The Family
1993 (Year B), 5 September / Pentecost 14
St Peter de Beauvoir Town
When the man who won the two hundred metres breaststroke gold medal at the Commonwealth Games this week took the winners’ medal he knew that he’d kept a promise he’d made to his dying father. He said that he’d win it for him. A newspaper, reporting the win, concluded that, ‘there are few things in the world more personal than a son’s promise to his father’. It was just a little insight into relationships in a family, and you don’t need me to tell you that within all our families there are some of the strongest, important, most influential relationships we will ever have in our lives.
Nor do you need me to tell you that families aren’t always the happiest or easiest of places to be. I haven’t got the nerve to quote all the words from the famous Larkin poem. You must fill in the blank for yourselves – if you can’t manage it – see me after. ‘They [...] you up, your mum and dad. They may not mean to, but they do. They fill you with the faults they had / And add some extra, just for you’
Families are amazing things, those with them spend some part of their lives at least wishing they didn’t have them, and those without them often long to be part of one.
We think when we’re feeling positive about them that they’re the place where we are loved and feel secure. The place where we’re supposed to learn and grow. They condition what we are and what we might be. They give us opportunities and they set limits on our experiences. If all this works well. Marvellous. If however your childhood was a bad time for you, or if you’re having a bad time right now with the family you’re stuck with, then any suggestion that the family is the way things should be, or that it might act as a model for our relationship with God, will be an almighty turn off. When they’re bad they seem as if they’re the work of the devil.
Yet the truth is that the family like everything else can be a parable. It can speak to us of God. It can even be a sacrament insofar as it conveys or expresses something of the divine to us.
In a family individuals share a particular relationship one with another. It doesn’t matter if you’ve never seen your brother or sister for twenty years they remain your brother or sister. They remain part of your family. Yet something more is needed if the family is to function and relationships maintained. It’s absolutely crucial that the members meet together and talk and listen to each other.
So it’s no accident that when the theme for the days worship is the family then the gospel suggests how we are to conduct and maintain our relationship with our divine father. And that’s through prayer. That’s where, consciously, we meet. It’s where we’re heard and it’s where we are to listen.
In what is quite an old film now, called ‘The Ruling Class’, Peter O’Toole plays the part of a mad Earl or Duke. At one point in the film he thinks he’s God. ‘How do you know you’re God?’ he’s asked. ‘That’s easy’, he replies, ‘when I say my prayers I find I’m talking to myself’.
If it’s true that when we pray we do no more than talk to ourselves then there is no hope left for us. The men with white coats are at the door. But if we are in a relationship with God then prayer is the way the relationship will grow and be sustained. In order to maintain family relationships we have to set aside time. So to maintain our relationship with God we must set aside time to meet and to talk and to listen.
Now of course we don’t just meet God when we’re sitting still consciously speaking and trying desperately to listen. God is present in all aspects of our lives. We will never find ourselves in a situation where revelation is impossible. God can communicate with us anywhere. It’s happening all the time. But we need times when we’re quiet to just think and listen so that we can make sense of all these other encounters with God. We need time to reflect on them, to begin to understand some of their meaning, some of their implications for the rest of our lives. It gives a chance for the relationship to deepen and grow.
These times are necessary because the relationship with God is constantly changing. One of the saddest mistakes we Christians make is that we imagine that once we’ve found God the same words, the same prayers will serve forever. Astute parents don’t treat adult children the same way that they treated the child when they were young. If they do there’ll soon be trouble. We need times to adjust to each other to recognise growth and change – so it is with God. Our lives are a pilgrimage, a journey to the Divine. Our awareness and insights change – so we need time to just realise where we are and where God is.
A poem says it much more eloquently than I ever can:
We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.
AMEN