I pray and pray for my
family and still we have so many conflicts and struggle to get along. Where is God in all this?
This weekend we celebrate the feast of
the Holy Family. Mary, Jesus and Joseph come
to mind when we think of a “Holy” family, especially during this Christmas
season. It is unlikely that in the wake
of this month of non-stop holiday gatherings, weary from this intense season of
interaction, that “Holy” would be the first word to roll off our tongues when
talking about our own families though.
Our
families are much too dysfunctional, tense and fraught with conflict to be
truly “Holy,” right? We are convinced
that that Jesus was misquoted. Surely,
he must have said "where two or more are gathered in my name, there's
bound to be an argument!" And yet
our tradition insists that our families, our relationships, are the primary
place of God’s activity in the world.
Many
of us have grown up with the notion that disagreements are failures. But
nothing could be further from the truth.
Disagreements are inevitable.
It’s really not a question of IF conflict will arise, but WHEN. As Pope Francis has been reminding us lately
- frank, honest dialogue, especially on difficult subjects is essential to personal
and communal growth; like resistant strength training – no pain no gain.
It
is in and through our conflicts that we uncomfortably receive God’s grace and
revelation and cultivate a deeper intimacy and true communion with one
another. God’s revelation is rarely
discovered in isolation, and revelation in community can be painful, like
putting a bunch of jagged rocks into a burlap bag and shaking them for 5, 10,
20, 50 years. Through ‘rubbing each
other wrong’ our jagged edges become smooth; we become well-rounded people. We have insights we could never have achieved
independently.
God
is present and working with great intensity in our conflicts. Our goal is to resolve disagreements in such a
way that the relationship is stronger afterwards than it was before. As the body of Christ, we are called to be a
model of this process. As tough, tricky, and emotionally draining as
resolving conflict maybe, reconciliation is not an option, but an imperative
for Jesus’ followers; it is the very heart of the paschal mystery. The easy-outs of seclusion, individualism and
indifference are the opposite of Jesus’ vision for our world.
More
and more I find myself dreading the moment when I’m at my kid’s school, the
doctor’s office, or in line at the grocery store and the person I’m talking to
finds out that I’m a minister and feels compelled, in what I sometimes sense is
a feeble effort to disguise their criticism, to explain to me that he or she is
“spiritual but not religious.” This is
often said in such a way that implies that they grasp some daring insight that
we church-going simpletons have yet to discover.
Quite
frankly, I don’t find being privately, independently, “spiritual but not
religious” very impressive. There is
nothing particularly challenging about that choice.
What
I find heroic is doggedly doing this work in community, where other people
might call you out on stuff and we are called to sacrifice a little bit of this
or that for the good of all. Our saints
tell us that real spiritual growth and insight arrive more often through our
arduous, energy-sapping work of lovingly resolving our disagreements than by throwing
up our hands and resigning to pray in isolation.
I
admire people who hope in the communion of saints and who are brave enough (or
perhaps stubborn enough), to believe that God is best encountered in a real
human community and audacious enough to believe that in our life together we
are surreptitiously building the kingdom of God, one challenging relationship
at a time.
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