-- George Santayana
Reading: by Rabbi Michael Lerner from The Left Hand of God: Taking Back Our Country from the Religious Right (p. 241)
Most people in the United States, when asked to say which social institution means the most to them, overwhelmingly choose family – and for one important reason. No matter what our own childhood experience may have been, no matter how much we had to struggle later in life to repair some of the damage done by less-than-perfect parents, almost all of us recognize that the family is the only institution in our society whose explicit goal is to provide love and caring.
Ideally families provide our first and most enduring experiences with love, caring, and well-being. In the family, we are loved for who we are, not what we have achieved or how much money we make. Families offer us refuge from the world of work and competition, and they allow us our first taste of the deep joy that comes from sustained intimacy.
No wonder, then, that people feel so attached to family. They use words like brother and sister to address people they really care about. They talk of their closest affiliations with others “as though they were family.”
Reading: by Erma Bombeck from Family: The Ties That Bind and Gag! – Here are some of her reflections on family, while trying to corral her own family for the annual holiday photo. (p. 9)
The family. We were a strange little band of characters trudging through life sharing diseases and toothpaste, coveting one another’s desserts, hiding shampoo, borrowing money, locking each other out of our rooms, inflicting pain and kissing to heal it in the same instant, loving, laughing, defending, and trying to figure out the common thread that bound us all together.
Sitting there I thought about how the years have challenged families in a way no one would have thought it possible to survive. They’ve weathered combinations of step, foster, single, adoptive, surrogate, frozen embryo, and sperm bank. They’ve multiplied divided, extended, and banded into communes. They’ve been assaulted by technology, battered by sexual revolutions, and confused by role reversals. But they’re still here – playing to a full house.
Reading: by the Buddhist teacher Thich Nhat Hanh from Reconciliation: healing the inner child (p. 22)
When we were only four years old, we probably thought: I’m only a four-year-old child, son or daughter, a little brother or sister. But in fact we were already a mother, already a father. All past and future generations were there in our body. When we take a step on the green grass of spring, we walk in such a way that allows all our ancestors to take a step with us. The peace, joy, and freedom in each step will penetrate each generation of our ancestors and descendants. We walk with the energy of mindfulness, and with each step we see countless generations of ancestors and descendants walking with us.
When we take a breath, we are light, calm, at ease. We breathe in such a way that all generations of ancestors and descendants are breathing with us… With each step we take, we see it is the step of all people in the past and future.
When we are cooking a dish that we learned to make from our mother or father, a dish that has been handed down the generations of our family, we should look at our hands and smile because these hands are the hands of our mother, the hands of our grandmother. Those who have made this dish are making this dish now. When we’re in the kitchen cooking, we can be completely mindful; we don’t have to go to the meditation hall to practice like this…
Who Is Your Family?
A Sermon Delivered on November 24, 2013
By
The Reverend Axel H. Gehrmann
This week I will be visiting family for Thanksgiving. My wife, Elaine, our two kids and I will be piling into our little car and driving to Washington, D.C., where we plan to share a holiday meal with Elaine’s mother and her husband. For the first fifteen years we lived in Urbana, they would come here to see us. But they aren’t getting any younger, and traveling isn’t easy. So now it’s our turn to visit them.
Not along ago, someone asked me to describe my family. I said, I am married and have two children, Noah and Sophia. That’s my family.
But as I thought about it, I realized that is not entirely the truth. Elaine’s mother, Barbara, is a part of my family. And so is her husband, Jerry. Barbara and Jerry married twenty-some years ago. Among our kids’ several grandparents, Barbara and Jerry are the ones with whom our kids have spent the most time, and to whom they are closest.
Elaine’s mother, father, siblings and cousins are all part of my family, as are my mother, brothers, and an assortment of stepparents and children, half-brothers and cousins once removed. And my family is constantly changing.
Just this past week I realized I have a 12-year-old nephew who lives in Australia with his mother. He is the son of my only first cousin, Bastian, who lives in Switzerland. My mother, who lives in Germany, sent me a picture of this blended family, new to me. It shows five happy people: my cousin and his son, along with a younger boy, who I assume is his half-brother, and the two Australian parents. I look forward to meeting them all together some day.
* * *
Most of the time, when I use the word “family,” I am thinking of parents and children. I am thinking of the nuclear family, the nuclear family that I am raising or the family that raised me.
No matter what our family status may be today, we are deeply shaped by our family of origin. The four-year-old child we once were still exists within us. Our fears and joys, our sense of vulnerability and our sense of wonder, the unexpressed hurts and hopes of the child still exist within us. This is what Thich Nhat Hanh tells us. He says, even as adults the child within us needs a lot of compassion and attention, comforting and healing.
When we are children, our fathers and mothers are like gods. Our parents seem all-powerful and all-knowing. As children, we know they granted us life, and that we are utterly dependent on them. Our parents feed us and clothe us. They give us sustenance and safety. They provide love and care. They teach us our first lessons of life, what it is expected of us, and what we can expect of others.
And like the gods of old, our parents are not always gentle and kind. When they get angry with us, their fury feels like a divine wrath. Their unhappiness feels like an earthquake that shakes the very foundations of the world we know. When they give us the cold shoulder we feel as if we were stranded in an ice storm.
When our parents ask us to act our age, and demand a degree of discipline and self-control, their expectations can feel overwhelming. For the child, it sometimes seems impossible to please them. And because our parents are all-powerful, all-knowing, and always right – then the child must be wrong. As children we may invariably conclude that there is something wrong with us. We are inadequate. We are flawed. We are sinful.
When we are children, it isn’t easy to understand how complicated life actually is. We see the world in straightforward terms of good and bad, right and wrong. Only as we grow older, and hopefully wiser, we realize that the world can’t be adequately understood in terms black and white, but is actually made up of countless shades of gray.
When we are young, our parents are like gods. As we grow older, our gods are like parents. And so Christians across the world pray to their “father in heaven,” or invoke the name of Mary, “mother of God.”
* * *
Michael Lerner says that human beings are and have always been defined by some sense of the sacred, the holy, the transcendent. He says we are “theotropic.” We turn toward the sacred. We are defined by a “near-desperate desire to reconnect to the sacred, to find some way to unite [our] lives with a higher meaning and purpose.” We are drawn toward that aspect of the sacred, he says, “that is built upon the loving, kind and generous energy in the universe that [he calls] the “Left Hand of God.”’
But this benevolent force is not the only way to imagine the sacred. Lerner says many people imagine a world shaped by the “Right Hand of God.” They see “the universe as a fundamentally scary place filled with evil forces. In this view God is the avenger, the big man in heaven who can be invoke to use violence to overcome those evil forces, either now or in some future ultimate reckoning.”
Lerner says, “seen through the frame of the Right Hand of God, the world is filled with constant dangers and the rational way to live is to dominate and control others before they dominate and control us.”
Is the universe in which live – and the God who created it – basically loving, kind and generous, or scary, violent and dangerous?
As Michael Lerner sees it, those of us on religious right believe in a world defined by the harsh Right Hand of God. Those of us on the left, who are religiously progressive, tend to see the world shaped by the nurturing and benevolent Left Hand of God.
The seemingly irreconcilable differences between the left and right are so difficult to bridge, he says, because they are rooted and radically different frameworks through which we make sense of the world. These very basic beliefs are shaped early in our lives. They are significantly influenced by the families that raised us, and how we interpreted our experience.
* * *
The cognitive scientist George Lakoff sees similar connections. The family is not only a powerful social institution. It is not only a symbol of our relationship with the sacred. The family is also a metaphor for the nation in which we live – or would like to live. Our notion of what an ideal family looks like, shapes our political vision of the nation. He writes:
“Americans have two very different models of what an ideal family should be: a strict father family or a nurturant parent family. Whether or not [your] real family was like either of these – and real cases do exist by the millions – we all, nonetheless, acquire these ideal models as part of growing up in American culture. They are represented not only in our homes and communities but also in our movies, TV shows, novels, plays, fairy tales, and everyday stories. Strict and nurturant parenting are part of the fabric of everyday culture in America. When these two ideal family models are projected onto the nation by the nation-as-family metaphor, what results are two visions of what our nation should be: The strict father model is the basis of radically conservative politics and the nurturant parent model informs progressive politics.” (Whose Freedom? The Battle over America’s Most Important Idea, p. 66)
The family metaphor is so powerful, because it has both both intellectual and emotional appeal. It’s visceral, because it touches into our own highly emotional family experiences. Lakoff says,
“A simple family frame can provide the basis for a whole worldview; a way of seeing every aspect of life… Family-based… metaphors seem utterly natural and commonsensical – and hence true! [They] are mostly unconscious, which makes them hard to examine consciously. Their very invisibility gives them power.”
* * *
We have a choice in how we understand our place in the world. For each of us, life is a mixed bag. Each of us has been granted a measure of love and care, of sustenance and support. And each of us has known our share of suffering and hurt.
Regardless what our life experience has been, we have a choice in how we understand the character of creation. We decide whether our universe is basically a cold, cruel and lonely place, or whether our world is basically benevolent, filled with beauty and wonders, and the promise of life more abundant.
And we each have a choice in how we understand our family. Our family can simply be the people closest to us: our nuclear family or the friends with whom we spend most of our time, whether blood relative or not, they may be our brothers or sisters, our parent or child. Or our family can extend to the furthest reaches of the earth, including people we have never met, and yet who are family nevertheless.
Our family experience is intricately linked to our whole worldview. Too often it is unconscious and invisible to us, and thus constrains us. Then our family ties really do bind us and gag us. Then our elders will eternally be gods, who control our lives and our destiny with divine or demonic powers.
When we are young, we are fragile and vulnerable, and our elders seem all-powerful and indestructible in comparison. Becoming an adult means recognizing that our parents are human beings, regular people, just like us. Hopeful but flawed, in some ways gifted, but invariably imperfect. Muddling along as best we know how.
But even when we are adults, there is still a child within us, a child that needs compassion and attention, comforting and healing. This is what Thich Nhat Hanh tells us. “That child within us is not just us,” he says. “Our parents also suffered as children. Even as adults, they often didn’t know how to handle their suffering, so they make their children suffer. They were a victim of their own suffering, and then their children became victim of that suffering too… Every parent [was once a young] child, fragile and lonely.”
When we open our eyes, and look deeply, we realize that there is much more to our family than we often think. When we look deeply, we see our ancestors don’t really rule over us, but rather they exist within us. When we look deeply, we realize all past and future generations are right here in our own bodies. We are connected to all people past and future.
Then the simple act of cooking a dish in the kitchen will remind us that our hands are the hands of our fathers and mothers. Then the simple act of sharing a meal with family and friends will be a sacred act that reminds us that we truly are brother and sister to all people.
May we be grateful for the gifts of life and love we have received,
Passed on to us from generation to generation.
And may we find ever new ways to share the blessings of our lives
with our whole family, the family of humanity.
Amen
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