Meditation for 1/13/02

Creative Spirit, Spirit of Life

Source of human good

We come together this January morning

To reflect, to renew,

to return to ourselves

long enough to acknowledge those around us

in new ways.

 

We come together this January morning

To quiet our restless souls,

To remember

That even as we twist and turn

Through our gusty lives

There are moments of peace,

Lulls in the storm,

Where we can reconnect

With others who have always been

Twisting and turning right beside us

Even when we have felt most alone.

 

We come together this January morning

Against the backdrop of an ever-changing

Ever-challenging world

A world that can seem indifferent to our pain

A world that can seem indifferent to our action

A world that can seem indifferent to our lives.

 

And yet, here we are…

Together on this January morning

Offering our collective presence

Offering our collective good

Offering our collective assurance

That we will not be indifferent to this world,

Nor to the life we share.

 

Let us be silent for a time

As we discover once again

The breath of life that connects us all.

(silence)

Amen.

 

Reading

Song  by Carl Seaburg

 

Say that air remembers lark

Say that sea remembers shark

Say that earth remembers mole

Say that fire remembers coal

Who know?  Who knows?

Time goes its way

Whatever we say—

 

Say that hand remembers right

Say that eye remembers light

Say that mind remembers truth

Say that love remembers youth

Who knows?  Who knows?

Time steals away

Whatever we say—

 

Sermon

Now that December has turned into January, I thought it might be a good idea to do a little exploration into family life.  I figured this would be a good time because many of us have spent at least a portion of the month of December in the company of our families.  Some of us have just been reunited with loved ones who we rarely see and we can fondly look back at the time that was shared. And then there are those of us for whom the holidays were a difficult time…a time in which we could not help but calculate an inventory of all the ways in which our families haven’t measured up to our ideals of what a good family should be.  Of course, a good family is a difficult thing to define, particularly if we choose to rely on what we often think are “traditional” models.  Each of us may have a different model upon which we base our concept of family life: For some, Ozzie and Harriet, for others The Brady Bunch.  And as Sara Scott pointed out after the first service, for some The Addams Family.  Regardless of the many models we may use, though, most often our family will come up short by comparison.

 

I think this kind of evaluation inevitably leads to disappointment because real life is typically much more complex than what can be portrayed in any simple, fictional family. Real life, we have learned, is definitely not a sitcom.  When we are faced with the contrast between a myth and the reality we are actually experiencing, there are at least two common reactions.  One is that we may feel guilty because our families don’t measure up.  We may beat ourselves up over all the ways we miss the mark.  Who cares if our expectations are unrealistic;  we believe we should be able to rise to the challenge anyway.   A second reaction might be anger—a sense of betrayal or rage when we see that our family does not live as the myths suggest we should be able to do.  Someone has got to be at blame for our family’s shortcomings, and they most certainly deserve to feel the wrath of our frustration.

 

I’ve been thinking about these models, the myths upon which they are based, and the ways in which we are almost doomed to come up short by comparison, as a result of reading a book by Stephanie Coontz entitled The Way We Never Were, a book that goes to great lengths to examine and expose the myths of the “traditional family” against which we may be inclined to compare ourselves.  In her book, Coontz presents well-reasoned, fact-laden research to contend that our cultural penchant for evaluating family forms and change through the lens of nostalgia for the past limits our ability to support the kind of families that actually do exist.   She believes that by examining how complex and multifaceted the experience of family life has been in the past, modern families may be able to develop a greater tolerance for the ambiguities of contemporary family life, and may stop longing for a past that was never as untroubled or uncomplicated as we might lead ourselves to believe.[1] 

 

While Coontz’s work covers a great deal of ground, indeed she thoroughly examines two centuries of American family life, I am limited by time in what I can share with you this morning.  I encourage you to read her book yourself, particularly if you would like to know how the “traditional” Ozzie and Harriet-type family of the 1950s was not, as common wisdom has told us, the last gasp of ‘traditional’ family life with deep roots in the past; or if you wish to learn more about the near-universality of American families’ dependence on public assistance, despite the commonly held belief that only the poor have relied on handouts.  There is also intriguing information about the relationship of individualism and gender inequality in families and the shift in emphasis from civic duty to familial self-indulgence.  Coontz’s exhaustive research offers some important reminders to us as we consider our own families, yes, but perhaps just as importantly as we consider the families around us.  As she says, “Only when we have a realistic idea of how families have and have not worked in the past can we make informed decisions about how to support families in the present and improve their future.”[2] She contends that romanticizing the “traditional” family by adhering to the myths that promote it often leads to self-righteous attitudes toward those who are unable to live up to the ideal.  In other words, the more common it becomes to idealize the “traditional” family, the more likely real families, in their unavoidably imperfect existence, will face condemnation.[3]

 

Under these conditions the “family becomes over-burdened with social expectations as well as psychological and moral ones.  If the family would just do its job, we wouldn’t need welfare, school reform, or prisons.  And if my family would just do its job, I would be perfectly happy.  The obvious next step, of course, is that if I am not perfectly happy, it’s my family’s fault.”[4]

 

Examining families according to these mythical ideals is like using an outdated map that distorts one feature of family life without regard for all the other, inevitably unavoidable, features. Policymakers and popular pundits often assume that if people would just avoid the one exaggerated feature on their particular ideological map, all would be well:  “If couples would stay together, if mothers would stay home, if women would have babies only when they were safely married, if parents would revive older childraising values—then we wouldn’t face the problems we do today….”[5]

 

We can see evidence of this kind of thinking all around us.  In fact, a recent edition of the Des Moines Register featured an editorial by Washington Post columnist George Will that appeared just in time for my topic this morning.  In the editorial Will quotes a 30 year-old government study which declared that socioeconomic background of students is a primary factor in a school’s performance.  Despite the age of the study, I assume it is not difficult for us to agree with this finding.  After all, in a culture which gauges the spirit of the nation according to the strength of the stock market, we should all be well aware that socioeconomic factors have an influence on just about everything.  However, Will then draws a connection influenced, no doubt, by the traditional family myth.  He directly equates “socioeconomic background” with the “quality of…children’s families” in general and the presence of two parents in the home in particular.  He then goes on to bemoan the increase in the percentage of children born out-of-wedlock (what he labels as “family decomposition”) as a factor that will always outweigh any kind of legislation.  In other words, until families fix themselves, we should expect government action to be ineffective.  This idea that we need to fix families in order to solve our cultural problems is really just another way to say that families are to blame for these cultural problems.[6]

 

Will’s argument, essentially that the root of America’s problems is the “epidemic of family breakdown” is not uncommon.  “Historically,” Coontz writes, “Americans have tended to discover a crisis in family structure and standards whenever they are in the midst of major changes in socioeconomic structure and standards.”  And today is no exception.  “If we once had long-range optimism in the midst of short-range hardship, today we have long-term despair in the midst of short-term benefits.  This makes it tempting to focus on something small enough to seem manageable:  If we cannot strengthen America’s political and economic infrastructure, maybe we can at least shore up our families.”  But, Coontz warns, “focusing attention on family arrangements diverts us from the research, programs, and hard choices necessary to bring families back into balance with economic and political realities.”[7] 

 

Besides, Coontz contends that assuming children will suffer long-term negative effects by being raised in non-traditional family arrangements is not backed by research.  She writes, “Both contemporary studies and historical experience show that children are resilient enough to adapt to many different innovations in family patterns:  When they cannot adapt, this is caused more often by the economic and social context in which those innovations take place than by their parents’ ‘wrong turns’ away from traditional family patterns.”[8]

Coontz points to the results of one well-known study to indicate that the ramifications of turns away from tradition are often difficult to forecast.  She recounts that researchers, after tracking individuals from infancy to adolescence, attempted to predict which youths were likely to lead successful, happy lives and which would turn into troubled adults.  “When they revisited the subjects at age thirty, they were shocked to find that their predictions were wrong in two-thirds of the cases—a record worse than if they had just made random guesses.  However, there was a pattern to the researchers’ errors:  They had consistently overestimated both the damaging effects of early family stresses and the positive effects of having a smooth, successful, nonchallenging childhood and adolescence.  They had failed to anticipate that depth, complexity, problem-solving abilities, and maturity might derive from painful experiences rather than easy successes….  There are, in other words, many roads to success, each with its own rough sections….  The idea that there is one single blueprint for parents to follow, one family form that always produces well-adjusted children, or one ‘normal’ set of family arrangements and interactions” Coontz says,  “is not true now and never has been.  The evidence suggests that as long as we respond to the uncertainties with common sense, flexibility, and affection, most of us can be… ‘good enough’ parents.  We may only be muddling through, but we are not dysfunctional.  We can afford to be ‘at risk’ in a few areas of our lives and can even manage to turn those risks into personal and social growth.”[9]

 

And yet, the family continues to be portrayed as the entity that must, on its own, endure and overcome all of the economic pressures and social stresses that continue to insure its demise.  Coontz writes, “…very few people can sustain values at a personal level when they are continually contradicted at work, at the store, in the government, and on television. To call their failure to do so a family crisis is much like calling pneumonia a breathing crisis.  Certainly,” she says, “pneumonia affects people’s ability to breathe easily, but telling them to start breathing properly again, or even instructing them in breathing techniques, is not going to cure the disease.”[10]

 

So why is Coontz’s research appropriate fodder for a Sunday service?  Well, I believe that at the root of her work is a compassionate search for truth in the face of almost dogmatic adherence to a limited view of human potential.  The more we rely on outdated methods of understanding our current socioeconomic realities, the less likely we will be able to maintain justice, equity and compassion in human relations and the more distant our goal of world community with peace, liberty, and justice for all will become.

 

Coontz writes, “it may seem depressing to think of our current family problems as part of a much larger socioeconomic crisis.  But surely it is even more depressing to think that the problem is caused by people’s rotten values or irredeemable selfishness.  That kind of analysis,” she says, “leads people to give up in despair….  Seeing our family pains as part of a larger social predicament means that we can let ourselves—or our parents—off the hook.  Maybe our personal difficulties are not all our family’s fault; maybe our family’s difficulties are not all our personal fault.”

 

More than simply being let off the hook, though, we can be encouraged by Coontz’s research to work to improve conditions for families of all types.  As she writes in her conclusion “despite all the difficulty of making generalizations about past families, the historical evidence does suggest that families have been most successful whenever they have built meaningful, solid networks and commitments beyond their own boundaries.  We may discover,” she says “that the best thing we will ever do for our own families, however we define them, is to get involved in community or political action to help others.”[11]  In other words, only by helping others will we eventually be able to help ourselves.

 

For, as the hymn says, on and on the circle’s moving…sisters, brothers, all.

 

 

Closing Words (Carolyn Owen-Towle)

We have inherited sustaining history from those who have come before us.  As the generations follow one another, so too does wisdom and belief in the future.  Let us venture forth blending past and present in the ongoing quest for a better world.