a family christmas

I’ve taken a longer hiatus from my blog than I had intended. Karla & I were gone several days for Christmas. Then, shortly after we returned, the neuropathy in my hands flared up so badly that I was unable to type. (Heck, I couldn’t even brush my own teeth for a day or two.) My hands still hurt, but the burning and swelling have begun to subside, and frankly, I’m sick of being able to do nothing but lie on the couch in front of the TV, so let me give it a shot.

For Christmas, we all converged at my mom’s place in San Jose: my mom and step-dad, my dad and step-mom from Tennessee, my sister and her two college-aged kids from Alabama, my brother with his wife and son, my two step-brothers and their families, my youngest brother, my aunt and cousin from Florida, and Karla and me. It was a large gathering in more ways than one, and one that tells a pretty rich story.

Lynne was ten, Todd five, and I seven when Mom and Dad divorced. As children, we found it easy enough to cast Carol as the woman who split up our home, but in reality all she did was show up at the right time. Either way, she and Dad were married a year later, and within the following two years Mom met and married Don. By that time I was in the fifth grade, and living apart from my father had becoming increasingly difficult. All four parents agreed to the new arrangement: I would live with Dad, Carol and her two boys, Brad and Steve; and Lynne and Todd would stay with Mom and Don. Several months later, Carol gave birth to Eric, and the six of us left San Jose for the small lumber town of Janesville, high in the northern Sierras.

Years later, as a youth pastor, I worked with enough broken homes and witnessed enough hostility between divorced parents to gain a profound appreciation for my own. I had never heard them disparage each other, never felt called upon to choose between them, never felt as if my stepparents thought of me as someone else’s child. It’s not enough to say that my parents remained civil to each other, for at some point the civility became genuine friendship. My dad’s sister has remained my mom’s confidant and traveling companion for over thirty years. My stepmother’s three sons always know that they have a place to hang out at my mom’s house. And if one set of parents is ever in the vicinity of the other, they invariably get together.

And there we were, every one of us piled into Mom’s living room on Christmas Eve to exchange gifts.

I can’t idealize my family. No need to groan about past wounds at this point, but we had our share of dysfunction, and several of us have required some form of therapy or another. But when I see Mom and Carol reminiscing on the front porch, or Dad taking a grandfather-grandson walk with Brad’s son Mitch, I’m reminded that God has been very good to our family. Our failings simply bring that goodness into sharper relief.

William Willimon once suggested that the most ontologically instructive part of the human anatomy is the belly button. A dot in the center of our bodies, whose function ceases moments after we’re born, it remains there to the day we die as a reminder that we did not create ourselves, that we came from other people, flawed people to whom we owe an unpayable debt of gratitude and whose biological and psychological fingerprints form a huge part of our own identity. I would suggest that this extends not only to our forebears by blood, but also to the communities and traditions that shaped us before we ever knew enough to consent to their influence. We have been largely formed by others, and to despise our roots is to despise our very selves. So God commands, “Honor your father and mother.” Love the streams that contributed to your becoming who you are. This is not a command to idolize your roots, to accept their every influence uncritically, to imitate them in every way, to refuse outside voices that might challenge the values and loyalties instilled in you when you were younger. It’s certainly not a command to pretend that the people who shaped you never hurt you. But honor them, forgive their failings and acknowledge their gifts, thank God for them. In so doing you learn to honor yourself.