The Family Today – Healing and Expansion in Christ: An Anglican Perspective

Abstract

The Family Today – Healing and Expansion in Christ: An Anglican Perspective1 Ginnie Kennerley There is something non-negotiable about the family. For better or for worse, our parents are our parents and their parents are our grandparents. Their blood runs in our veins, their genes pass into our bodies to determine intimate details of our make-up and their personal history – their joys and sorrows, their wounds and their heartbreaks, as well as their view of life – can both feed us and trip us up as we find our own feet, develop as individuals, seek out our own marriage partners and hopefully raise our own children. So it is important for both church and society – any society and every faith community – to cherish and support the family, fostering love, justice and mercy within its boundaries, so that these ultimate values may prevail in the wider society around us. The traditional family is not the be-all and end-all of a Christian or any other society, however. The nuclear family of Mum, Dad and children is not always a haven of harmony; sometimes it can be fragmented almost as soon as it comes into being, and sometimes it can become a prison or even a torture chamber for children and parents alike – with terrible results for the mental health and well-being of the next generation. So it is crucial that we do not idolise or idealise the family. We need to admit that all family life sooner or later falls short of the ideal – not so much in its failure to comply with all the rules and regulations which dogmatists try to impose but through the simple fact that we are all imperfect human beings, carrying our own wounds, afflicted by our own fears and frailties and subject to our own inevitable areas of selfishness. Healing is often needed; forgiveness is regularly required; compassionate guidance is often unavailable. And in the absence of compassion and forgiveness, healing and loving kindness, families can fall apart with devastating results. It shouldn’t surprise us that the Bible confirms that this is so. We don’t need to read far into Genesis to find Cain murdering Abel in a fit of fraternal jealousy, believing that God was favouring his brother unfairly. Fratricide The Family Today – Healing and Expansion in Christ: An Anglican Perspective Studies • volume 107 • number 428 481 is part of what the Jewish tradition sees as the very first human family! And throughout that first book of the Bible we are offered a succession of brothers who have little or no brotherly love for one another, who plot against each other and usurp each other’s position in the family (remember Jacob and Esau!), until eventually we come to the ferocious treatment of Joseph by his jealous brothers, who, while they stopped short of actually knifing him, abandoned him in a dried-up well to either die of thirst or fall prey to slavetraders , which is what actually happened. I can think of quite a few brothers who have felt the same way about one another, without actually acting on their feelings but, without forgiveness, the alienation affects the rest of their lives. (Incidentally it is good to note – and I owe this insight to Rabbi Jonathan Sacks – that the future of the people of Israel is dependent on Joseph’s dramatic but not easily achieved forgiveness of his brothers). So, healing and forgiveness are required; and one of the first duties of Christians must surely be to help one another find healing; and it is always the emotional wounds that are the hardest to heal, the hardest to forgive. Sometimes forgiveness may prove impossible to demonstrate in practice – particularly where there is no will on one side to allow for the needs of the other or to change destructive behaviour. In such cases a permanent rift may prove the only way out of a downward spiral that is causing great pain and damaging the lives of parents and children alike. And that, of course, brings us to the question of remarriage, step-families and the extra support they need. Step-families In my limited experience, second unions are usually...