The State of the American Family
Given by James Covington on February 9th, 2004
“Then my sister came out of the house. And there was something I cannot explain that I felt as they ran to each other and that trembled with something instinctual and rooted in the provenance of the species–unnamable, yet, I know it could be named if it could be felt. It was not my sister’s tears or my father’s tears that caused this resonance, this fierce interior music of blood and wildness and identity. It was the beauty and fear of kinship, the ineffable ties of family, that sounded a blazing terror and an awestruck love inside of me.”
Pat Conroy
Prince of Tides
And there we have Pat Conroy’s poignant, portrayal of “family ties” in his Prince of Tides—the story of scarred and wounded people from a dysfunctional family if ever there was one. His point here I believe, is that no matter how painful and difficult the experience may have been, family is a biological part of us. We can never really cut it out of our lives.
And so I am here to speak with you this morning about the family. I have said many times from this pulpit that after all is said and done, the most important thing in life is our connections to one another, and this especially begins at home with family. For there in that arena, to love and be loved, is surely the most important arena where love is grown, a love that includes the realities of human frailty and imperfections. Married life and family life are very human experiences, no more, no less. And we human beings often seem to be like a group of porcupines huddling together against the bitter cold of winter, trying to be close, yet pricking each other in the process. In the very act of trying to be intimate, we often manage to hurt one another. It is difficult, sometimes, to love. There are times I wonder with comedienne Lily Tomlin, “If love is the answer, could you rephrase the question?” And yet, I agree with the Russian novelist Fyodor Dostoyevski that “hell is the suffering of being unable to love.”
And so it is, as last week when I spoke about men and intimacy, a sermon on the intimacies and issues of family life can be rife with exceptions and generalities. With that risk factor in mind, I offer you my present reflections on the state of the American family.
First of all, you cannot talk about the state of the family without talking about the state of marriage. Marriage is the anchor of family life. Now already, I am on a somewhat delicate ground here. Many of us, including myself, have been divorced. And often times, people feel happier. But more often, they do not feel happier. But when you continue to have a divorce rate above 50%, and the divorce rate for 2nd marriages is 60%, we have to think about how that affects the overall state of the family, specifically, our children. Many children survive divorces and seemingly thrive. But new research, particularly by Maggie Gallagher who wrote The End of Marriage, based on numerous interviews with children of divorce, confirms that most children of divorce do not thrive as well as those in non-conflict two parent families. We have evolved or devolved into a divorce culture in the last 30 years. Generally speaking, diminished child well being is a certainty if the institution of marriage continues to erode. Someone has said that we are now witnessing a new poverty among children in America—the poverty of connectedness—that even those who live in material comfort, are now experiencing more than ever the loss of close, warm, long lasting bonds that are essential for children’s healthy, emotional development. When marriage and family are, in my opinion the cornerstone of a healthy society, a divorce culture necessarily has to be challenged and changed.
Now, as a couple’s counselor, I believe most marriages can work and that every effort should be made to save them when conflict between partners becomes dysfunctional. I believe divorce is probably the wisest choice: 1) When there is an abusive or abandoned relationship 2) when there is a totally miserable mismatch of personalities leaving no sense of respect or appreciation for one’s partner or 3) when one’s healthy emotional needs can obviously never ever be met. But even in these circumstances I believe couples should do everything possible to save their marriage for the sake of their children and their grandchildren. Marriage is work, period. There should be pleasure and fulfillment, but marriage is work. Our commitment in marriage is to love one another and work to make the marriage work.
Now one of the things that concerns me these days, is that many young people don’t understand what I just said. There is a lot of talk these days about marrying one’s soul mate, with the notion that if you find your soul mate, there will be utter bliss in one’s marriage. That’s a very dangerous notion, because the expectations that young people bring to marriage for companionship and emotional satisfaction become impossible to meet and lead to disillusionment. And so we have couples getting divorced because “he or she didn’t make me happy” or he’s not the soul mate I thought him to be. So young adults marry fantasies of each other rather than real men or real women who will be real parents. According to the National Marriage Project in Rutgers University, Americans today tend to see marriage as a couples relationship, designed to fulfill the emotional needs of adults, rather than as an institution dedicated to bring up children.
Now the reason for this demanding expectation is partly due to the breakdown of the extended family and the breakdown of societal institutions that foster connectedness. So our young people are turning more and more to soul mate marriage as the bulwark of their happiness.
This is why I think the marriage initiative proposal by President Bush is on principle a very good idea. Whether it should be funded by the government, is still open to debate. But government has been involved in marriage before as in after WWII when the GI bill was passed making FHA housing loans possible and helping fathers get in touch with their children. Today, pre-marital education that helps couples learn interpersonal skills that sustain healthy marriages is something I believe is desperately needed for our young people. We also know, that one of the best ways to assure strong marriages and avoid poverty is to persuade young people to complete High School and not have children out of wedlock.
We need to instill in young people an informed consciousness about the sanctity and work of marriage.
The fiasco marriage of Britney Spears a few weeks ago, “let’s do something wild, crazy. Let’s go get married, just for the hell of it,” is an attitude that devalues one of our most important institutions. Such immaturity strikes me as an attitude far more worthy of concern from those who care about the sanctity of marriage than the decision of a same-sex couple to live together faithfully and lo love each other “in plenty and in want, in joy and in sorrow, in sickness and in health, as long as we both shall live.”
Another concern about families today is the role of fathers. I spoke to this last week, particularly, the role of fathers with their sons. Probably one of the greatest reasons for hyper-masculinity in boys is that they did not have a good relationship with their fathers. And if little girls are to grow up and marry a real man rather than a fantasy man, she also needs a real father. Between fathers who abandon their children and those who are too busy to spend much time with their children, there is a significant loss in a child’s emotional development, which according to research, affects a child’s ability to have enduring relationships.
Another concern I have is the lack of time families have to be together. I heard William Dougherty, author of the book Take Back Your Family, tell his audience recently that when he asks married couples at seminars what are the major challenges for achieving successful life-long marriages, invariably the number one answer that comes back is “lack of time.” Not lack of communication. But lack of time. There’s no time to communicate. Today Americans work more than medieval peasants and more than the rest of the industrialized world. In a way the crisis of the family is not because we have lost the traditional values of love and caring—one instead may marvel how healthy many families are despite the stresses of the world; the crisis is because the wider society has made these values almost dysfunctional in a headlong rush to—where?
At the cultural level, busyness has become a point of cultural pride and this now includes our children’s lives. Our children, according to Dougherty, are vastly overscheduled. So that now families spend less time simply being together and talking without doing anything else. In fact, the children are so busy attending events after school, being chaperoned here and there, that dinner is hardly ever an event anymore where the whole family is together. And in a recent news item that crossed my desk, I read that research shows that the more often families eat together, the less likely their children will smoke, drink, use drugs, have sex at a young age. Doherty suggests that more family rituals be created that will give the gift of time, non-busy time.
Now why do all of these social issues about family life matter? Well, aside from strong families being the cornerstone of a good society, the notion of “family” is deeply tied to the sense of who we are in the world. The generational legacies of family provide a connection to ourselves, our past and our children’s future. We resemble other members of our family. Their quirks and gestures are similar to ours. They have been there(or we believe they should have been there) at all the important occasions of our lives—births, marriages, graduations, illness, deaths.
Moreover, we feel very deeply that if our families cannot acknowledge us, love us and support us, no one else will. No matter how old we are, no matter how distant emotionally or physically, we seem unable to get away from the importance of family. Some may say that it does not matter if we never loved our parents or siblings or they us, or that we ever had strong ties, but it does matter. No matter how far we travel in miles or achievement, our family belongs to us and we belong to them. In fact, in sometimes strange and eerie ways, our experiences in our first families are repeated with our marriage partners and children.
Family will inevitably come back to haunt us—in our relationships with our spouses, our children, with our friends and even at work. Beneath each family’s particular idiosyncrasies, there lie patterns that cut across cultural and time differences. In fact, every family has its own culture.
More than a hundred years ago Abraham Lincoln, who did so much for our country to create the “right relationship among things” refused to be in contact with his dying father whom he had not visited in 20 years, saying that “if we could meet now, it is doubtful whether it would not be more painful than pleasant.” Lincoln’s frank hopelessness about changing his relationship with his father, who seems to have been abusive to him in childhood, is familiar to many adults today. In spite of Lincoln’s brilliance and clarity on so many issues affecting our nation as a whole, his pessimism about his father devastated his other family relationships. It is little different today, when many outwardly successful people seem incapable of relating to members of their own families, unable to look into their father’s hearts so they do not die as a stranger.
In a way there is nothing more real or earthy or grounding than the family, because the experience of family includes so much of the particulars of life. In a family you live close to people that otherwise you might not even want to talk to. Family life is full of major and minor crises—the ups and downs of health, success and failure in career, marriage, and divorce—and all kinds of characters. It is tied to places and events and histories. With all of these felt details, life etches itself into memory and personality.
The point of all this, is that the family is a microcosm of humanity—with both good and evil—both light and darkness with a host of characters—heroes, victims, jokesters and villains. The temptation is to run away from the darkness—from the abuse, neglect, abandonment, what have you, and never more have anything to do with them. But perhaps we do this at great expense to ourselves, certainly to our children.
I am not suggesting that one should forgive one’s parents their parents and go on in life as though nothing ever happened. But I am suggesting that no matter what the abuse or neglect or disappointment there are important stories behind the lives of all the actors—there are myths, secrets, tragedies, misgivings—all of which are important for one to know. A few years ago, a psychotherapy patient of mine, a young woman, recalled that she had been sexually abused by her grandfather. After she recalled the trauma and relived it through nightmares and painful memories I suggested she talk with her mother. And she did, only to find found out that her mother was also abused but never admitted it and also never protected her own daughter. She said: “I don’t think I can ever forgive, but at last I am beginning to understand the mystery, to know who I am and where I come from and now who I want to be.”
These events, stories, whether you know it nor not, are instrumental in your life, shaping and forming you into the person you are. In spite of the pain and suffering and disappointment, there is a richness in your family history. I say rich, because it embodies all the complexities of humanity. Knowing and respecting that history, I believe can only fill your life and help you know who you are, where you come from, and give you more of a handle on how you can change yourself. Repairing and building anew on that history through dedication to a strong, loving and enduring family of your own is the best gift you can give yourself and your own children and grandchildren.
A few weeks ago I emailed to everyone a synopsis of a report from the Commission on Children at Risk. The commission is made up of 33 distinguished medical doctors, mental health and youth counselors. The commission reports that new research on the brain, human behavior and social trends strongly supports the notion that “belonging” is critical to humans, especially to children.
They learned that humans are “hardwired” biologically to need close connections with others. Children need responsible parents to provide care and nurture and a web of supportive relationships to survive and thrive.
They also learned that religion and spirituality are key factors in prevention. Researchers now believe that children naturally seek to connect with sources of moral and spiritual meaning. Like adults, children and youth long to discover a purpose that makes life worth living, to find something to live for greater than themselves.
To provide both types of connection, children need to be part of what researchers call “authoritative communities” or communities of connection, as found in strong families and schools, religious congregations and other associations that provide encouragement, clear limits, and accountability.
Now as I see it, this Fellowship fits right into the kind of community the commission describes and I believe, if we don’t assemble for any other reason, it should be to help provide that kind of connection for the moral and religious meaning that all our children want and need. This congregation should stand as a bulwark of families—all kinds of families—the two parent, two-children families, the single-parent families, be they led by Mom or Dad; marriages without children; the gay and lesbian families; the blended families with children from previous relationships; the single persons among us who seek community. This congregation, in its best moments at least is family—an intergenerational family defined as a “group of people who love and care for each other.”
Presumably this is why we come together on Sunday mornings. This is why our church school should be a parent’s co-op, where all of us actually, are involved with supporting RE.
This church is not a perfect family. Yours is not a perfect family, nor is mine. We all have warts. We are all dysfunctional, flawed and faulted, and walk with feet of clay. The Mulla Nasrudin in the Sufi parable sought the perfect wife and found her, except she was seeking the perfect husband. All of us will be frustrated in that search for perfection. Families are fragile, but we know that we need that center of intimacy in which to fashion our lives. These ties of intimacy surely are stressful from time to time, and painful—often. But we know we surely need that love if we are to survive.