Chaplain's Corner

Commercial interests like Hallmark Cards, and Christian ministries like Focus on the Family and other influences in our culture have created a “Disney-like” image of family that hinders many from experience real relationships within their family groups. North American’s, who derive so many of their aspirations from images created by the media, largely driven by sales and profit, have a difficult time embracing the fact that “family” is messy business.

The church for the most part, regardless the denomination, has been an inadvertent co-conspirator in keeping the illusion alive. Don’t get me wrong, I love the illusion of a husband and wife who remain madly in love their entire marriage, supported by both sets of parents, raising well adjusted, happy, successful children. I’m a big sucker for “happily ever after”. In fact if I am choosing a book to read or a movie to watch, I choose these most of the time, more so as an escape from the reality of the rough and trouble business of life with all the disappointments and adjustments that reality requires. However, I do so knowing full well that I am choosing to “escape” for a few moments into that fantasy.

The reality is that under the “plastic” surface of every “perfect family” is sufficient relational pain, sacrifice, struggle and compromise to burst any “perfect family” bubble. My own nuclear family and marital family are no different. Many of us make things work; we keep our marriages together and our families in some sort of planetary revolution around us. Some of our family members revolve around us closely like Mercury revolves around the Sun. Others are more “Pluto-like” or even like a comet that comes close enough to be noticed only after long intervals of length absence.

Then of course, some times marriages and families explode, after much effort to figure out a way to make things work, the critical energy needed to hold things together is lost and partners separate, divorce, remarry and the complications grow deeper and more chaotic. Sometimes the explosion is so huge that the members of that family simply disperse and abandon any semblance of relationship altogether.

Of course, much of my life and much of my work exists in the reality of real families and real relationships and real problems that result in these social units we call families not working well or at all. It is rare that I sit by a bedside and provide spiritual care to a patient that family isn’t part of the discussion. Since our human and divine connections are an essential aspect of our spirituality, it is important that this be part of a spiritual care conversation.

It is not at all unusual that a prayer at the end of a visit not only includes concerns for the party in the bed but concerns for family relationships that are broken, children who have strayed, healing for the pain that has nothing to do with the body but with the injuries to the spirit created by broken family relationships.

I had an ever so poignant confrontation with this in my own life recently. On February 15th, 2013, my father passed away in Riverview, Florida. We were not close and hadn’t been for many, many years. Some may think that I never thought of him, they would be wrong. I thought of him weekly. For years I have grieved the brokenness in our relationship. Earlier in my life I had made some attempts to bridge the gap, it never happened. I didn’t attend the funeral; I am not grieving this loss only the disappointment that the relationship was what it was. No my Dad and I never had a huge fight, we never had it out about anything, we just drifted apart. No my Dad wasn’t an abusive man, just a broken one, but so am I.

I have been able to sort my way back though my Dad’s formative years; his father died when he was 12, there was a step-father who he never connected with, and over-controlling mother who died the day I was born. Yes, I can understand why my Dad may have been the man he was, I have compassion for his brokenness, for the deficits he experienced that impacted my life. There has always been what I would call “affection” in my heart for him, but for the past fifteen or so years no relationship – my heart just couldn’t endure the disappointment. Although I understood his brokenness as a man, I wasn’t able, because of my own brokenness to continue to “try” to make a relationship work. It was easier, probably for the both of us, to just allow the revolutions of our loves to grow further and further apart.

I have one final hope for the relationship. My father was a believer in Jesus Christ as am I. We have both faced the depths of our sinfulness and trusted Jesus alone to provide forgiveness through his blood and life everlasting. One of these days, when it is my time to slip away from this earthly existence, I will join him in heaven and everything that prevented us from being close in this world; will have been swept away by glory. We won’t have to talk about what went wrong, we won’t need a counselor to help us find a bridge back into relationship, and we won’t be carrying guilt and shame and disappointment surrounding our relationship. There will be no painful discussions, no blaming, accusing, hard feelings or indifference. We will simply experience the oneness that is an essential attribute of the glory that we experience when we are freed from the bonds of this world. It would have been wonderful to know that here – but we didn’t.

Now many who are reading these words may be shocked that this was true of my relationship to my Dad. But before you get too scandalized by this, stop and think about your life, your family relationships, about those who revolve closely around you and those whose orbits are much larger. Stop and think about how you have tried, how who feel guilty, disappointment, and weary that some of the relationships of your life have a brokenness about them that seems to defy repair. Have compassion for the other(s) in your life whose relationship with you isn’t what you had hoped it would be and have compassion for yourself.

Understand that unlike the sentiments of many Hallmark Cards and the picture painted by organizations like Focus on the Family and many of our churches, family is a messy affair. It is the attempt of sinners to live in relationship, a God-designed relationship that has been messed up because everyone of us in this relationship are sinners and our sinfulness has a negative impact on the relationship that stubbornly defies repair at times. God’s sanctifying work in our lives often mitigates the impact of our sinfulness on each other. But sin goes deep, we often don’t see it in ourselves but see it clearly in others. This reality often causes us to stand back and expect the other to make the first move. Throw fear and failure into the mix and there are times that we learn to live with what is, broken as it may be, because we just don’t know how to move the relationship forward and we are terrified that if we try to make it better it will grow even worse.

Family, it is messy business. Be gracious to your family members, lower your expectations, extend more grace, have compassion for the others and for yourself and when you need a break from reality it’s OK to go to that “happily ever after” place just for a little while and when you do, dream of the time when those of us who are saved by God’s grace will finally arrive in the happily ever reality of glory – this is, after all, what our hearts are longing for.