Buechner: Family
“…what I’ve said about my mother has at least a kind of partial truth is that I know at first hand that it is true of the mother who lives on in me and will always be part of who I am.”
Frederick Buechner, “The Dwarves in the Stable,” Telling Secrets, p. 18, 1991.
So many people come for spiritual direction but spend more time talking about their struggles with other people especially family members rather than their own walk with God. I keep wanting to remind them that I am not a therapist trying to help them to live life on life’s terms, but that I am the spiritual director or friend they have chosen to care for their soul. I try to redirect our meeting always asking the question, “Where do you see God in this situation?” Sometimes it works for a while, but then we often find ourselves back on that other road with the difficult family members or friends.
Frederick Buechner writes often about family members and his walk with them, his father who committed suicide when he was ten years old, his mother who died in her nineties living a very superficial life relying on her physical beauty, and his daughter’s life-threatening struggle with anorexia. As he finishes part of a story he sometimes wonders what people will say about him as well in years to come. He seems suddenly to have an awareness that he will always be carrying these people from his past and present with him no matter how hard he works to deal with the issues. It may be the same for us as well.
Buechner teaches us through his story to see how our struggles with others connect us with our relationship to God. We still carry our family and our friends with us, maybe sometimes not as intensely. They will always be a part of us. We learned from them. We inherited them. They are in our genes.
I carry with me my father’s need and search for peace and quiet, my mother’s best survival mode of being the victim, my brother’s love of laughter and play, my grandmothers’ and grandfathers’ deep and abiding faith.
As I grow older and make more mistakes, I learn to be gentler with these parts of me. This seems to be a part of the path of learning to love our selves so that we can now love our neighbor outside of our selves. It is the road to forgiveness. It is the road to the Christ within who stops and sees the Christ in our neighbor.
Joanna joannaseibert.com