The Family: Holy & Otherwise

“Always remember, other people think we are a normal family.”

Editor’s Note: This essay also appears in The Line Issue 10.12 (December 2023); subscribe to The Line here.

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Friends of mine have a sign on their wall: “Always remember, other people think we are a normal family.” Among us all, there is a mostly shared vision about what a family should be about. It includes a lot about love, loyalty, togetherness, accepted values and mutual support.

As the sign implies, my friends were far from being a “normal” family. Nor are they alone. Our vision of the ideal family and our lived experience of families, our own and others, is quite divergent. It becomes most obvious during the Christmas cycle, as the world observes it (post-Halloween to Christmas Day).

This is because a myth has developed about the Christmas celebration. It is embodied in Christmas card art showing a nostalgic scene of extended family arriving at the old family home, a grand old white clapboard place, set in a small town or a forest, as the snow falls gently around it. Hugs are being exchanged, gifts are sorted out, the promise of a feast is in the air and love and peace abound.

It is a compelling picture. For most of us, it is also quite fictional. Few will experience a real Christmas comparable to it. The distance between the ideal Christmas with an ideal family, and the reality of our individual lives is a significant gulf. The Christmas season is consistently a time when depression spikes upward, as minds try, and fail, to reconcile the myth and the reality. Because few have functional extended families, indeed many have no functional family at all, loneliness and longing abound than love and peace. Surgeon-General Vivek Murthy calls it a “loneliness epidemic” and comments that it is “more widespread than other major health issues in the U.S.” Christmas season is when it peaks. The natural environment is cold and dark, which doesn’t help. But the bright, sparkling lights, cheerful music and air of false gaiety which appears everywhere may well be worse.

In seeking an explanation for the disparity between the myth and the reality, an explanation hiding in plain view can be found. While seldom discussed or analyzed, our whole society has been in a radical, if unintentional, social experiment for a century or two.

For most of human history, the species has lived in gathered extended families. But today, the transition from extended families in smaller communities, to the urban demographic of a nuclear family, is nearly complete. Most of the underlying reasons for this are economic: the concentration of employment in urban locations, the disappearance of the family farm, greatly increased mobility in the quest for continued employment, the demise of small family-run businesses in smaller communities, leading to the loss of services such as schools and hospitals all are factors.

Give that process a few generations and we arrive at today, where we overwhelmingly live in nuclear families or alone. A family home as big as five or six people is quite atypical. Grandma’s house is likely to be in assisted living or an Arizona retirement community.

We humans have not really done this before, in all of history. While temporary absence from home is nothing new, to be living all by yourself or with a spouse and maybe one or two children is definitely new. It has placed intense pressure on the nuclear relationship, which is not designed to support all the needs formerly met by extended families. Attempts of all kinds to solve this problem have mostly floundered. And, while it is clearly worse at Christmas, it strongly persists throughout the year.

In this context of epidemic loneliness and stressed nuclear families, we ought to remember something. Christianity is a family, a very, very large extended family. Our baptism is, among other things, our adoption into the family of God. Our Eucharist is the central meal at our family table. Marriage is a micro-unit within the larger family, reconciliation is the oil which allows all the parts of the family to mesh together without being destructive. Nor is our adoption into the family simply an allegory. The family exists, the adoption is real, the bond is unbreakable, just as in other families. Once baptized into it, you cannot reverse the action. There is no rite of “debaptism,” just as there is no way to divorce yourself from your genetic family. You can deny it, reject it, avoid it, denounce it, but you cannot leave it. Just as you can do all those actions towards your parents, children or siblings, yet they remain your family despite the alienation.

Two observations which may help.

The first is that what should be a great comfort is instead seen by many as an unfair burden. They have left the Church and are unhappy that they cannot be freed from the indelible mark of their baptism and consequent family membership. The descent into loneliness and alienation comes with the permanent reminder tattooed upon their souls, following them like a curse or a birthmark. The baptism meant to include them becomes an accusation which they must carry unaided. Once they were a part of God’s people, now they have become no people. God’s family has become an enemy in their minds. I suspect this drives, perhaps mostly at an unconscious level, a lot of hostility towards the Christian community.

If only that community could reach out in love to say, “Come home, the feast is prepared for your return,” and mean it, it would connect with a deep longing on the part of many dechurched people. Sadly, churches often seem full of people like the elder brother in Jesus’ parable of the Prodigal Son, angry at the prodigal for leaving and self-righteous about his return (Luke 15:11-31). Sometimes, the biggest obstacle to finding Jesus is church people.

The second failure is that the family of God frequently fails to understand its own nature. The parish is intended to be like Grandma’s house, the place where the whole family can gather and celebrate. But just as often, it becomes an institution, a service provider, a consumer choice, or even a club of like- minded individuals who come and go. The realization that we are family has yet to hit many Christians. It is reflected in the life of many parishes where no one expresses or lives in the reality of our family. Ironic, isn’t it, that the priest is called “Father,” and in many churches, members are known as “sister” or “brother?”

This is not intended to create another unrealistic myth, such as the classic family Christmas at Grandma’s house. The Church is not a “normal” family, either. Or, maybe it almost is. Because most families, big and small, are dysfunctional, and the Church family is no exception. Christ may be the head, but the rest of the earthly section of the Body is composed exclusively of billions of sinners, dysfunctional by definition. In saying we are a family, there is no expectation of perfection.

Yet it does mean some powerful things. Marked indelibly, we are joined forever, to God our Father and to each other, our brother and sisters. We are one family, without human barriers. We are of all races, tribes, nations, languages, ethnicities, orientations, classes and economic circumstances. We are all loved by the Father, unconditionally.

Water, the raw material of baptism, turns out to be thicker than blood after all, contrary to the old saying. We only need to wake up to, and then rejoice in and celebrate with, our big family. This Christmas, remember you are family.