Rev. Emily Wright-Magoon | December 8, 2019 | Sermon
In this holiday season, there are often many family gatherings. I love this description by Glennon Doyle of expectations vs. reality when it comes to the beautiful mess that family often is.
She says this about Thanksgiving Eve but it could just as easily be Christmas Day, or Hanukkah, or Grandma’s birthday:
IT’LL BE LIKE THIS! Tomorrow will be peaceful and everyone will gaze lovingly at each other in cozy precious sweaters and chuckle at witty banter while the fire crackles and Uncle Joe decides against talking politics and Aunt Bertha remains sober and vertical… and Brother Tom puts it all behind him and just shows up and Lisa and Karen bury the hatchet and baste the turkey together and your mother-in-law finally notices your excellent parenting and apologizes for being so short sighted for so very long!!! It will be JUST LIKE the commercials!!! This is the year!!!
Is that how your Thanksgiving was?
“ACTUALLY. It’ll be like this,” Glennon continues:
Uncle
Joe’s gonna talk about politics. Very loudly and first thing, likely. Aunt
Bertha’s gonna drink like a saguaro cactus. Sarah’s gonna talk about how much
red dye is in the cranberry sauce. Even if you pray hard, even if you stare at
that front door all day long – Brother Tom might never show up. Lisa and Karen
are gonna go at it like the Real Housewives. Your mother-in-law is gonna notice
that your middle kid really needs a haircut and shouldn’t he know how to tie
his own shoes by now, sweetheart?
Here’s the terrible news: The best predictor of how a family’s gonna act is how
a family has always acted. It will never be like the commercials.
But here’s the good news: Our crazy families aren’t the problem. The
commercials with the fake perfect families are the problem.
Our families of origin are the final frontier when it comes to achieving maturity and peace in relationships.
Has this happened to you before when you get together with family for the holidays? Maybe every time …? …You are feeling centered and healthy and mature, and then you walk into our parents’ house and feel like you’ve regressed to an 11-year-old?
Families are systems. Systems in which each person has a role, and we play our parts like actors on a set. Are you the “fun-loving, free, irresponsible” one? Are you the “responsible” one? Are you the clown? The scapegoat? The golden child?
The system has a strong, magnetic pull on each of us to get us into our roles.
Our roles carry unhealed family dynamics that didn’t even start with us – they go back generations. If there’s trauma, even before we were yet born, that trauma lives in our biological genes.
So if we enter the holiday season – which is already full of unusual stress and pressure – with an expectation that it will be like a Hallmark movie ending, it’s a recipe for heartache.
What can we do instead? Two things.
NOTICING
First: We can enter stage left and instead of trying to direct the movie, or wishing we were at an entirely different movie, we can just watch it. We can notice what there is to notice it, and let the judgment and fixing and disapproving go just a little. And that includes the judgment of ourselves.
When we find ourselves on stage saying that line we always say but we vowed we’d stop saying, we just notice – “Wow – and so this is happening again. Interesting.” This is the spiritual practice of equanimity.
Now sometimes this enables us to find some unexpected beauty, humor, or joy in this messy family we’re part of. And/OR sometimes there’s just tons of hurt and heartache.
I’m not saying that this practice of becoming a nonjudgmental observer will save you from pain and heartache. There might be real damaging stuff going on – maybe you’re being misgendered over and over again by your dad, or maybe you don’t feel physically safe. And so it’s important to notice all of that, too.
And what do we do with all that noticing? Here’s part two.
BIG
Part two has three parts. They come out of systems thinking, led by Bowens and Friedman and others. The researcher and author Brené Brown has her own language for it she calls Living BIG.
BIG stands for Boundaries, Integrity, and Generosity.
It’s a seesaw and we strive for balance most of the time.
Boundaries means taking a stand. Defining ourselves. Setting boundaries means: “Here’s what I will do, and here’s what I won’t do.” Boundaries can be seemingly small lines in the sand, or they can be great fortresses. We can say: “I’m tired. I’m going to go take a nap now.” Or: “I’m going to wash the dishes but I’m not going to sweep the floor.” Or: “I’m going to keep speaking up when he says racist or sexist things.” Or: “Since she keeps hurting me, I’m going to do x,y,z to protect myself.”
Generosity means coming from a place where we believe deep down that most everyone is doing their best. Now I know that might be hard to believe sometimes. But even your racist uncle, or your abusive mother, might be doing their best with what they themselves learned and what they were given.
BUT that doesn’t mean that we let the teeter totter tip all this way toward generosity. We don’t let them walk all over us. …That’s where the fulcrum comes into play:
Integrity is the fulcrum. We can keep boundaries and generosity in balance when we know what we think, who we are, what our principles are.
STAYING IN TOUCH
In order to keep this process alive and healthy, we can do what family systems thinkers call “Staying in Touch.”
See, what happens when we’ve opened ourselves up to seeing all this pain without judgment, and when we’ve started setting boundaries, is that it can be easy to simply crawl into our shells like a safe tortoise and remain there. But then we miss out on all we can learn.
Staying in touch means staying connected to our families – in boundaried ways when needed. It also means staying in touch with ourselves, and with the ongoing process of life. Staying in touch means being open and adaptive to our environments.
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The Egyptian writer and Nobel Prize winner Naguib Mahfouz says:
وطن المرء ليس مكان ولادته و لكنه المكان الذي تنتهي فيه كل محاولاته للهروب
“Home is not where you were born; home is where all your attempts to escape cease.”
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By Living BIG – we can cease escaping from our families (physically or existentially).
Not escaping from our families means not escaping from ourselves. From the unhealed wounds within us. From the unhealed wounds within our larger communities.
I know it’s not easy.
It takes a great deal of practice, and I believe it’s a spiritual practice – a spiritual practice of cultivating “inner rigor and outward ease.” ((I found this phrase, as a description of grace, in a reflection by Jake Morrill, and he found the phrase from Heather C. Ohaneson’s PhD dissertation, Free to Play: An Analysis in Aesthetic, Ethical, and Religious Movements))
My colleague Jake Morrill tells a joke about this:
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It’s the day after Thanksgiving – Black Friday. The store is jam-packed. People are shoving and grabbing and spending too much. In the midst of it all, there’s this mother and her red-faced and strung-out four-year-old daughter. I see them first in the toy section. The daughter is whining, “I want this! I want that!” But the mother? She’s calm, cool, collected. “Now, Cindy,” she murmurs, “our shopping trip has been going so well. Let’s not get upset. We’ll be out of here soon.” A few minutes later, I see them again. Now, they’re in electronics, and the daughter is howling, “Give me this! Give me that!” Really pitching a fit. Still, the mother is unflappable. “OK, Cindy,” she says. “I know this is difficult, but please, let’s not cry. Only a few more items, and we’ll be at the check-out.” Then, I see them up at the check-out. Here’s where the daughter puts on an operatic production, with shrieking and wailing and all kinds of riot about how much she wants Twizzlers. But the mother stays calm. “Cindy, my dear,” she says, “I know you are struggling with some strong emotions. Very strong. That’s ok. Only five minutes left in this line, then we’ll be to the car. Soon enough, we’ll be home where you can have a nice, cool drink and lie down for a nap.” I have to tell you, I am flat-out amazed by this woman’s parenting skills. So, when I see her out in the parking lot, I just have to go up and compliment her. “Ma’am,” I say. “You have got to be the Parent-of-the-Year. I mean, really! I’m so impressed with how patient you were able to stay with your daughter, Cindy.” For a second, she’s puzzled. Then, smiles. “Oh, no,” she said. “My daughter’s named Tanya. It’s my name that’s Cindy.”
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“Inner rigor, outward ease”
I believe that healing happens in and through relationship.
Even though families can be a place of great sorrow and pain, I do believe that some of the deepest healing we need in our world can happen in and through families. Families, after all, are where we first ideally learn unconditional love. The great tragedy is that didn’t happen for some. But with the courage that comes from baring our hearts, we can heal our families and ourselves incrementally each generation.
It still won’t be a hallmark movie.
It’s more like Leonard Cohen’s song “Hallelujah.” Leonard Cohen writes,
Love is not a victory march, it’s a cold and it’s a broken hallelujah.
Brené Brown says of this song:
Love is a form of vulnerability and if you replace the word love with vulnerability in that line, it’s just as true.
From calling your brother after years of estrangement, to confiding your deepest fears in your spouse, even to setting a boundary for the first time with your mother – these all come from a place of great vulnerability, great courage, great love.
It’s courage beyond measure. It’s daring greatly. And often the result of daring greatly isn’t a victory march as much as it is a quiet sense of freedom mixed with a little battle fatigue.
Brené Brown
It’s a hallelujah, even if broken.
As you do this work of great courage and love, friends, may you always know you are held by this community and by a Love beyond belief.
May it be so.
– Rev. Emily Wright-Magoon