The eCrozier

My mother loved me to pieces, as she often said, and I’m still trying to pick up the pieces. – Roy Blount, Jr.

There’s no consensus in our society on what exactly constitutes a family. That’s probably wise. Some would argue it’s limited to one’s blood relatives, but I have cousins I’ve never even met and I often feel much more “familial” with people who I’m not related to by birth. Since WWII our culture has come to define family as only the nuclear family: wife, husband, children. Once it became defined thusly, we soon were told that this nuclear family was under assault by adverse cultural forces. People who touted “family values” sought to alarm us with supposed threats to the nuclear family. That often was code. The alarmists simply didn’t approve of the kind of families being created. The Bible doesn’t help us with many virtuous examples of godly families. Most biblical examples just make us blush by their R-ratedness. For example, King David’s “family values” displayed murder, rape, adultery, and filicide (and he’s considered the greatest King of Israel).

David Brooks, writing in the March 2020 issue of The Atlantic, argues that since family was redefined to be only the nuclear family, it’s been a disaster for our culture. As we jettison the larger, interconnected web of relationships of blood and “adopted” relatives, we lose a vital source of health and well-being in our society. Yes, our families at times exasperate us and some family systems are so unhealthy that escaping them is simply self-preservation, but for most of us, family is that group of people who help us learn patience and compassion while also keeping us grounded in our personal narrative.

In my first parish as a curate, the Rector formed a committee to support me as a new priest. We met monthly so they could encourage me and offer me feedback on how I was doing. After one meeting when we were walking out, one gentleman took me aside and said: “I didn’t want to say this in front of the others, but it’s ‘get’ and not ‘git’. If you don’t pronounce words right, then you won’t go very far in the church.” I thanked him, but I left troubled. I had no idea I talked funny. I later came to realize my accent was part of growing up in the Appalachian part of southern Ohio. And I didn’t want to lose that because it was a reminder from whom I came and their claim on my lives.

Family, in its broadest definition, are simply our neighbors, because they’re the ones most “nigh” to us (nighbors?); those whom Jesus calls us to love as we love ourselves. Often, it’s their very “nighness” that makes it hard to love them. I hope we can recapture some of what Brooks is talking about, revisioning family as that broad, diverse collection of blood and non-blood relatives that have a claim on our love and our lives. That’s what the “Church family” is at its best. Church should be like that 80s sitcom, Cheers, where everyone knows your name and loves you even (especially) when you behave like the back end of a horse. This way of seeing “family” views it as a training ground for such virtues as compassion, endurance, and mercy, virtues we seem to be in short supply these days. Most virtue is gained through not what’s easy, but what’s hard. Being family, however we define it, takes hard work with a lifetime of pieces to pick up.

+Scott