Letter #165: The Family Garden
On Letting Go
Spunch!
Wonderful to be with you and everyone for Thanksgiving. It’s poignant to me, having grown distant from most of my family of origin, to see our new family gathering and growing in love and good will.
I couldn’t help but ponder: what makes the difference between a family in which the members can blossom into themselves and a family from which one has to break away in order to become what he was made to be? It is not so strange that these thoughts echoed our recent theme, Christ vs. Christianity; the salvation of the individual vs. the church that carries that salvation to all.
I think the secret lies in a principle that I see everywhere throughout the Gospels, but many others don’t see anywhere at all: the principle of letting go. When I rattle on about the command to “judge not,” people seem to imagine I’m calling on them to become some kind of moral idiot, blind to the nature of creation and its human imperatives. But no, it’s a question of how to exist within those imperatives while in relationship with others.
Haven’t you noticed this? The man who tries to keep too tight a grip upon the world is bound to end up with a fistful of dust. “How can I convince my wife to believe so-and-so?” “How can I get my child to become such-and-such?” “How can I make the politicians do this and that?” These are not bad questions. They’re simply the wrong questions. When Jesus tells us to remove the plank from our own eye rather than worrying at the speck in our neighbor’s, he is not telling us to let our neighbor be damned. He is actually describing the best way to make everyone around us see a little more clearly.
Try this. Re-read John 4, about Jesus’s encounter with the Samaritan woman. People often tell me the woman feels guilty or that Jesus convicts her or commands her to sin no more. None of that is there. He simply tells her what she's done and who he is. There is not a single passage that indicates her guilty feelings or her repentance — yet the result is the epic conversion of an entire town and maybe a nation.
Every family has its rules and its conventions and even restrictions on what can be said and done and how. But those conventions and restrictions must be elastic enough to grow and change as each individual soul takes its unique shape. Today’s idiot world searches for identity in idiot things: skin color, sexual desires, class, and other mere incidentals to the eternal image of God within. But that doesn't prove identity is meaningless. It proves that idiocy is idiocy.
A family — or a church — should not be a graveyard in which to bury individual identity, but a garden where it can grow.
On to Christmas.
Love, Dad
First, welcome back!!! I actually missed your daily letters and commentary. It has proven to be a great place to contemplate, reflect and then comment upon (at great length, sometimes) the many topics you have opened. The field of cultivation that was my family has been strewn with the darnel of American modern culture, to the degree that one child barely speaks to us as we are dangerous i.e. believing Catholics and conservatives. This one has taken seriously the internet admonitions to no longer associate with such dangerous persons as my wife and I. My wife, a kinder and more generous soul, reaches out to her (I believe she is still a her, although she may have morphed into a they). I will content myself with waiting and outliving her stubbornness. I was a fool in my 20’s as well, and remember Mark Twain’s quip about his father’s ability to learn at an advanced age.
My greatest sadness is that we were blessed with four children, and none of them is even dating (except possibly for the aforementioned rebel). Our relationship is close with the others, but they are a product not only of our family but of the modern corrupting culture. The excellent interview that Klavan the Elder with Dr. Sax spells this out well. They were too old to have cellphones but they have been injured by this culture.
We are leaving our lines of communication open, and cherish the relationships we have with 75% of our progeny. We pray, we hope. We are storming the gates of Heaven with our prayers, and will continue to hope for reconciliation and maturation (happened to me in my early ‘30s).
I've missed these astute observations that I would never think of on my own, but which cause me to slap my forehead with a "duh". Yes, Yes, and Amen.