The Family
1991 (Year B), 25 August /
Pentecost 14
St Peter de Beauvoir Town
For four days this week I have been torn apart. I’ve been diminished, devalued and disabled at a conference on groups. My goodness it hurt. The theory was that we should study how groups relate to each other in an organisation and how members of those groups react with each other. The members of our little group managed to get on quite well, we failed miserably with most of the other teams. In the process just about everybody got mashed up.
Now the conference was organised by the church. Most of the people there were Christians, so you might’ve expected that everybody would spend the time being just nice to each other, ensuring that everybody was affirmed and gently encouraged to come to some kind of self-awareness. Not so. That expectation would be revealed as pure fantasy. Members spent sleepless nights, others just dissolved into tears during the sessions. By Friday morning one quarter of the conference couldn’t even sit down to breakfast with the rest. We had come to see how groups relate, and I guess that is what happened, but by the end the organisation had all but collapsed.
Most of us hoped it would be a good experience and our expectations were shattered. Yet we all keep on. We all fantasise. New houses, new jobs, new cars, more money, new opportunities. More often I guess those who are not part of a family wish they were those who are there already long for it to be different. Family life, for our society at least is envisaged as the very pinnacle of human existence. More often than not the reality never lives up to the expectations.
Families, like the groups I’ve been part of this week are places where we can often feel most intense. We imagine they should be places where we learn the joys of intimacy. Sometimes they are. You can see it when you go into people’s homes. The looks and the words which to a visitor are mere glances, but to the members speak volumes. We feel they ought to be where we belong, where we are formed and grow. They should be places which are constant, were we get love and support. That’s the fantasy, hopefully it’s the truth but we all know, rather like the event I’ve been part of this week, they have other, rather darker sides.
Yet 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. Families are living parables. God makes known to us the mysteries of his kindness through human relationships. What makes this parable so forceful is that it’s are not just to be understood with our brains, it’s to be lived.
In recognising and experiencing the joys of familiarity and intimacy which exist between our families and our close friends, we can glimpse something of the nature of the relationship between ourselves and God. In feeling the pain of exclusion and the destructive forces which exists in families from time to time, then we experience the pain and hurt caused to God by our rejection of him.
And families are a parable of the constancy of God. We might not’ve seen a sister for thirty years yet she remains our sister. We remain bonded to her. Our father may’ve walked out on us or died, yet nothing in all the world can stop him being our father. All of us can turn our backs on God for just as long as we will, but he will be there waiting for us to return and respond to the open arms held out for us.
The parable doesn’t end there. Parents are given, for good or bad and we don’t choose them. They chose us, although maybe they didn’t get what they bargained for. Some of them might even claim they didn’t know what they were doing, but they brought us into being and there isn’t a thing we can do about it. Hillary, is going to be baptised in a few minutes and there’s not much she can do about that either. At that baptism she will be given a new family – the family of God here at St Peter’s.
She will discover here a very strange mixture of people, some warts but many, many gifts. I guess it’s very much like the family she’s come from. But I know she will find a group of people here who will care for her, pray for her, and if given a chance fulfil their responsibilities in helping her to grow and develop.
There are more aspect to this parable. There are many gods. Our society is constantly making more and our Divine Father has given us the freedom to choose any or all of them. In the end of course they will prove empty and sterile. And hopefully we will be able to recognise the Divine Father and Mother of our souls, waiting with outstretched arms to welcome us home as adoptive children.
May that be Hilary’s end. To be welcomed into the arms of the divine and experience fully the love and joy which we now only glimpse in those who have been given to her to love. AMEN