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All in the family
- Colleen Douglass
My dad was full of mischief. At times he brought it out in all of us. Once when he was watering plants in front of our house, my mom opened the door. He spun around and squirted her, soaking the bookshelves inside. She, of course, had to retaliate, so she stole up the stairs to an open window and dumped a bucket of water on his head.
We were a close family, not just because of the fun, but also because we spent a lot of time working together in my parents’ grocery store. I have lots of wonderful memories from my childhood. Mostly, I remember the love.
Early in my adult life, things changed dramatically when my mother passed on. She had been the backbone of the family, supporting all of our endeavors and proffering advice on various challenges that my sister and I had faced in our young lives. Several months later, my sister married and moved out. I stayed in my dad’s home during the next couple of years to help him find his footing. At the end of that time, he remarried.
The first year my dad was married, he naturally wanted to spend Christmas with his new wife and her son. My sister planned to spend it with her husband’s relatives. It seemed that family, as I had known it, no longer existed.
I felt very much on the fringes, with one foot in and one foot out of the family. I struggled to know where—or even whether—I fit in. Some friends invited me to spend the holidays with them, and I was delighted to accept, but a feeling of emptiness persisted as I thought about facing Christmas without my immediate family.
In the years leading up to this experience, I’d learned to rely on prayer and spiritual communion with God when things got tough. The God I had come to know is full of grace, meaning that He provides abundantly for every one of His children, me included. So when I found myself feeling that my family was anything but abundant, I realized I probably needed to explore the idea of family from a more spiritual standpoint.
As I saw it, defining family as “flesh and blood” can be woefully limiting, and can sometimes occasion a whole host of problems. Sometimes a person’s family disappoints them, or, as it did in my case, changes or simply has never existed.
Mary Baker Eddy faced an even greater family challenge than I did. After losing her husband as a young wife and mother, she confronted health problems that caused family members to question whether or not she was capable of raising her own son. They decided that she wasn’t, and gave the child to his nurse to raise. These relatives eventually cut all ties between Mrs. Eddy and her son, allowing no further contact between them until he became an adult.
Even though Mrs. Eddy must have struggled with disappointment and feelings of betrayal, she was able to find solid footing through a conviction of God’s able parenting. This led her to redefine family as beyond and above bloodlines. Later, she wrote, “Immortals, or God’s children in divine Science, are one harmonious family; but mortals, or the ‘children of men’ in material sense, are discordant and ofttimes false brethren.”
Families, viewed from a flesh-and-blood perspective, are often imperfect. But discovering oneself as a child of God reveals a tender relationship to this eternal Father-Mother and all of His children. This elevated perspective can harmonize existing families and foster new expressions of love and belonging.
The Bible supports such a view. The Lord’s Prayer begins, “Our Father which art in heaven.” Later, Mrs. Eddy would interpret this to mean, “Our Father-Mother God, all harmonious.” This simple phrase contains the key to finding harmony within ourselves, our families, and our world.
We all have one Father-Mother. Catching a glimpse of what this means, realizing that we’re part of God’s grand and harmonious family, dissolves a restrictive flesh-and-blood approach to kinship.
This God-created family includes brothers and sisters that span the globe, irrespective of clans, surnames, bloodlines, or ethnic, cultural or national boundaries. The thread that unites everyone is their spiritual heritage as children of God. Not human lineage, but kindred values and qualities of thought.
When we get to the core of who we are as sons and daughters of God, we echo Paul’s affirmation to the Romans, “We, being many, are one body in Christ, and every one members one of another.” And this opens the way for the human family to take on a higher nature, mirroring the nature of God. That kind of family offers fulfillment, harmony, balance and an inherent structure that translates into support for each one of its members.
Stretching one’s view of family can profoundly affect many lives, just as it has mine. Over the years, I’ve found a palpable expression of family in lovely and unexpected ways. For instance, rather than wait for family to come to me, I’ve enjoyed the adventure of discovery. And while I still cherish the flesh-and-blood variety, my concept of family has broadened and become much more inclusive.
Shortly after my mother’s passing, I worked in Arizona in the heart of Indian Territory , where I met a family that has claimed me as one of its own for many years. When members of this Native American family have come to visit for Thanksgiving, or my husband and I have traveled to Arizona to see them at Christmastime, I’ve felt included in an ever-expanding family.
And when I married, my husband brought three children to our family unit. Two of them now have children of their own, so my list of relatives continues to grow. During the holidays, we often welcome a mélange of family members to our table, including those from various cultures and nationalities. And several young French women, students who stayed in our home, now call me their American mother.
These experiences have shown me that the family of God promises unity, not division; inclusion, not exclusion. I love to think of where we’d be as a world if everybody thought of all mankind as one grand family, under the capable parenting of one Father-Mother, God.
March
2007 Reprint permission from The Christian Science Journal.
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Colleen Douglass is a Christian Science teacher and practitioner in Los Angeles , California |
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