Quest Conference 2009
LEICESTER
‘We Are Family:
New Thinking for the 21st Century’
Contents
Family – norms and ideals for a new paradigm(?) by Terry Prendergast
A homily for the Quest Conference on the 16th Sunday, Year B by Fr Bob Eccles OP
Family – norms and ideals for a new paradigm(?)
Terry Prendergast
This article is the text of one of the addresses given at the Quest Conference 2009.
Terry Prendergast is Chief Executive of Marriage Care, formerly CMAC, and has been in that role since 2000. He was born in Batley, West Yorkshire, and joined the Montfort Fathers in 1967, studying at Heythrop in Oxfordshire. He left the Montfortians in 1970, marrying Kate. He has worked in a number of social-work settings as a practitioner, but has been involved in management in the charitable sector since 1989. He trained as a social worker in 1975 and also as a group-analytic psychotherapist in 1980. He has an MA in Managing Change in Community from the University of Bradford. Apart from the general work of Marriage Care, Terry is concerned about long-term relationships, how they are managed and supported, as well as the development of the spiritual and sacramental aspects of adult relationships.
Today I want to explore with you a new concept of family – one that relates to the current and myriad experiences that we all have, in our different ways, that takes account of the traditional and the stereotype, but also offers a model and ideas for today, and tomorrow.
I am going to present some ideas of family that relate to a more philosophical position initially, moving onto possible definitions, old and new, before looking at family roles, and the role of the family in our society. I then want to explore our images of family, touching briefly on the darker side, something that Kate has already discussed and explored with you, before looking at what is going on today in family, both policy and the living out of this important societal structure. This latter will include a brief exploration and presentation related to marriage, cohabitation and same-sex unions. Culture and its impact is also important, so I will mention this before suggesting a paradigm based on ideas from Professor Margaret Farley, in her book, Just Love: a framework for Christian Sexual Ethics. I had the good fortune to hear and also respond to Margaret’s lecture recently on Sacred Desire and her seven norms or ideals for relationships. I want to try to translate them into norms and values for the family.
Whilst I am going to present these ideas to you, I also expect you to do some of the work. So, I will be pausing at certain points to allow you to talk to someone near you about what your experiences are, what your reactions are, so that we might start to debate what family is in 2009 and beyond. We will have a break for coffee and then there will be a time for questions and more debate. I suggest that this time is there for us all to learn from each other so I suggest that we all endeavour to take a leadership position – by this I mean taking a responsibility for moving the group on in its understanding and learning. I suggest to you that there are no experts on family – we are all experts because of our myriad experiences. This is not some post-modern perspective or an attempt by to deny my responsibility in providing input today. But, I would worry if you listen to what I say without a critical view based on your own experiences and life. We all have something to add and, ultimately, we all have to make our own minds up about the paradigm that works for us.
Philosophy and the process of Socialisation
One fundamental and existential experience for us as humans is the continuing struggle between agency and structure, between the individual and group. These dualisms are fundamental to our human experience.
One of the main components of any family is the coupling process and structure for the adults therein, where family contains two adults, that is. This process of being together exposes potential difficulties because we are alone, in our basic human condition, and different, driven by needs that often conflict with others. So, despite our desire to be together intimately, I still want my needs met, and before yours, if it comes to that! Any relationships are a struggle because they flow against nature. So, understanding the process of building and sustaining a relationship is vital. It is very important that difference and independence are developed as Kate described yesterday so that a set of relationships within the family allow for individuality and individual expression. Researchers in the relationship field now have suggested, correctly I believe, that teaching couples how to reduce or mitigate conflict is a misguided intervention. Couples and families need to be taught how to fight, how to recover and which problems might have solutions. And if you look at the immediate post-war period in this country and America, you will note how many subscribed to and promoted a rarefied version of something called the nuclear family, sinking dreams and expectations into this model of hope. It signified a concept and pursuit of domestic perfection that did not last as it soon fell prey to the individualism that it had sought to suppress. And this model, that I will refer to later, has been used as a yardstick of measurement for the sublimely good, or has been modified, or rejected out of hand, yet still remains the ideal or paradigm that people benchmark by today. Its power seems to be that those generations really believed that they had solved the puzzle of being together, by promoting a model of marriage and family never to be repeated.
I recently heard family or the socialisation process in family described as turning little animals into human beings. And whilst I found this comments somewhat chilling, it does bear a modicum of reality. Norbert Elias, the German sociologist, talked of the Civilising Process and of how we don’t have to scratch the surface much for less acceptable behaviours or attitudes to be seen or experienced. The adults, of course, have an important role to play here, though it also falls to other family members to provide an environment of sustainable growth.
In our own faith tradition, we are provided with the model of the Holy Family. Doubtless many of you will have struggled with this concept at home and at school. I was never that clear myself how this family was meant to help me in my understanding or life, other than yet another model against which I fell short. However, there is a modern-day irony in this presented family model, with mother child and step-father – the earliest recorded and celebrated re-constituted family?!
It is dangerous and difficult to generalise about family – I can talk of mine and you can talk of yours, and we can consider the differences, but it is possible that mine might be better than yours! If we explore the biography of family, in its many cultured settings, we end up with a myriad set of constructions, though it is possible to discern some givens. Normally, two adults in an intimate partnership, some children, either born, fostered or adopted, and some extended and expanded other members. But, it is difficult to look too close. So, we can, I suggest, take issue with that most famous of opening sentences, from Anna Karenina (‘All happy families are like one another; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way...’ ) , since all families are unique and different in their happiness and unhappiness But we continue to try nevertheless to define and conceptualise. So, I would suggest that we remember that the term family may not exist as some ideal type, as Plato would have us believe, for example, but remains but a shorthand expression to define a set of relationships that are common but different. Therefore, we must beware of giving too much significance to the term itself but rather try to understand and accept the different forms that this term expresses, but principally the people who make up families, and how they behave.
Defining family – by whom and how
I guess it is worth asking whether there is a need to define at all. I have just suggested the real difficulties in presenting a model that catches all. And yet, we are beset on all sides by attempts to define and capture, and a lot of the time these are genuine attempts to move us all forward, rather than stigmatising and discriminatory comments. I would suggest you try to keep in my mind idea that family remains this shorthand term to define a set of relations and inter-relations.
One of the key definers is of course the State. This definition finds its form through law and tradition. So, the State defines family within the context of marriage, for example. It defines it in relationship to citizenship, though I would remind you all that we remain subjects rather than citizens in this country! It defines family through fiscal processes – taxes, allowances, pensions, and we have seen recent helpful legislation in the country, in respect of civil partnerships, to helpfully give rights to those in other kinds of families.
However, as a faith community, I suppose that we would all consider that the role of the Church in this definition process also carries weight – a greater weight I would suggest when we consider family as sacrament. We do not stop at the merely civil in our faith. But, we also seem to run into a real problem immediately in our own Church which seems to have the rules really sewn up when it comes to defining family. It is man and woman, and children, and we have recently had this re-emphasised by Rome. We have had this definition reiterated often enough to know what the ‘rules’ are. And whilst, it is possible to perceive these rules as an ideal type, it is also clear that some sections of the Catholic community see it as the norm, and not as ideal. So, other family forms do not partake of the Church’s blessing, in legislative terms, though it is also possible to perceive a more pastoral and compassionate view if you search. But, it is not the view purveyed by the Magesterium. So, many families, and the individuals that make up these groups, other than married man, woman, and added child, find themselves discriminated against or denigrated. The list is long and current – single-parent families, re-constituted families (where the relationships are deemed to be irregular), cohabiting families, same-sex families. The irony for me is the way that all these attempt to live out good, Catholic lives whilst being judged and bracketed by those in authority, or those who appear to have reached the Kingdom already!
I suggest that the most important definers in this process are those individuals themselves who make up families. They have made their choices and with the accompanying life-style. They want to live good lives according to the precepts of the Gospels. They are an advert for the Church, an advert that the Church often ignores or consigns to the waste bin.
How these definitions are made by the State and Church are contained in what I have suggested above. For example, from the point of view of Church, a proper family must have a marriage in it – as I have just said, we have had this repeated over and over. As I have said elsewhere, I am more interested these days in the concept of the sacrament of relationships, rather than merely marriage, but this is certainly a bridge too far for our own Church. So, we do get a clear idea from Church, even if we don’t subscribe to it, of what family is, or isn’t!
The State is much more open to other forms and is perhaps driven by other considerations, not least the views of the electorate. But it is ironic that the State appears to be much more pastoral and compassionate in its acceptance of what family is. The fact that there are all kinds of benefits available for different family forms, and legal imperatives to support families suggests that the State is even more concerned for families than Church.
So, we see that how family is defined is inevitably determined by the definer, and the validity of these definitions is supported or denied by how individuals, within their respective belief systems, subscribe to these pronouncements. I would own here that these latter definitions are likely to be driven by the experiential rather than the structural. We all seem to have a clear notion of where family ends – cousins, second-cousins, consanguinity, etc, though it could be argued that at some level we are all family. I will return to this in my offer of a paradigm using one of Margaret Farley’s suggestions to support this, or at least, raise it as a question.
The role of family, and family roles
In its simplest form, family offers a place to belong. In the work of my organisation, Marriage Care, we consider the work of John Bowlby and others in relation to attachment as key here. Family provides us with a secure base from which to grow and develop. We see clear relationship problems with adults, in the way they form relationships and sustain them, where there has been a disrupted or absent experience of secure base. Family challenges also that basic human condition of aloneness that is our common experience. We all come into the world alone and as individuals, and die in that way also, but we are given a taste of difference by family. We get membership rights to belong to a particular club and whilst this can benefit might change as we grow, and sometimes might not seem so helpful, it remains the one club that we can belong to by birth, with no direct membership fee.
And where the base has been secure and nurturing, family can be the launch pad for new family and development. We see, for example, that statistically children do best in a family where the adult relationship is steady, stable and loving – you should note here perhaps that I stress adult, not married, since there is no evidence that suggests that children do best with heterosexual couples. And where this base is secure, we learn to love, to give love, to accept it, and to care for others. The bonding we receive, where it is wholesome, really does set us up for later life, and certainly that life where we go beyond our immediate family to be with strangers.
With this belonging inevitably comes identity. This identity, as I suggested above, does not come from Church or State, but from the individuals who make up family. You get a name – family name and first name – that gives you a badge of identity. And certainly, this name is a very helpful form of identification for others – I am Terry Prendergast allows me to leave out father, granddad, brother, son, chief executive, motor cyclist, artist, etc. when I go anywhere. It does carry with it other issues though that we have to take care of – you will note now how many women do not take the family name of their partner or husband. The family name has also its roots in patriarchy and power, so we have to be careful. This also suggests that identity as family is less defined by name, and other such badges, but more related to common beliefs, love, care and togetherness. This identity is passed on within family in a very special way since we all live downstream from somebody – as spiritual writer, Merritt Jones, noted when speaking of his daughter’s growth into womanhood: ‘what I really saw was the continuum of the stream of life flowing from her great-grandparents, grandparents and finally through her mother and me into her.’
So, we can see that this identity is powerful stuff since a lot of it is unconscious and passed down without our need to formally accept it. You can witness those struggles of individuals when their own consciousness and beliefs come into conflict with this stream. Because whilst it can be wholesome, it can also be the source of prejudice and discrimination, and the growth of fear.
To complete this section in relation to the role of family, and the roles therein, I would like to spend a few moments on the couple in a family. Certainly where children are present, there will always have been a couple even if the current family does not have that shape.
Becoming involved in an intimate and long-term relationship is problematic and a leap of faith, and you will have heard Kate speak on this matter yesterday in some detail. It is very clear that most of us seem to want to have that intimate and secure relationship with another. We perform a great act of trust when we open ourselves to another in an intimate way, and we make ourselves vulnerable thereby. So, it is hardly surprising that the breaching of that trust, via another sexual relationship, for example, can be a devastating blow. And, despite a more liberal attitude towards many social and sexual issues, most people still regard that kind of betrayal as unacceptable and view it with disapproval as recorded in a survey of British social attitudes in 2001. For example, marriage means committing yourself to another and being faithful. This latter implies being faithful sexually. The reasons why the sexual element of the relationship has remained so key is difficult to determine. The notion of a long-term partnership, that another will satisfy your intimate and every need over a very long period of time, is possibly problematic itself. Is it possible that one other person can satisfy the other socially, physically, emotionally, psychologically and sexually? There has always been a major difference on this matter with many believing that such a remit is virtually impossible. So, we need to consider what makes a relationship work and what we can do, as a society, to support that in these modern and different times.
In long-term, committed partnerships, and any subsequent family that develops from the relationship, it is the adults who set the climate. They have the responsibility to make it all work. The couple are the ones who are the focus of everyone’s attention when things don’t go well. And yet, we ask so much of them and offer so little to start them on their way. Any long-term relationship is going to be dynamic, troubling and troublesome. Difficulties and problems are inherent in such a life, along with the joys. However, relationship difficulties are seized on, and couples feel stigmatised when things don’t go well. In supporting the couple, there is a great need to normalise these difficulties so that adults can continue to seek and get support when they need it as they pursue their lives together. We need to remember the words of the American writer, F Scott Peck: ‘love is not an emotion, it is a verb: it has to be worked at’.
Our images of family
Where do we get our image of family? Stephanie Coontz, American writer on relationship issues says: ‘perhaps no other institution in our culture is as burdened with ideals of perfection as the family. The vision of the firm-but-gentle Dad, sexy-but-nurturing Mum, and the goofy-but-lovable kids infuses the media (and thus popular consciousness, which means us) and becomes the standard against which family normalcy often gets measured…….Many of our ideals about the family come from backward looking perspectives on a history that never existed. We imagine a bygone era when families were strong, stable and seamlessly integrated into society, or producing a continual stream of healthy, happy, and disciplined citizens. A closer look shatters that illusion and illuminates the points of challenge in our own era’. It seems to me that most people I meet up with either professionally or socially know the above to be true, yet the image of the perfect model is pervasive. Coontz further suggests that most of our modern problems arise because of this clash between the image, which yield unrealistic expectations, and aspirations I would add, and the reality of the ever-changing socio-economic environment we inhabit. Other commentators make similar points – India Knight, writing in The Times last year, points with some irritation, and perhaps despair to the kind of unreality of the suggestion that ‘having two parents under the same roof somehow magically guarantees a Janet and John kind of childhood, free of risk or trauma, and that having just one parent is a recipe for impending hoodie-druggie-gun disaster’. The major problem here for all of us is that we actively or passively subscribe to a world that can never be, never was or will be, yet which we judge others or ourselves against.
We do get our images from other and possibly more informed sources. Sociologists have long written about family as an essential societal structure within the context of different cultures. Theses works in the main suggest that the above image that I have presented is not real, yet we have behave as if what has been written is not true. Religion, in its many forms, has also provided us with images that might be helpful, though my comments already about the Holy Family possibly question this. It is also a fact that many of the unreal images find their roots in evangelical, right-wing religious thought, so not much help here, I fear. I was often regaled with the ‘family that prays together, stays together’ – we tried, but we didn’t, and many families who pray together, then prey on other people through their self-righteousness.
Today, would we have a checklist that suggests an image of family that we could all subscribe to? If so, what would be on that list: married adults; cohabiting adults; same-sex adults; one-parent; stable; founded on justice; harm-free – how long is the list, and is it helpful? We need also to beware of how cultural or societal opinion-formers can be powerful in their ability to project the image, or change it. Where the 19th century middle-class family, for example, revolved around the mother-child axis, so the 20th century family elevated the couple relationship (married of course) to its central concern. So, we might like to have an image that has a root in tradition, but I would suggest that the society we live in today has myriad images for us to play with. I raise this matter in this way to suggest that image, despite its potency is not helpful in defining what family is, or might be in today’s society.
The Dark Side of Family
I will touch briefly on what I describe as the darker side of family – briefly because Kate spoke on this subject in more depth yesterday. We have to remember that most violence, and murder as the extreme of that, happens in families. Abuse is rampant, if one can use that term within families yet there is a massive unconscious process that we engage in to deny this. There is an image of the lone paedophile, for example, preying on children and whilst these do exist, most sexual abuse of children happens in what we call a family. Abuse is not respecter of class or economy. So, whilst single-parents low down the socio-economic scale are headlines in some newspapers, abuse rages in middle class and upper class families, often unseen and unheard.
Just consider the power within such a family structure – you will recall the awful trial not many months ago of the Austrian man who sexually assaulted his daughter for years; the infamous West family in Gloucestershire; and many others who come to our attention where I, and probably you, ask – How can this happen in a family, and today!?
In a violence of a different kind, but nonetheless abusive, we have to remember that family is dominated by patriarchy, or has been, and that marriage itself was about male power and property rights.
I offer this to you merely to continue to poke holes in the popular images that we are beset by every day, whether we seek it out or not.
Modern times – marriage and cohabitation
It is possible, though it might be our collective arrogance that suggest this, that our generations have witnessed more rapid change and growth in all facets of human existence than any previous era. Certainly, the evolution if not explosion of mass media now puts everything in our living rooms at the touch of a button. Which of you now carries a pager? Is anyone ever out of touch since the mobile phone explosion? It would seem that family has not been immune to this explosion also.
Let’s just stay with UK culture – to go beyond that at the moment would not serve our purpose. We’ve gone from extended families where we could wander around the corner for help to the nuclear. American writer on the family, Judith Olmstead, says that the difference between functional and dysfunctional families often lies not in their form but in the quality of their extended networks of support.
The replacement of the extended family, the nuclear family, has been blown away as well, it would seem. I have already alluded to that post-war allegiance to this type of structure and it is suggested that the rationale for its popularity could be found in the wider societal context – the turbulence of family life in the second World War and the immediate post-war years, where fear of the Nazis mutated into fear of the Red Mushroom Cloud. So, family and marriage thereby became the perfect if unreal antidote to this external menace, sheltering those in the family against the omnipresent uncertainty of life.
The cohabitation of the late ‘60s and early ‘70s bears no resemblance, other than in purely external form, to the current cohabitation of hetersexuals. Where wedding ring and suburban housing once were consequences of marriage, the modern day wedding ring is a mortgage, children, and a personal and private decision to be together. Duncan Dormor writes well on this phenomenon in his book, Just Cohabiting, where he suggests that modern cohabitation is akin to Mediaeval betrothal.
Add to this the increasing openness, and tolerance, of same-sex unions and the picture of today’s family society starts to come into focus. The Civil Partnerships legislation in this country was somewhat ground-breaking in giving gays and lesbians similar legal rights to heterosexual partnership. The real consequence of this is the legal acceptance, and partial social acceptance, of this family form.
We know, nevertheless, that there are many who are outrightly opposed to same-sex unions having any legal status. Our own Church is particularly active in some areas on this front, perhaps missing the point that when we look at intimate relationships, we should be less concerned, as Church, with the purely civil, and focus on sacrament that is more about the expression of the presence of God mediated through commitment, consent and covenant. Where this exists in married couples, in cohabiting heterosexual couples and same-sex couples, there is sacrament, I believe.
The need to move beyond the purely civil, to the sacramental, perhaps mirrors the change in why people chose each other in these generations I am referring to. The move from the institutional to companionship, choosing for love, has been marked, possibly more deeply, in cohabiting and same-sex couples. But, married people also moved in this direction paralleling the importance of self-development for individuals in relationships, with the expression of feelings, as opposed to the gratification of merely building a family and playing out roles. Indeed, it is possible to suggest that this development of married couples has led to the growth of cohabitation, easier divorce and the legitimation of same-sex parents because we have come to believe that there is no substitute for the couple!
Another factor of change in these generations has been the growth of equality. In relationships, this has been most notable in the development of gender politics and thinking. It has led to some to question whether marriage, for example, is possible in such a society. Elizabeth Beck Gernsheim, the German sociologist, has made exactly these claims suggesting that if equality is taken seriously, then marriage in the form we understand it, is not possible. The corollary of this is that cohabitation, in all its forms, is possible and is, indeed, the response of an equal society. As Mark Strasser has noted: ‘it is ironic that those who worry that marriage is becoming less attractive, paint it in ways that make it increasingly at odds with societal perceptions concerning equality.
The rise of cohabitation merits a whole conference in itself, so my attempt to do justice to this phenomenon in a few sentences is not helpful maybe. As I say above, people are still choosing to be with someone else in an intimate partnership, so the couple is important what ever family form it finds itself in. There are some pointers to why cohabitation has risen in the last two to three decades that spring from issues that should concern us. Kathleen Kiernan wrote an analysis of European society in relation to marriage and divorce and found that children who had experienced parental divorce were more likely to commence their first partnership with cohabitation rather than marriage. She further suggests, without reference to this above comment, that in most West and North European countries, cohabitation has eclipsed marriage as the marker for first partnership.
Whatever our view on this subject, it has been one of the most significant changes in our times, and continues to grow, with Government predictions indicating that 20% of all family forms will fit into this family structure by 2020.
And whether we are thinking about marriage, cohabitation or same-sex unions, one of the other major phenomena that we need to consider is the re-constituted or step-family. Again, this has been a growth industry certainly since the 1969 Divorce Law Reform Act. And the re-constitution doesn’t happen just once. A story circulating, probably apochryphal, neatly sums up this family form. Two boys are talking in the primary school playground and one tells that other that he has a new father. What’s he like asks the other. ‘He’s sort of OK but I don’t see him much and he is often angry’. ‘What’s he called’, again asks the other. ‘ John Riordan’. ‘John Riordan’, the other retorts – ‘I had him; he’s rubbish!’
Another matter that I will touch on finally in this section is the growth of multi-culturalism and thereby of relationships between people of different cultures. This just adds another component to our experience or picture of family that cannot be shoe-horned into the pervasive and unhelpful image I have referred to above on a number of occasions.
We all seek to try to provide an image of family though. And I am no exception here. However, we need to guard our enthusiasm or desire since there appears to be a Panglossian sub-culture that would have us continually believe that ‘s urely this is the best of all possible worlds’ What social history teaches us is that contemporary families are never the best of possible forms since they are always in transition. So, my concluding paragraphs are about trying to offer you some norms and ideals instead of form, that hopefully are not driven by rules or prejudices.
A new paradigm for family(?)
As I noted at the start this morning, I had the good fortune to hear Professor Margaret Farley speak on about Love in intimate relationships in April this year. She was talking about Sacred Desire and the presence of God in same-sex relationships. Traditionally we have talked of the sacrament of marriage and I hope that today you have been able to consider that we might be able to talk about the sacrament of partnerships or relationships, but also might we consider the sacrament of family? Margaret offered 7 new norms and ideals for such relationships and it struck me that it was possible to apply these norms and ideals to family, in whatever shape or form it takes.
1. Do no unjust harm. I had taken such a concept as read until I was forced to think further – it is not just an obvious assumption, or a desired state, but a fundamental position on which all the other norms stand since we are setting the basic ground rules for how family members should view and treat each other. When you consider we have explored this morning, and put that alongside what Kate offered yesterday, I think it is obvious that this must be the fundamental and pivotal underpinning of everything else.
2. Free consent. Again a prerequisite – you might be forgiven for thinking this is obvious but I think that we cannot assume this from what we know of our society and our relationships. And Margaret suggests a much more active quality than that offered by the mere words. She speaks of it in more dynamic terms by calling it active receptivity and receptive activity – as a couple, for example, you have to be active, not merely acquiescent. We know that long-term relationships are essentially dynamic and changing over time, requiring mutual development for those involved, and also for the relationship. In theological terms, we have a Trinitarian perspective in the Catholic faith. Father, Son and Spirit can be translated into Creator, Redeemer and Sustainer, where the energy and synergy of Father and Son create the Spirit. I like to apply this in parallel and analogous terms to long-term partnerships where the partners each take on the role of creator and redeemer, and where they both create and redeem the relationship, the ultimate sustainer. I think that we can also apply this to the separate relationships that each family member has with another.
3. Mutuality – in Marriage Care we have long worked on the assumption that this norm is at the summit of relationship building, through Romance, Reality, Power Struggles, Finding Oneself, Working Through and Mutuality – again, you will have knowledge of this from Kate’s presentation yesterday. We would normally apply this to the couple, but the graceful and grace-giving nature of a good family surely implies again a mutuality in all the relationships present in the family.
4. Equality. We can argue that all long-term relationships are founded on equality but Margaret’s explanation suggests that all must be aware of the uniqueness of the other and find joy in that difference, actively seeking it out and developing it for the self and other. This concept within family might be particularly challenging for the adults in relation to any children present. But equality is not about everyone starting on the same line – none of us do – but about each appreciating the unique value and worth of the other and their contribution to the whole.
5. Commitment. This has been one of the major cornerstones of our thinking in Marriage Care for many years in relation to long-term relationships, but not a commitment that is associated with contract. Commitments are basically decisions, or the making of choices, even making a choice to give up other choices.
The emergence of the pure relationship, an intimate partnership entered into for its own sake, which lasts only as long as both partners are satisfied with the rewards that they get from it is another challenge in relation to commitment these days. It is seen as the logical extension of the increase of individualism and the de-institutionalisation of long-term relationships such as marriage.
The nature and quality of relationships wax and wane as the years pass and the family must navigate this. I like the quote from Robin Morgan, in Margaret Farley’s book, Just Love, where he says ‘Commitment gives you the leaverage to bring about change – and the time in which to do it.’ I also like the suggestion from the Irish Redemptorist, Johnny Doherty, about the importance and difficulty of commitment over time. He says: ‘on a good day I am committed to you; on a not so good day I am committed to the relationship (or family); and on a really bad day I am committed to the commitment that I made.’ Commitment is not just saying ‘I do or I will’ – it is making that choice actively and then working with it, staying with it, and believing in it over time. So, whilst people can be born into a family, or adopted or fostered, they have to actively make that commitment for it all to work.
6. Fruitfulness. You might consider this norm a little more difficult to apply to family where there is progeny. It’s reasonable in relation to heterosexual relationships. But, I guess for the traditionalists this is where homosexual relations hit the wall, since there has been a concentration in Christian tradition on fruitfulness being akin to procreation. And, how can children be fruitful? We are aware of how family now has different meanings and how it is possible for all of us in a myriad of relationships to be fruitful, without that necessarily being linked to conception. Fruitfulness can be seen within family as the ability to grow and produce, not in that economic sense, but in the sense that each grows and feeds the other with their own fruits, and that family members benefit exponentially. But, I would concede that this is not an easy concept and where you hold entrenched views of Gender, you will certainly come to believe that children, for example, need a man and woman, and you will not believe that these so-called male and female qualities can be mediated in other ways. But, it cannot be accepted that a family based on marriage is the only place that fruitfulness and growth can be present. What about adoptive families, where the children are not born of the couples’ union? What about same-sex partnerships where children are raised in a surrogate sense – there is no evidence to show that fruitfulness for all cannot be present in these circumstances and my argument is that if you adopt the norms suggested by Margaret Farley, you are likely to ensure that this norm, and all others are present.
7. Social justice. The final norm suggested by Margaret Farley, that of Social justice, is the really new element for me in these ideals. Not, of course, that I haven’t considered this matter as important. It is fundamental to the Gospels. But I have never given it the attention it deserves within the context of adult relationships, or family. It is very challenging to consider that all so-called good relationships are in fact diminished if there is no focus on the outside, if the family only look inwards. If, as I have noted above based on 1950’s families, they see their salvation completely within, using insular, consumerist perspectives as a barrier to the outside. In fact, it is possible, perhaps, within our Christian tradition to understand this as the call to be ‘holy’.
Finally, in relation to Margaret Farley, she has also rightly connected us with the importance of the faith community – such a community provides the context for the development of grace and communion, and an opportunity for going beyond and sharing in social justice. We perhaps as children repeated the rote lines of ‘sacrament being an outward sign of inward grace’ without any conception of what this might mean. I certainly didn’t but do find meaning for it in the every day activities of care and love between people, and especially in committed, consensual and convenanted relationships fundamentally project sacrament. But, it finds it fuller meaning when these relationships go beyond themselves, that is, outwards to others. It is importance to be outward looking – we are part of communities, for those of us here to day I would assume, a faith community. Relationships that are inward and insular do not obviously display grace, and they are diminished in some way. It is only in building on and developing the family’s strengths, by sharing, that a vital fruitfulness is passed on. I was struck by the comments on this topic by the Dominican, Timothy Radcliffe, in his book Why go to Church? The drama of the Eucharist, where he says that we are gathered as a people of hope and not because we like each other – we may not like each other that much. But, the important matter is that we gather in hope, as people of love, to be slowly infected by God’s grace working in us. Being part of the community is not the end rather it is the beginning. This, for me, again suggests this seventh norm of Social Justice. And, of course, this broader community of sharing is also where the single person can experience and live out family, in the way we often refer to our faith communities.
Conclusion
I hope that I have provoked you into thinking about family in a different way today. I would hope that you consider your own family, of origin, or current construction, and see what can be done. It is never too late to change and add something. We need to remember that image and paradigm come from a number of important settings. For us as a faith community, these come from a number of sources: scripture is an important guide in defining and determining things; tradition also plays an important part where it is used constructively and inclusively; but there is also the importance of today, the current, not in some post-modern sense, but in the sense that both scripture and tradition were also once current.
As I have noted above, some of our basic condition is prescribed by familiar dualisms – agency and structure, individuality and the group, freedom or dependence. Equally, our basic existential reality of a being towards death, as Heidegger suggests, on our search for reality and nurture. Such a search suggests that there is a root problem for all of us, that offers itself in the different symptoms of our daily struggles. Is it loneliness? The search for another? The finding of the other and the decrease in loneliness temporarily also adds to our difficulties since such solutions are likely to be false dawns. Perhaps if we can agree that marriage, partnership, relationship, family are not solution to a basic condition of our existence, but a part solution if treated with care. Being part of a couple, for example, will not change your fundamental human condition, but it will mitigate it if managed properly.
The way we live our lives today and the ‘traditions’ we establish will, if we adhere to the norms, provide a better world and environment for those who come ‘downstream of us’. We must not let our traditional views or models come to represent a tool of intolerance or discrimination.
References
Cherlin, Andrew J., The de-institutionalising of American Marriage, in the Journal of Marriage and Family. No 66. November 2004.
Coontz Stephanie, In search of a Golden Age, in Caring for Families.. 1989
Difonzo Herbie J, and Stern Ruth C., The Winding Road from Form to Function: a brief history of comtemporary Marriage. . and, in the Journal of the American Association of Matrimonial Lawyers, 2007
Doherty CSsR John, Commitment in relationships.. Unpublished presentation to Marriage Care’s Marriage Preparation Conference Manchester. 2005
Dormor Duncan, Just Cohabiting.. Darton Longman and Todd. 2004
Elias Norbert, The Civilizing Process: Sociogenetic and Psychogenetic Investigations. Revised edition of 1994. Oxford. Blackwell.
Farley Margaret, Just Love: a framework for Christian Sexual Ethics. Continuum International Publishing Group Ltd. 2006.
Giddens Anthony, The Transformation of Intimacy.. Stanford University Press. 1992
Gottman John, The Marriage Clinic. Norton 1999
Heidegger Martin, Being and Time. HarperOne Revised Edition. 1962
Jones Dennis Merritt, The Art of Being. New York. 2008
Kiernan Kathleen, The state of the European Unions: An analysis of the Fertility and Family Survey data on partnership formation and dissolution. London School of Economics. 2000.
Knight India, Britain plays unhappy families. The Sunday Times. January 2008.
Olmstead, Judith, Informal Social Support: A Key to Family Support, in Office of Reseach and Data Analysis, Dept of Social and Health Services, Washington State, USA. 1988.
Radcliffe OP Timothy, Why go to Church: the drama of the Eucharist. Continuum International Publishing Group Ltd. 2008
Strasser Mark, The future of Marriage, In the Journal of the American Association of Matrimonial Lawyers, 2008
Tolstoy Leo, Anna Karenina. Penguin Classics 2004
A homily for the Quest Conference on the 16th Sunday, Year B
Fr Bob Eccles OP
(The texts: Jeremiah 23:1–6, Ephesians 2: 13–18; Mark 6:30–34)
“You must come away to some lonely place all by yourselves and rest for a while” (Mark 6:31)
Thank you for inviting me to such a rewarding Quest Conference.
I appear here, not quite as the Quest chaplain with nine lives, though I seem to have been in and out among you often enough, but rather as the Quest chaplain à la Cheshire Cat. Now you see him, now you don’t. My only remaining ambition is to leave a grin behind!
In this chapter of St Mark’s Gospel we find Jesus and the Twelve in a lonely place, in other words, a desert. For Catholics, biblically speaking, it is a trial, being in the desert, the place where faith is put to the test. There is all the difference in the world between being in the desert and being in the Catholic Directory!
I think we have been very fortunate to have been so ably assisted to reflect on relationships and being family. G. K. Chesterton said that people are mistaken when they talk of the family as an oasis of peace in a world at war. In fact, it is a theatre of actual war in a world which broods in a false peace. By this he meant, as my teacher Herbert McCabe pointed out, that in the world outside we usually get by, by being reasonably polite and decent to one another, whatever our real feelings. Whilst at home, in the family or in any relationship deep enough to really count, the gloves are off, we meet one another as we really are. Love as it grows towards commitment has nothing to do with being pleasant. To take part in a violent argument amongst quarrelsome people who give no quarter, join the English Dominicans. No? Then celebrate a civil partnership!
After all that Kate and Terry have told us, there’s no need for me to say that the first time there’s tears and broken glass, don’t go home to mother. This could be when your union kicks in. Failure to realise this has resulted in the absurd proliferation of divorce lawyers.
Jesus goes to a desert place with the Twelve in order to find a little peace. Instead, he finds overpopulation and importunate people. They always do get there before you. I was once resting up at a lovely Benedictine retreat at Cerne Abbas, all alone on a sunny evening with a volume of Meister Eckhart and a glass of dry sherry, when a face appeared round the door and said, “Hello! I’m Dorothy, I’m charismatic!”
This gospel, if you remember how the story told by St Mark develops, comes as a kind of hinge in the action. It follows upon the story of the death of John the Baptist, who in the opening chapter was described as the beginnings of all this. The death of John is wrapped up – Mark has a way of wrapping one story around another – in the story of the sending of the Twelve to deliver people from demons and cure the sick. The tale of John the Baptist surely points to the fact that if you do witness to the word of God, you will likely come to a sticky end.
Mark doesn’t say that Jesus sent them out to teach, notably, only to cast out demons and heal the sick (casting out demons, so much less demanding than being a teacher, I hear some of you say). But they did in fact preach repentance, Mark says, and on their return they were obviously keen to tell Jesus all they had done and taught. He is their model and they clearly want to do as he does, teach. Now they head for the desert, and this is where the first miracle of the loaves is to take place, as we shall hear in next Sunday’s gospel which will come not from St Mark but from St John. For the five Sundays that follow, in fact, we shall come to Mass and hear that glorious meditation on the sign of the loaves, as it is now called, as we read from the sixth chapter of St John, the discourse on the bread of life.
The fact that the Twelve have taught, or wanted to teach, coupled with the remembrance of John the Baptist whose teaching career ended rather badly, opens a new perspective – we go now to the desert, typically the place where the God of the Hebrews formed a people of his own possession, so a place where His love for Israel is renewed: “behold, I will allure her, and bring her into the wilderness, and speak tenderly to her” (Hosea 2:14). Here Jesus is seen as supremely the Teacher. He teaches the crowds at some length, he is first of all the teacher, not the miracle worker, hungry and hurting though they may be. He has compassion on them because they are like sheep without a shepherd. The gospel is glancing here at the biblical figure of the shepherd, whom we’ve met already this afternoon in the book of the prophet Jeremiah and in the psalm. The kings of Judah gave themselves the title Shepherd. Jeremiah’s king was Zedekiah, a feeble puppet king, whose name means ‘Yahweh is my righteousness’. But Jeremiah stands that name on its head: the coming king who will be a true son of David and who will practise honesty and integrity in the land will have a better name, ‘Yahweh is our righteousness’.
The Good Shepherd, good in the sense of the right one, the real shepherd people wanted, teaches in the wilderness, first of all in word and then in action. The family that is forming about him, whom he wishes to call his mother and his sisters and his brothers, if they will do the will of the Father, they too are among the taught, the students of the reign of God. What does the word disciple mean, but student. And here is the first lesson: when Jesus has taught ‘many things’ he turns on them and says, ‘you give them something to eat’. But can they? they are unable to meet the need. They cannot match their effort to be teachers, with the pressing human need that stares them in the face, so they give up. They are shown up, they have pride in their performance but there is no point in appealing to their compassion. You know, after the feeding of the five thousand the Twelve take to the boat and Jesus walks to them on the water. Yes, for he is the Lord. But they are terrified, because, St Mark says, they had not understood about the loaves, and their hearts were hardened.
They can’t be the teachers they want to be, they can’t be the shepherds the people need. They can’t even be the family of God, not this side of the grave. One day, around the family table, Judas slipped away into the night. They would all be in the night before long. What had to happen? “Jesus has to teach them the lesson of the cross and they must learn it. Jesus must give them his Spirit and they must go out to preach and teach in the power of that Spirit.”* You can only have the freedom of the children of God on God’s terms, through Jesus the Christ and Him crucified and risen. Until you realise this you cannot but go back to that scenario of rivalry and one-upmanship that we see so clearly amongst the Twelve, what Mark sadly calls their hardness of heart.
But the good news is in fact that “through the shedding of his blood, the enmity is over, Christ has brought peace by the Cross. In his own person he killed the hostility, and came to bring the good news of peace, peace to those who are far off and those who are near.” (Ephesians 2). Why should we still be Catholic Christians, how can we still be Catholic Christians, in the face of every discouragement and obscurantism? Because we tap in to sources of grace and well-being that are beyond ourselves. Because the gospel has not lost its revolutionary power. For the voice of the Shepherd never falls silent amongst the family of the faithful. “Through him we all of us have, in one Spirit, our way to come to the Father”. Amen.
*From a homily for this Sunday by Fr Vivian Boland OP on torch.op.org, to whom many thanks.