Once there were two sisters who didn’t get along since the time they were toddlers, and the situation only got worse when they were youngsters and then teenagers … and well, let’s just forget about the adult years. Do you know them?
Or maybe you heard about the two brothers who don’t get along—not Cain and Abel—and stopped talking over a business deal. Or the siblings who want nothing to do with one another because of their parents’ will? Or the family that got divided over a divorce due to infidelity?
Sometimes, oftentimes, it seems our worst enemies are in our families, even though our families are where we should find the greatest comfort and encouragement in a hostile world, but tragically, the hostility even invades that sacred space.
Family strife has many causes—substance abuse, jealousy, divorce, favoritism, anger—and it can manifest itself in many troubling ways. Did you hear about the cousin who didn’t go to another cousin’s funeral because the animosity between them was so intense they took it to the grave?
A priest I know, who is a chaplain at a nursing home, says he lost count of the number of times elderly residents go to him in tears, crying, “Father, my daughter doesn’t visit me.” “My son won’t take my grandchildren to see me.” “I haven’t seen my children in years. What did I do to deserve this?”
Parents can find themselves discarded in their senior years, especially during the time of their greatest need. That sort of neglect goes back millennia.
The Jewish scribe Ben Sira wrote about it in 180 BCE in the Book of Sirach: “My son, be steadfast in honoring your father; do not grieve him as long as he lives. Even if his mind fails, be considerate of him; do not revile him because you are in your prime. Kindness to a father will not be forgotten.”
Every year on the Feast of the Holy Family, there is a reading from Sirach about honoring and loving family members, and every year on that day, I think, “My family isn’t like the Holy Family, we’re more like the Addams Family.” Remember them?
I recently started a novena to St. Anne because if anyone can help a family navigate its troubles, she can. And let me not forget St. Joachim, who like many fathers can get pushed to the sidelines.
A number of years ago, the word “dysfunctional” came into vogue and everyone I knew started saying they were from dysfunctional families. Quite honestly, I’ve never encountered a perfectly functioning family. There’s always some crisis, some argument, some rivalry waiting around the next corner to assault us.
In her best-selling book, The Shelter of Each Other, Mary Pipher PhD, explored our need for families in a society, where they’re buffeted by attacks from within and without.
“I’ve seen hate-filled, violent families, families with addictions, families in which the parents were not grown-ups and the children had no childhoods and families in which the children were starving for moral nourishment,” she wrote. “I know how destructive families can be, how stifling and riddled with pain. But I also know that this is not the whole, or even the most interesting part of the story. Families are ancient institutions … We need our families but we don’t always behave well in them. We love and hate them, yearn for them deep in our bones and feel so disgusted with them that we want to spit.”
I’ve been praying for my family, not just my immediate family, but also my larger family of cousins, nieces, nephews, aunts and uncles. I’ve been praying for all of them because I have this crazy thought that one day, some day at that great heavenly banquet we’ll all be together with no memory of the rivalries and bitterness that may have separated us. That’s certainly something to hope for and something to work toward.
And whenever I think I can’t get along with them, I leaf through photo albums and my cellphone pictures and come to the same conclusion: “Hey, things aren’t as bad as I thought.” It’s probably grace that leads me there, because it’s always wise to look for the good and cherish the fond memories rather than concentrate so much on the misery.
So if you’re estranged from family members, pray for them rather than nurse a resentment for the rest of your life.
