Real Families: Meditations on family life

The fact that this is my last Real Families column made me want to zoom out to bigger-picture reflections. What kept coming to me was this: Families are where we primally and intimately experience torment and transcendence.

I hasten to recognize that torment probably isn’t how those blessed with sunnier family experience would put it. And transcendence may not compute for those who have known primarily ways families maim.

So let me simply report why I think of both torment and transcendence. Torment because I’ve seen so much of it in family layers going back generations. And I see it in communities, often church-related, I participate in. The torment can range across mental illness and the pain such illness inflicts on sufferers and those who love them; suicide; the inability to navigate inherited shadows, passing them on to others; divorce and its trauma for those separating as well as children, relatives, friends. I know a family in which attempts of children to grow up led to being disowned; there is torment here for those disowned as surely the acts of disowning flow from their own wells of anguish.

I could go on, but my point isn’t to belabor the torment. I simply want to name it and offer the severe mercy of acknowledging that the torment is not rectified by being Christian but accompanies us as Christians. No example I’ve offered flows from non-Christian family life. I don’t blame Christianity—but those of us in Christian families can empower shadows through believing there must be something non-Christian about them, hence we may take our church selves to church, sequester our family hurts at home, and in so doing often deepen rather than heal them.

I’ve seen this dynamic in relation to suicide and its frequent companion, depression. Many of us were formed within an understanding that suicide was sin and depression a sign of spiritual failure. Suicide has been viewed as so grievous we can even tell of suicidal loved ones whose bodies congregations wouldn’t allow in cemeteries. Seeing association with depression or suicide as shameful has made us reluctant to talk about such matters, to make them part of our church lives or faith journeys, to trust that rather than God’s judgment added to the depressive’s or the suicide’s torment, grace even here, and maybe especially here, can sorrowfully and tenderly abound.

And maybe that takes us to the cusp of transcendence. Because when families are able, imperfectly though truly, to confront their torments, they can become zones of amazing grace.

I don’t mean cheap grace. Any family who has walked through the worst of the worst knows that grace is costly, bought by tears, sleepless nights of reliving nightmares, choices to grow even when one’s family soil seems too shallow to offer nurture, turning to mentors and therapists and friends and sometimes our own family members with readiness to keep loving even when it hurts like we imagine hell itself hurts.

A friend I’m in touch with only on Facebook but with whom I share roots going back to our growing up together as children of missionaries posted that a giant of our missionary youth had entered hospice care. This stirred us to share memories. My friend remarked of the dying missionary and his wife that they “were probably the first people I met—as a young child—that were very very much in love and full of creative, imaginative energy. I’ll never forget them running across a field, hand in hand. I was very young, and there is no photograph of that moment, but it is engraved in my mind.”

Chills. Tears. That is a picture of transcendence. Family can carry us beyond our worst to miracles larger than we achieve in isolation. Hand in hand across a field. So classic a filmlike image as to be almost a cliché but in the best sense of cliché. Though we risk cheapening it by repetition, the reason we’re thus tempted is that it’s so primally and powerfully true.

I think of the day a dying mother, amid a family’s shadows, embraced a child. And in that embrace said to one who was long an adult yet also a child tremulous still, “I love you as you are.” Transcendence.

I could go on. Because could we with ink the ocean fill, we wouldn’t exhaust the love of God or for each other that allows us to turn scripts of even family torment into narratives of transcendence.

Families. It has been a privilege to write about them through 19 Real Families columns. Special thanks to all of you, each carriers with me of family wounds and wonders, who have joined me on the way.