By Joe Pisani
It’s that family time of year. I don’t mean the time for celebration, revelry and festive get-togethers. I mean the time when we all gather around the Thanksgiving table or Christmas tree with the appropriate protective masks and gear, trying to savor the mood of the season … and arguments erupt. This year, politics and COVID will only make it worse.
When it comes to families, I often think of that Carole King line, “You’ve got to take the bitter with the sweet.” Or maybe that famous quote by Leo Tolstoy from the brooding novel Anna Karenina: “All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” But it’s important to remember that Tolstoy also said, “If you look for perfection, you’ll never be content,” which is a principle that certainly applies to family life.
Whenever I run into friends I haven’t seen for a while, after the initial pleasantries, they’ll inevitably ask, “How’s the family?”
I’ll respond, “Great, they’re just great” or “Fine,” even though I’m thinking, “Ugh, don’t ask me to tell you about everything that’s going on.”
Last week when I was coming out of the Post Office, I met a longtime friend I hadn’t seen in months, and she eventually got around to asking, “How’s the family?” I paused a moment and then responded, “What day of the week is it?”
Some days it’s great and some days, well, it’s not so great, and other days it’s downright horrible. She told me, “Long ago I stopped complaining about my family … so everyone started thinking I had the perfect family.”
Perfection is a privilege reserved for the Holy Family, which should always be our role model even though we’ll never achieve that degree of holiness on Earth.
I’ve often thought that God gives us our family members as a way to get us to Heaven because they provide so many opportunities to grow spiritually by learning patience, tolerance, long-suffering, forgiveness and charity. In addition, family life offers countless challenges, most of which you can’t walk away from because they’re staring you in the face — everything from substance abuse problems to personality defects and betrayals and the inability to stay in the same room together without arguing about everything from politics to lifestyle preferences.
In families, conflicting personalities are forced to live together in harmony or at least pretend to get along. I’ve discovered it’s easier to get along with the dog. The dog loves me unconditionally. The dog does what I ask, for the most part. The dog is there when I need someone to talk to. And the dog doesn’t answer back. However, families members aren’t dogs.
Even though we can’t be the Holy Family, it’s an ideal worth striving for, and one of the best things we can do on the path to perfection is pray for our family members, especially the ones who annoy and anger us.
We should never underestimate the importance of our families or take them for granted. We live in a culture that is destructive to the family. Everything from the entertainment industry to the media and the government works to devalue families, and yet families, perfect and imperfect and everything in between, are the foundation of society, civilization and worship. They’re where we find love, acceptance and support.
When I was growing up, I recall my father, his brothers and sisters — all nine of them — would go to visit my grandmother every Sunday to spend time together. They didn’t always get along, but they managed to subordinate their differences for the greater cause of family unity.
Their mother, who was widowed at a young age, raised nine children during the Great Depression on the East Side of Bridgeport. Enduring that prolonged adversity taught them the importance of family and how petty rivalries paled in comparison to the importance of helping one another when the chips were down.
Despite the challenges, God gives every family the graces to survive and thrive…and all we have to do is ask for them.
Pope Francis had some valuable advice for families: “The family is a great training ground for mutual giving and forgiving without which no love can last for long….There is a simple secret to healing wounds and avoiding recriminations in the family. It is this: Do not let the day end without apologizing, without making peace between husband and wife, between parents and children, between brothers and sisters, between daughters and mother-in-law. If we learn to apologize promptly and to give each other mutual forgiveness, the wounds heal, the marriage grows stronger, and the family becomes an increasingly stronger home, which withstands the shocks of our smaller or greater misdeeds.”
That’s great advice to remember, especially during the holiday season. And never forget this fact of life — your family is a lot more important than your political views.