Kids arguing over toys, teenagers disobeying rules and mothers ruminating over old offenses — this is the environment found in many homes, even the most stable and loving ones. While home is meant to be a place of peace amidst the world’s turmoil, it often feels more like a battleground.
We defend the family as a stabilizing force in society, a spiritual and emotional respite. But paradoxically, there’s a contrasting argument in defense of the family. As Christian author G.K. Chesterton outlines in Heretics: “The common defense of the family is that, amid the stress and fickleness of life, it is peaceful, pleasant, and at one. But there is another defense of the family which is possible… the family is not peaceful and not pleasant and not at one.”
Think back to your childhood and the reality of daily life with your family. Hopefully, you have memories of laughter and joy. But maybe your big brother also ignored you, your sister was hypersensitive, or your dad was hard to please.
Chesterton emphasizes familial conflict not to disparage domestic life, but to highlight its potential for fostering personal growth. “The best way for a man to test his readiness to encounter the common variety of mankind… is to climb down a chimney into any house at random and get on as well as possible with the people inside. And this is essentially what each one of us did on the day that he was born.”
This “test” is a difficult one for all of us. “As soon as you think you’re enlightened,” writes contemplative teacher Ram Dass, ”go spend a week with your family.”
In reading his Meditations, we find that even Marcus Aurelius, the mighty Roman emperor, seemed to be more preoccupied with the difficulties of getting along with his family and colleagues than he was with conquering nations or ruling an empire. He wrote, “When you wake up in the morning, tell yourself: the people I deal with today will be meddling, ungrateful, arrogant, dishonest, jealous and surly… But none of them can hurt me. We were born to work together like feet, hands and eyes, like the two rows of teeth, upper and lower.”
Two thousand years later, modern thinkers are less likely to meditate on how to deal stoically with family members. Many today reject family precisely because of the conflicts that so frequently arise within it. They argue that family—especially when it isn’t entirely supportive and “validating” — can impede happiness and freedom. Instead, the argument often goes, we should choose our relationships in what some call a “chosen family.”
This is why we see increasing estrangement — one in four adults reports being estranged from a family member. There are certainly cases where this is necessary, such as in instances of abuse. But more often, as a recent New Yorker article discusses, children cut ties because of shifting political or religious views or the inability to get along. A secular daughter, estranged from her religious parents, said: “Reconciliation, for me, would mean them doing a bunch of work, and I don’t think they’re going to, so I just need to move forward like it’s not going to happen.”
Family reconciliation does indeed require frequent work, from all members, and many are no longer willing to make that sacrifice. Why do “a bunch of work” when you can seek other social connections that feel good and ask far less? The Christian values of forgiveness and humility can seem outdated, in a society serving up the comfort of like-minded communities. But as Chesterton says, “We make our friends, we make our enemies, but God makes our next-door neighbor…. That is why the old religions and the old scriptural language showed such sharp wisdom when they spoke, not of one’s duty toward humanity, but one’s duty to one’s neighbor.”
The most prominent of our “unchosen” neighbors are our family members. It’s hard to imagine that Jesus Christ, who called Matthew, the tax collector to stand alongside Simon, the Zealot, would see political or ideological differences as grounds for severing family ties. Through the heart-expanding message of their common master, Matthew and Simon transcended their differences.
As Christians, we are all on a mission to receive the virtue required to overcome such differences. We take seriously scriptural admonition to honor parents and love our families. We embrace suffering as part of mortality and aim for higher goals than comfort alone. We desire lives that stretch us and demand something of us — we want adventure. The supreme adventure is being born into a family.
In rejecting family life to seek comfort or like-minded communities, we wall ourselves off from humbling relationships that are essential to virtuous progression. In this way, as Chesterton says, we may inadvertently create a society that cushions increasingly “solitary” individuals from “all experience of the bitter and bracing human compromises” — something he characterizes, “in the most literal sense of the words, a society for the prevention of Christian knowledge.”
Martin Heidegger, a German philosopher, described our birth into this world as being “thrown” into life, suggesting that we didn’t choose the place, circumstances, or relatives into which we were born. Even if you believe in some kind of a specific premortal choice, you may still believe some part of that “throwing” was orchestrated by God. Often, this “throwing” places us in difficult situations and with people we don’t naturally get along with. Yet we can take comfort in the knowledge that God has a plan and His goal is our growth. That will almost certainly require real heroism as we move forward in the story He has written for us.
The home is where most of our heroism must occur. There is a special kind of annoyance that happens in the home — a more potent offense and a more stinging rebuke than found anywhere else in the world. We could travel around the world among diverse cultures and never encounter anyone as incomprehensible as our sister. We can seek and attain honor and glory on Wall Street but find no one whose opinion matters more to us than our own fastidious father. We may debate opposing ideologies throughout the nation but will find no one’s politics more upsetting than our own Uncle Bob.
Because we are bound by birth, even when we don’t like each other, the family becomes the training ground for lasting change. As a child, my best friend was my sister, who was two years older than me. She was also my worst enemy. She was sweet, quiet, and sensitive. I was overconfident, pushy, and insensitive. This led to some hardship. I remember feeling like she always thought the worst of me. She remembers my rudeness.
But slowly I have changed, and so has she. I am less brash and sarcastic, and my sister is more resilient. I think the change came because of the slow chipping away of each other’s rough edges. I began to choose not to say things because I didn’t want her to take it the wrong way. She chose to let things go. I believe I am a better person because I had to go through the difficulty of adapting to my sister. We got through our trying and wonderful childhood and are still best friends, but no longer worst enemies.
If we wish to prove ourselves as disciples of Christ — embodiments of love and forgiveness — we must first succeed in the battlefields of our own homes. As Christ said, “If you love those who love you, what reward do you have? Do not even the tax collectors do the same?” But if we love our little brother despite his obnoxious habits, or forgive our older sister despite her offensive behavior, then we gain a hero’s reward.
As a mother of five, the greatest joys in life come through my family — and the greatest miseries and strife. However, I have learned to have a lighter view of familial conflict. I have had to accept that my “happy family” isn’t always happy, and that is ok. I try to see my children’s sibling rivalries and differing opinions as a means for them to learn important skills such as compromise, conflict resolution, and tolerance of differences.
As we ponder the many things we have to be grateful for this Thanksgiving, perhaps we could consider the blessing of our challenging families. Rather than avoiding our difficult relationships — let’s step into them, knowing God “threw” us into our family. Let’s also pray for peace and work towards harmony. But we might also want to teach our son that if he could just learn to get along with his little sister, ruling Rome would be easy.