eventually accumulates an embarrassing amount of clothes, electronic gadgets, photos, memorabilia… the list goes on and on. And though I regret losing some very personal things – letters, journals, gifts from good friends, family mementos, all those things that are not kept virtually or digitally – I experienced even more the liberation that comes from no longer having almost anything! We could move into another temporary house – provided by a good and generous friend – with little storage space, without any problem at all. You don’t need a very big home or room when you only have about 10 things!

A faithful and generous community of Catholics surrounds my community of priests and me. Immediately the offers of help started pouring in: everything from apartments and rooms, to furniture, to gift cards, to offers to buy clothes, food, and the electronic devices that seem to be indispensable to our American way of life. It was almost overwhelming, and very moving. Nevertheless, I did not want to accept, at least for a while, all these offers of help. I actually enjoyed having almost nothing: it was so liberating! Having nearly nothing saved me so much time, and so much worry. And maybe God wanted me to experience what is asked of us in our congregation’s proper law: “to love poverty, which keeps the soul open to God and others; creates a spiritual environment favorable to interior docility, prayer, dialogue and cooperation; nourishes hope; engenders justice and mercy; increases love and bestows serenity and joy.” When my house burnt down, I think God wanted to teach me that this was true.

3. Trust in God

A third and last grace that was offered to us, or at least to me, was an increased trust in God. When many people asked me how I was doing after the fire, my answer was inevitably bipartite: first, the surprising sense of the two graces I have written about above, but secondly, a dreadful sense of the amount of work this was going to entail for me and my community. Like most priests, my comrades and I were already very occupied; I didn’t think I could press too many more things into my already overloaded calendar. But when we lost the house and everything in it, suddenly I found myself with a whole host of added responsibilities and urgent needs that pressed to be addressed immediately. I won’t list them all here; it would be too long. But even an attentive reader probably wouldn’t realize how many things must be taken care of when you lose almost all the old structures that gave a bit of balance and order to one’s everyday life. It threatened to be overwhelming. How could one increase one’s workload when it was already, or seemed to be, absolutely maxed out?

But this is what I found, or, better said, the grace I seemed to have received: God never asks us for more than we can handle. Everyone has 24 hours daily, and everyone decides how to use them. All God asks of us is to do the best we can every day, and to resolve those problems and only those problems that are within our capacity that day alone. During some of these days, Jesus’ words in Matthew 6:34 were some of the most important of the entire New Testament for me: “Therefore do not be anxious about tomorrow, for tomorrow will be anxious for itself. Sufficient for the day is its own trouble.” And St. Paul’s letter to the Philippians 4:6 was not too bad either: “Do not be anxious about anything, but in everything by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving let your requests be made known to God.”

What do you do when your house burns down? Trust in God, and with serenity and resolution, start to resolve the problems one by one, day by day. The Devil will often try to provoke in us a sense of being overwhelmed, but the Holy Spirit always inspires serenity.

Conclusion

What just might happen if your house burns down? With the grace of God, maybe these three things:

1. A keen recognition of the fragility and insignificance of material things.

2. A surprising experience of the liberating effects of poverty

3. A renewed awareness that trust in God can carry us through even the most seemingly overwhelming challenges.

From this perspective, the fact that our house burnt down is not a calamity or even less a tragedy. It is an extraordinary grace given to me and my community, to grow in discernment, evangelical poverty, and trust in Him. Please pray for us so that we may know how to take advantage of this divine opportunity.