Family Life

SAT., DEC. 21, 1991, 7:01 AM
FARM, STUDY

Last night’s film was a portrayal of Italian family life in a big city. There was lots of turmoil and many “problems,” as counselors define them, but underlying was a strong sense of “family” and the influence of “My big Church.” In a very rough sense I would call this picture an analog to earth life: lots of apparent problems, but with an underlying reliance on Me (taking myriad forms) and a strong sense of connection with humans like unto oneself… “family” in a wider sense.

Unfortunately, this very strong sense of “family,” identified with racial, ethnic, and religious groups, while a positive factor in earth life, is also the cause of much strife. Groups in Africa have been reconstituting themselves as countries for years. Now former countries are “coming apart,” partly because of these long-standing ethnic clashes. We must wait to see if the good overbalances the turmoil and strife.

Your functional family was small, but you, as a child, lived in a rather “family” neighborhood. Your memories and childhood are mostly pleasant. School became another sort of family, as did Sunday School, the Y, and summer camps. In high school there was the Comus Club, and athletic teams as the main extensions of your family. In a time of war your Navy unit became a strange form of family, even more so when you were aboard ship. Athletic teams, again, your training room job, and the fraternity were the forms of family that were operated in your later college years.

You were led to a position on the Punahou faculty, and you became part of another family, of which you still belong, tangentially… in spirit. Out of this family came your wife, Lenore. When you eventually married you became part of her rather large family, with its closeness and its tensions. You became a functioning member of the health education profession, and this has become a real family for you, highlighted by your experience with the School Health Education Study and with students who have become colleagues over the years.

Since your marriage the church has been an important family to you, in its Presbyterian form. Now it is an essential part of your total “family” life, with yesterday afternoon’s conversation with John as a good piece of evidence. Synod School has been another “family” experience, dampened by Lenore’s disinterest. You have no “neighborhood” here, but the space that is yours is another kind of good. It is possible to have too much family.

As this Christmas season proceeds there shall be a focus on your own family – your sons, their wives, and children. You acknowledge that there are tensions in this family, and the time together will not be all sweetness and light. When individual families try to establish their own customs and ways of celebrating this holy day of Mine it is difficult to put this all together in a completely harmonious time. Try to remember that your fundamental allegiance is to Me, the Christ of this Christmas season. You are all part of the wide and deep Christian family, even Matthew (who cannot yet acknowledge this). Let this be a unifying aspect of family rather than a divisive one, which it can be.

Middle class Christian families have standards, and families are “ideal” when everyone upholds all of these standards, of conduct and even of motivation. But let Me remind you that the first story in My Holy Scriptures describes a family dispute. The family is small – Adam, Eve, and Me, as Almighty God. I set a standard. Eve succumbed to temptation. Adam stuck with her. So I tossed them out. Then one of their two first sons killed the other. And thus family life began. (Consider My dilemma if Adam had resisted temptation, and only Eve had “sinned.” Would I have cast her out and left Adam to be a righteous bachelor till the end of time? Or would I have created another woman for him? Or would I have forgiven her and let them stay on together due to his righteousness? But as I have told you I wanted them out of the Garden to begin to shape the earth’s human family, with its joys and sorrows.