The Family
1990 (Year A), 9 September /
Pentecost 14
St Peter de Beauvoir Town
My friend’s father seemed much older than most, and indeed he was so old that when he’d finished studying his father had already retired. In working for his degree, he’d studied so hard, reading in badly lit rooms, that he was told to rest his eyes, ‘Look’ said his father, ‘the fence round the garden is falling to pieces, we’ll replace it. We’ll do it in oak; and we won’t buy the uprights ready slotted, we’ll cut them out with hand tools.’ So during the summer, the pair of them made the paling right around the garden.
He said the weeks of forbidden reading flew by, in fact he reckoned he was never happier in his life, than that summer when he was supposed to be blind. There was the pleasure of doing a great work, of overcoming hourly difficulties, but above all of co-operating and working with his father, getting to know him in a new and wholly delightful way.
Families, if they work well are places where we learn the joys of intimacy. I see it often as I go into people’s homes, the looks and words, which to me as an outsider are mere glances, but to the members of that family, quite clearly, speak volumes. They are places where we belong, where we are formed and grow. They offer constancy, so much so that when they ended by death we feel as if our whole world has come to an end. They are places where we get support, love and where we can be creative, where we can be ourselves. That’s the good, but as all of us know they have another side, they can be places of tension, hurt and pain, so much so that will disfigure lives forever. They can be places of fear and death.
They can, like every human experience we will ever have, speak to us of God, for God chooses to communicate with us in the things which are closest to us. They are living parables. God has made known to us the mysteries of his kindness through human relationships. And what makes these parables so forcible, is that they are not merely parables we can grasp and understand with our heads, but parables we must enact.
In recognising and experiencing the joys of familiarity and intimacy which exist between members of our families and our close friends, we can feel the pleasure and level of commitment, which God longs to share with us. In feeling the pain of exclusion and separation which exists in nearly all families from time to time, then we experience the pain caused to God by our rejection of him.
Our families and the close intimate relationships we share with our friends are places where our most important needs are met.
With them I can express my dependencies, and this too is a parable of the relationship which God longs for with us, one in which we might express our dependency and need for him, a relationship which we might co-operate with. ‘If you then, know how to give your children what is good, how much more will the heavenly Father give the Holy Spirit to those who ask for him.’
I met a man the other day who gave me a preposterous great lunch. I asked him how he managed to be so disgustingly rich. His reply took my breath away, ‘Well to start with,’ he said, ‘I was very careful in the choice of a father.’ He meant it no doubt as a joke, for the one thing we can’t do is chose our parents, and yet sometimes, we do even that, for if we find our earthly parents wanting we choose others as models and fashion ourselves round them. We become in a way their adoptive children.
Even here there is a parable for us. There are many, many gods, our society is constantly discovering new ones, and our Divine Father has given us the freedom to choose any or all of them. In the end of course they all prove empty and sterile and we are left with the image of the Divine Father and Mother of our souls waiting with outstretched arms to welcome us home as adoptive children.
May that be our end, to be finally welcomed into the arms of the divine and experience fully the joys which we now only glimpse in those who have been given as to love us. AMEN