Day Twenty-Seven: Family

Word of the Day: Family

Image of the Day: carbonated water with a green "tint"!

Token of the Day: Frida Kahlo butterfly brooch from Tate Collection

Family - lots of conflicting thoughts and images immediately spring to mind and heart... i call to mind my biological family - my immediate family of sister, mother and father and my extended family living and dead; i see pictures of Janet and John, the Famous Five and Secret Seven versions of family; i think about the various Biblical references to family (congruent? incongruent?); and i think about chosen family and "family" as code for someone who one thinks is gay...

The butterfly brooch belongs to the same family as the butterfly hairgrip; the butteflies are exactly the same yet their function is quite different. Yes, they are both decorative accessories but one holds the hair in a particular position on the head whilst the other simply decorates an item of clothing... So they are related but also different.

Water - carbonated, still, spring, table, sea, river, rain, hot, cold, vapour, frozen... It's all water but each type is quite different. Each bubble in the carbonated water is unique just as each snowflake is a one-off divine creation - there is no word for snow in Chicewa, one of the languages spoken in Malawi (i discovered this when encountering my first native Malawians who were in St Andrews studying medicine!) yet there are many varients for snow in Inuit (not dozens of separate words apparently but multiple suffixes - follow this link if, like me, you are fascinated by language! (http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/000405.html)

Then there's our inner family (http://www.sfhelp.org/01/ifs1_intro.htm), the family of our psyche, which we might experience in our dreamlife as family and not recognise for what it is. One's inner family is the personality which we hear as streams of thought (inner voices) and which might not always agree! Our subselves evolve over the years; they are made up of our parents, teachers, friends, experiences (traumatic, neutral and positive), and also innate, spiritual, God-given. I will be returning to this - i just know it!

I did a websearch for Bible references to family. The top two websites both avoid including Jesus' challenge to the crowds about who "family" is! The websites, both very conservative, dwell on all the Old Testament passages telling us to honour our mother and father, and Paul's proclamations to the early church about the man being the head of the house as Christ is the head of the church, etc, etc! Is Jesus' response to the multitude, as reported in Mark 3:31-35, incongruous with the rest of the Bible's teaching? My automatic reply is "No!" But it isn't a passage that i'm drawn to, it's not one i seek out for comfort. However i think i'm beginning to understand what Jesus meant and i see its relevance in my life and for today's society. Uh oh, here i go again!

In my first year at university i studied Social Anthropology and learnt something about kinship, the different functions of family (economic, political), and how the concept of family differs around the world and in various cultures and religions. I grew up hundreds of miles away from our nearest blood relatives (dear parents - i am NOT writing this in order to apportion blame, simply to state facts!). I listened to schoolfriends talk about going to their grandparents for Sunday lunch, playing with their cousins, staying overnight at Auntie Jean's and i couldn't relate. Until i was a teenager i didn't have any cousins and then, when i did, i met them infrequently at their christenings, the occasional visit, and at "family" occasions such as weddings and funerals. Now communication is different - we can be in touch casually and frequently through email, Facebook, text - but, despite sharing some very intimate moments (babysitting, nappy-changing, sobbing and hugging at funerals) we hardly know each other at all.

A pregnant client shared with me recently how anxious she was about the birth of this, her second, child. She had been able to put her feet up and snooze when her first child was born but this time she'd have a toddler to keep up with regardless of whether the baby was asleep or not. I asked her about support from family. No family members live within 50 miles and the closest geographically were not the closest emotionally - she was not keen to call on them. This saddened me and yet it is very common and would be my own experience too. But how did we get here? From extended families all living within the same village, or at least town, or at least city, or at the very least county as each other to being rarely in the same country as each other! At one point my mother was in Wales, my sister in England and my father in Canada... and i'm not making out like i'm some special case. This is 21st century living, apparently... But more than 2,100 years ago Jesus was already telling us that family is those who are around us, those who walk our life path with us, those who are in touch with their true self and their Higher Power, God, the Great I Am, Father/Mother/Parent/Creator. We have to take the risk of allowing those around us into the most intimate areas of our lives. If the person we share our life with isn't allowed in, if we cannot open up to the person we laugh and cry with, eat with, make love with, pray with, sleep with, then what hope do we have to be fully alive?

The word itself first came into use in English in about 1400 meaning servants of a household. It comes from Latin familia "household," including relatives and servants, from famulus "servant," of unknown origin.

How interesting! If the "house" is God's house then we are all members of it. If the "house" is the dwelling place of the Holy Spirit then it refers to the human being, the whole person, with all of its constituent parts. No part is to be excluded but is to be embraced, loved, accepted. Mental health suffers when we are told or we feel that part of us is unacceptable, horrible, unlovable. Oh, okay the message is coming through louder and clearer day by day. I have to learn that my inner family is as important as my biological family, my chosen family, and the family of those i share interests with. To be fully alive i need to love myself...

To be continued...