In the process of writing a memoir, I have been reflecting on the families of two sisters. The first, Joyce, ruled with the iron hand of legalism. Her five kids obeyed a lengthy set of strict rules—“Because I say so, that’s why!” Now grown, they tell me they acquiesced mainly out of fear of punishment.
Joyce’s family devotions often centered on the Old Testament: Honor your parents, Fear the Lord, Stop grumbling. The word grace rarely came up. When her children got married, Joyce told them, “If your marriage fails, don’t bother coming back here. You made a vow to God, so keep it.”
All of Joyce’s children have struggled with self-image problems. They admit it has taken many years for them to think of God as loving, and even now that concept seems more intellectual than experiential. Joyce and her husband have softened into grandparents, but affection still does not come easily to anyone in the family.
Yet here is a striking fact: defying an overwhelming national trend, all five of those children remain married to their original partners. They’ve chosen jobs in the helping professions. All but one are raising their own children in the faith. At some level, strictness and legalism in this family produced results.
In contrast to Joyce, her sister Annette determined to break out of the rigidity of their own upbringing. She vowed not to punish her children, rather to love them, comfort them, and calmly explain when they did something wrong. Her family devotions skipped right past the Old Testament and focused on Jesus’ astonishing parables of grace and forgiveness.
Annette especially loved the story of the Prodigal Son. “We are those parents,” she would tell her children. “No matter what you do, no matter what happens, we’ll be here waiting to welcome you back.”
Unfortunately, Annette and her husband would have many opportunities to role-play the parents of the prodigal. One daughter contracted AIDS through sexual promiscuity. Another is on her fourth marriage. A son alternates between prison and a drug rehab center.
Annette has kept her promise, though, always welcoming her children home. She looks after the grandchildren, posts bail, covers mortgage payments—whatever it takes to live out her commitment of long-suffering love. I marvel at her spirit of grace and acceptance. “What do you expect?” she shrugs. “They’re my children. You don’t stop loving your own children.”
I grew up in a home and church more like Joyce’s. After a period of rejection and rebellion, I discovered a God of love and forgiveness. (More accurately, God found me). I ended up as a Christian writer, piping the tune of grace. My brother, raised in the same environment, tossed faith aside. He now attends what he calls an “atheist church”—a Sunday gathering of humanists who spend much time talking about and opposing a God they don’t believe in—and stocks his bookshelf with works by noted atheists such as Christopher Hitchens and Richard Dawkins.
“No one can comprehend what goes on under the sun,” concluded the Teacher of Ecclesiastes. “Despite all their efforts to search it out, no one can discover its meaning. Even if the wise claim they know, they cannot really comprehend it.”
A friend of mine, a wise counselor, says that human behavior can be explained by three things: nature (or heredity), nurture (including family upbringing), and free will. Which, he quickly admits, explains very little, for those ingredients combine in different ways in all of us. Loving, supportive families sometimes produce wounded and rebellious children; harsh or dysfunctional families sometimes produce the opposite. In between lies mystery—and God’s grace.
(I welcome hearing your stories of how family did, or didn’t, provide a nurturing balance in cultivating the life of faith.)
Hi Philip, we grew up with Christian leanings, but mostly in theory. My siblings and I were left to think and believe what we wanted for the most part. Very little guidance, some neglect, even apathy for family structure or definitive teaching of any kind. Upon reaching adulthood, I realized I was given too much rope to believe what I wanted, and was beginning to see the repercussions of not having a clear vision for right and wrong and good values to live by. Looking back, I lacked both nurturing and discipline. I had friends who were subjected to overly strict parenting that seemed to cause its own kind problems, I’ve come to see both extremes harmful.
As a result of having not been offered the structure of truth, or some kind of structure, I found myself drawn to a legalistic form of Christianity as a man in my early twenties. I loved the rules, basked in the clear description of right and wrong and marveled at its righteous structure. Finally, life made sense. Starting around 1982, I was finally seeing life clearly through the lens of a religious construct of means. My romance with legalism sufficed for about 13 years. Various rumblings from deep within my own heart began to surface; guilt, anger, resentment, etc. Unresolved issues were coming to the front of mind and heart and I didn’t know what to do with them. Then, grace found me. Various sermons, The Jesus I Never Knew and Max Lucado all hit me about the same time. Finally, structure along with God’s love and acceptance seem to complete the picture.
Now, as a father of three daughters, I find myself striving for the ever-illusive “middle ground”, if there is such an animal. I know they need clear and immovable boundaries on one hand, and real love and nurturing on the other. It feels like a paradox. It’s a real circus act in fact, and I’m not sure if I’m making the cut. In God’s amazing patience and grace however, my wife and I are learning to be the best parents we can be.
We don’t have all the answers. For now however, I hope to find that balance of nurturing, discipline and healthy boundaries within God’s economy of love, grace and discipline.
I’ve loved your writings over the years, so glad you’re keeping it up. This world still needs your voice, maybe more than ever.
Fascinating, is it not, that there’s no predicting with any certainty where our genes and our upbringing (or downbringing) will take us in our lives? We are each formed differently in birth and then bent differently in our growing up. Siblings turn out differently than we do and we wonder why.
You can live to be 80 and still you not only don’t fully know your own wars and peace, but you also are perplexed by what you’ve seen happen with others you know, and sometimes love, and sometimes don’t, and sometimes you just don’t care.
Do we know better? Paul the Apostle writes in Romans 7:15-20: ” I do not understand what I do. For what I want to do I do not do, but what I hate I do. And if I do what I do not want to do, I agree that the law is good. As it is, it is no longer I myself who do it, but it is sin living in me. For I know that good itself does not dwell in me, that is, in my sinful nature. For I have the desire to do what is good, but I cannot carry it out. For I do not do the good I want to do, but the evil I do not want to do—this I keep on doing. Now if I do what I do not want to do, it is no longer I who do it, but it is sin living in me that does it.”
Makes you wonder doesn’t it whether that sin that lives in me is just the devil who made me do it. But no, I picked and ate the forbidden apple myself. Not the devil. His sin of pride was not greatly different from our own, excepting degree, and we are not archangels.
Nor were our parents. They married for love or convenience or no good reason at all, and some did not marry at all, but in passion, conceived and bore us. Some were teachers, some were not. Some cared for us and loved us deeply. Others didn’t. It all had something to do with who we are, but we brought our own mix into play, too.
My parents married less than nine months before I was born, the eldest of 5. My dad was a loveable jock, smart, able, suffering from depression when his athletic powers waned and he lost his job when the milk company where he worked spent his pension and shut down. He was, as they say, old school….loved a few drinks and then some, sung Bing Crosby songs almost as well as Crosby did, had a few errant flings, but somehow stayed married to my saintly, driven mother.
He was a “don’t do as I do” kind of father, but he worked hard, helped others in need, and expected us to do better than he had. The drinking stopped later in life when my sister, a nurse, told him after a pancreatitis attack that he’d die if if he didn’t quit. Believing he wasn’t saved, due to his former errant ways, he didn’t want to die, so he finally quit. When he was alone after my mother’s death, he regretted his behaviors and thought he couldn’t be forgiven. I gave him a Brennan Manning video to watch, one in which he shakes the viewer’s timbers with God’s forgiving love, and my father believed he was forgiven. He died at the age of 89, not long after.
Mom came from the farm in latter years of the dust bowl. 16 years old, beautiful, and off she went to the big city in the ’30’s to become a hair dresser like her aunt, who was only a few years older. I’m sure she was swept off her feet by my father, but 10 children later, and 5 stillborn, she was swamped with caring for us and trying to get my father to grow up. Since I was the oldest, it fell on me to try to get him to change. I had my own troubles. Helping him change would happen many years later after mom was gone and I was retired.
I was a compliant kid, pretty good student, became a teacher and still teach some. My wife and I have been married for 55 years and count ourselves lucky to have wed and committed to making it last. My two brothers did well, one a salesman who died from cancer at age 60, the other a teacher, now retired. Both brothers divorced but married again. One sister has had many physical ills, divorced and remarried, but has persisted in overcoming her many travails. The younger sister is in a happy marriage, and has raised a fine family. Only a couple of us still go to church, but all of us still carry a faith inspired by our mother.
There were days back in our growing up when mom and dad were on the outs, and mom was ready to pack up the two youngest and head back to her parents’ farm. How that would have worked for us boys I have no idea. I guess that’s why they somehow stayed together. We are glad they did.
They both loved us as well as two, busy parents trying to make ends meet in the 40’s and 50’s. My mother expected us to pray, and got us all to kneel and say the rosary, as urged by Padre’ Pio and Archbishop Sheen. My father included. She expected us to do better in our lives than she had, never realizing the high expectations she had for us all largely paid off in our own lives.
She loved her kids. Clipped stories from the paper and magazines for each of us on prayers and poems for us to read, and good nutrition and needed vitamins. She took in neighbor kids when help was needed, and showed us all that we all owe.
You make a good point, though no one is being coerced to write, only invited, and I have found that exploring the past can indeed be a step toward healing. Wounds that remain covered rarely heal. –Philip
Hi Sonya,
your comments really resonated with me. I have very similar struggles with my parents at the moment. It seems that I cant even have a normal conversation with them because I get a Bible verse back, used inappropriately, and everything is over-spiritualised. Reading Philip Yancey and others (C.S Lewis, Tim Kimmel, etc) has been so encouraging and healing for me. I pray for my parents every day and I live with the pain of a lost relationship with them everyday. I will keep on praying!
Wow, thought-provoking and powerful.
You share with such openness and courage. I love the way you mix thoughtful contemplation with heart.
I respect and admire that. It is why you became one of my favorite authors.
I had a bully, atheist father, but I don’t want to give the impression that he disciplined us. He had a lot of odd thoughts and did things like teaching us laziness on purpose. He told us things like if anyone ever asks you to do anything, do it wrong and they won’t ask again. My mother was a silent woman of grace, beautiful on the inside and out and was a hard worker. She was the one who tried to give us a life of discipline, while my father fought against it.
I can point to most of my flaws and know they came because I got angry at him for how he treated her and it was the middle of women’s liberation and I wanted her to not be treated like that, but it never touched her soul. It touched mine.
When we did something wrong, she would look at us across the room and we would stop immediately, because she was quite capable of “mom eyes”, but other than “mom eyes” she was a woman of grace. I am not sure if she was a Christian. If she was, it was one who was silent before her husband and he would order her around and she never got angry, but she was grace personified to me.
She would come home from work at midnight and she would still have a box of more work to do and he would run up the stairs, race to the couch and say every night, “While you are up, get me a cup of coffee” and I would be the one who would argue and she would quietly, gracefully get my father a cup of coffee and get back to her work without one hint of resentment or anger.
I was the one who had resentment at him for decades…. [pyasst]