Real Families

In the collection of candles and candle holders that I’ve gathered over the years, a few are simple, such as the Ball canning jar that holds a candle nestled in a bedding of multicolored sand. A few years ago I officiated at a wedding. On that December evening, participants in the ceremony, including me, carried these lanterns. The colors of the layers of sand were yellow and blue, the colors worn by the bride and groom. Two people, surrounded by friends and family, joined their lives together that day.

After the wedding, my lantern sat on my kitchen table for several weeks; eventually I moved it into a cabinet. Not long ago, as I was putting dishes away, I spied the jar and decided to bring it to my office. After nearly two years of being carried about and placed here and there, the colors of the sand layers had mixed a bit, but the layers were still discernable—bright yellow and cobalt blue. The original candle had long burnt low, and I had replaced it a couple of times. Now I put another new candle in the sand, carefully placed the jar in a box in the back seat of my car and drove to work, dropping my son off at school along the way.

Somewhere along the way, the jar tipped over on its side. Now the sand was even more mixed up together.

Families and communities are created in order to fulfill the human needs—the basic needs of survival, to be sure—food, warmth, shelter. Living in community creates a structure for those needs to be met more efficiently than what would be possible as individuals. Entering a shared living experience—as roommates or housemates, as a married couple or as an intentional community, for examples—certainly requires a measure of self-awareness. Yet we are only able to enter into such arrangements based on who we know ourselves to be at the time.

There is a measure of mystery about who we will become. How will the passage of time shape and mold us, and how will shared living shift us into new—or at least different—people? Perhaps we lose sight of the possibility—the probability—of change.

Remembering my early parenting years, I am astonished at how quickly they passed, as more mature parents assured me they would. But what I find more remarkable is how I changed. The reality of living in a household full of distinct personalities helped me grow into a different kind of person from what I thought I knew myself to be. There are many examples of how this came about, but nothing brought it home to me more clearly than having a troubled child on whose behalf I requested prayers from everyone who knew me. I learned that reaching out in all our ragged despair for shoulders to lean on was much more important than presenting an image of our family to the world that said, We’ve got it all together. We’re a good family. I had to give myself and my family some slack. In order to get through the hard times, I had to let go of the notion of myself as the kind of person who doesn’t need help and can solve my own problems. I had to shift.

In these troubled times (and there have been troubled times before) it is all the more urgent that households and families learn to lean upon each other. The Preacher in Ecclesiastes declares, “Two are better than one, because they have a good reward for their toil. For if they fall, one will lift up the other … if two lie together, they keep warm. … A threefold cord is not quickly broken” (4:9-12). Community in its many shapes and forms is good. But we have to let community do what it does—hold one another and shape us into something new. It does not mean losing ourselves, becoming less or being subsumed by the other.

True, those grains of sand in the jar don’t have sharply distinct layers any longer. Yet the blue grains and the yellow grains swirl and move about, creating new patterns and designs. If I wanted to, I could scoop out a spoonful and carefully, painstakingly separate the colors from one another. And on close inspection, I discover there has been another color there all along—red grains of sand in the mix that I never paid attention to.

Every now and then I light the candle in the jar as a reminder of God’s Spirit dwelling among the families of the earth. As the flame burns, the wax pools over the shifting sands, the mixture of colors that is now a new thing.

Regina Shands Stoltzfus teaches peace, justice and conflict studies at Goshen (Ind.) College.