What is a Family?

Liturgical Materials for Sunday the 9^th of February, 2003

Mark Belletini, Minister, Minister
First Unitarian Universalist Church of Columbus, Ohio

Opening words [Next] [back to top]

We are here
as learners and teachers, as growing persons,
to worship, to let the bud of our being
blossom like a rose in midwinter,
through praise and silence, thanks and singing.
Knowing that we are kin to each other,
as well as to whales, robins, lizards and flowers
we celebrate our place in the family of things.

And at our celebration's end,
may our reason and our passion keep us true to ourselves,
rue to each other,
and true to those shared visions of what we can together become…

Affirmation [Next] [back to top]

Dr. Laurel Clark, who died in the break-up of the Space Shuttle Columbia, was part of a Unitarian Universalist family who attended the Olympia Brown Unitarian Universalist Church in Racine Wisconsin. Her minister, my very fine colleague Dr. Tony Larson, who has served that church since Dr. Clark was herself but a child, tells me that his congregation is singing her favorite hymn this morning. This is the one we too will sing this morning, a hymn by Ohio composer, Shelley Denham Jackson. Dr. Clark's parents have been active in the Olympia Brown Unitarian Universalist church for many decades, and her brother is teaching in the Sunday School this very morning. And Laurel herself sang in the choir when she used to live in Racine, and has spoken in the pulpit there of her passion for her work relatively recently.

Dr.Tony Larson wrote these words in her eulogy:

"When I talked to her mother, Marge Brown, on the day of the tragedy, she told me Laurel really loved her work. She believed in what she was doing.

I think Laurel and her companions have a message for our warring earth. When I was in Houston for the last couple of days, I met a number of Laurel's fellow astronauts and I came to see how much of a family they had come to be to each other. And I thought about how these seven astronauts were from different cultures and different religions. One was from India, one from Israel, black and white, male and female…so different from each other in many ways…yet they loved each other, and with all their differences, they knew how to get along."

And these are Laurel Clark's own words, sent to her family of origin on the day before the tragedy, via space e-mail,

"The perspective (from up here) is truly awe-inspiring. Lightning spreading over the Pacific, the Aurora Australis lighting up the entire visible horizon of Australia below. Magically, the very first day we flew over Lake Michigan and I saw Wind Point, (where I grew up). I feel blessed to be here representing our country and carrying out the research of scientists around the world…our shared planet."

Blest by these words which affirm our common humanity, we sing part of Dr. Laurel Clark's favorite hymn, the first and last verse, as our affirmation this morning. There will be caring cards for you to sign in Fellowship Hall after the service, to send to her brother, her husband and son, her father and mother, and congregation and minister. She lived in Texas at the time of her death, but she always considered Racine her home.

Sequence [Next] [back to top]

Let the difficulties of the week
take their sabbath now,
their brief and simple rest.
Let the worries of the week
lay their heft gently onto the dark earth
below this carpeted floor
which can bear them with greater ease
than any one of us can by ourselves.
Let the tangle of feelings,
the pull and push of these last seven days
sit still for a minute,
stop writhing in my heart,
and move no more than a Buddha
at rest under a tree.
Let there be stillness in my heart for a moment,
the balance point between breathing in
and breathing out, like the pause of a dancer
between movements in the music.
Let the breathing in this room be free and flowing.
Let pulses trance a slower rhythm in the wrist.
Let the coming silence be like hands
pulling back a curtain,
revealing the nourishing table of the feast of life
which is present here and now
and has been the whole while,
present to those who give up living in either the past or the future…

(silence…)

Calling to mind those I love,
the kith and kin with which I am bound
in this life, I bless them by saying their names
in my heart, or in this safe and sacred time.

(naming)

Blest is the music, which bids us join heart to heart, hand in hand, to go forward together,
to go forward together, from this moment on,
toward the fire which warms, toward the flowing water which quenches our thirst.

First Reading [Next] [back to top] comes from a most excellent book which I recommend to you, The Way We Never Were by Stephanie Coontz, written just over ten years ago. It is the most sensible and wise and informative book I have read on this topic of family.

Pessimists argue that the family is collapsing. Optimists counter that it is merely diversifying. Too often, both camps begin with an ahistorical static notion of what "the" family was like before the contemporary period. Thus we have one set of best sellers urging us to reaffirm traditional family values in an era of "family collapse" and another promising to set us free from traditional family traps if we can only turn off the "old tapes" and break out of old ruts.

I am not going to argue that the more things change, the more things stay the same. There have been many transformations in American history of the family, but they haven't been as linear as many accounts claim. Some changes have resulted in gains for one family member and losses for another. One thing is clear though:

There is no one family form that has ever protected people from poverty or social disruption, and no traditional arrangement that provides a workable model for how we might organize family relations in the modern world.

When I go out to lecture on family history, I sometimes feel that half of the people I talk to are trying to figure out what they did wrong in their families and the other half are torturing themselves trying to figure out what their parents did wrong. Maybe our family pains are not all our family's fault…or our personal fault. Seeing our family pains as part of a larger social predicament means that we can let ourselves---and our parents---off the hook. We may discover that the best thing we will ever do for our own families, however we define them, is to get involved in community and political action to help others.

Second Reading [Next] [back to top] comes from a thoughtful collection of essays by the Canadian author Michael Rowe. This is from the title essay in his book, Looking for Brothers, published four years ago.

I have made brothers of my two oldest friends. I'm not sure where the line between friendship and brotherhood is drawn and crossed, but it has to do with trust and time.

Barney and Chris and I have surface things in common. We were raised in comfortable, upper-middle-class circumstances. We all attended prep school and universities (here in Canada).

Barney and I are gay. Chris is heterosexual. He and his partner, Claire, have a small perfect miracle of a little blond boy named Alex. Alex is the next generation of my family. My nephew, Alex. My brothers, Chris and Barney. At night sometimes, before I sleep, I move my mind across the years (thinking of my family.) It warms me with every breath, every heartbeat.

Sermon: What is a Family? [Next][back to top]

A few years ago, I was at a conference in a city half-way across the States. I was chatting with some colleagues during a break. We were sipping coffee in the wide hallway of the hotel where we were all staying, as other colleagues streamed by. It was the fifth day of the conference, and frankly, it was over for me. I mentioned that I was anxious to get back home.

"Really?" asked one colleague. "All you have is piles of work on your desk at the office. Why are you anxious to go home to that? It's not like you have a family you're chomping at the bit to get home and spend time with."

I shot her a glance calculated to stop her in her tracks, and immediately I said something to lead the conversation in another direction.

Later she came up and apologized for what she had said to me. "I really put my foot in it, didn't I." she said. I nodded. "I know you do have a family. A very close family. They don't live with you, but that hardly means they are not your family." The she apologized again and said, "I just wasn't thinking. Sorry." I accepted her apology and then asked about her family. Then she asked about mine. We had a good long talk that day. And I went home energized after our conversation.

Of course, that story, and the apology, has been repeated many times in my life.

Family. Another important word in the English language, which, like some other great words "God," "love," "faith" and "peace," seems to bear quite a variety of definition and nuance.

Now, like everyone in this room, I had a family of origin. I was born, not adopted, into that family of origin, first-born, to be exact, if you want to know.

But the edges of that family of origin were maybe not drawn in the same way yours were. I don't know. So in order for me to answer the question "What is a family?" I have to start with my earliest learning on the subject.

When I was 8 or 9 years old, I called a number of people Uncle and Aunt. (And yes, where I grew up, everyone always said Ant not Awnt like so many seem to say here in this city and its environs.) My parents, however, were each single children in their families of origin, that is, neither of them had brothers or sisters. So I learned very early that the words "Aunt" and "Uncle" could be safely used to refer to people to whom I was not technically related.

When my father's first cousin was very sick, so sick that they kept him in the intensive care unit for over five months, my father went to visit him every day. When the nurse asked my father who he was, he always replied, "I'm his brother." Now this man in intensive care had several siblings by blood, who loved him and visited him too. My father was his cousin. But he felt that their relationship was so close that only the English word brother expressed the reality of their relationship in any authentic way.

My parents also had many, many coupled friends who had no children. Armondo and Funcine, and Leo and Anita come to mind first. But they also knew two men who had lived together all of their lives, whom they now recognize as a gay couple. And, they knew plenty of single women and men who were neither widowed or divorced, just single all of their lives. These people were never presented to my brother or sister and me as odd or unusual or lacking anything.

These lessons about the nature of family were clear to me when I was growing up. They still make sense to me. And so, thus, when my best friend Richard comes to visit me, as he did over New Years, I introduce him to my other friends as "my brother." He often calls me brother too, as it really seems like the appropriate word for both of us…all that "time and trust" makes it so for us, I guess. He is part of my family and I am part of his.

Now clearly I am not the only person who learned these lessons when they were young. Our Canadian author, Michael Rowe, actually titled his book, Looking for Brothers, suggesting he shares the same understanding I received from my family of origin. He writes of his two discovered brothers, Barney and Chris, as well as his discovered nephew, Alex.

But some will protest that this Michael Rowe and this Mark Belletini are confused. They will tell us, "You cannot discover family, you can only inherit it." And of course you can call people " brother" if you want, but it does not make them your real brother any more than a homeless street man is your sib when he calls out to you from his tarry doorway on High St., "Hey, brother, can you spare a dollar?"

Well, I am not so sure if this protest makes any sense, spiritually. Maybe one of the reasons the world of our lives is so tragic and wacky these days is because the homeless man in a doorway is not our brother, and the welfare mom working two minimum wage jobs is not anyone's sister in any significant meaning of those terms. And yes, when Tony Larson says that the astronauts he met in Houston were like "family" to each other, he was using a metaphor. But I think he used it because it was a precise expression of how he experienced them. He was not just waxing romantic. He was describing the sober truth.

Family structures have taken on different forms, morally and relationally, in every era and in every culture. The fidelity which we claim is so important to us was not as important to other civilizations. This is one reason white people from Europe called members of some of these civilizations "savages." For example, a Jesuit missionary, appalled at the way the Naksapi Indians defined family outside bounds of conventional Christian morality, spent an entire winter in a Naskapi lodge trying to convince them of the error of their ways. "If you do not impose tighter controls on your women," he said to one of the male leaders, " you will never know for sure which of the children your wife bears actually belongs to you." To which the chief replied "You French don't have the sense you were born with. You love only your own children, but we love all the children of the tribe equally."

Now this is not a romantic slap at modern mores, as some might rush to say; this is an actual attitude toward family values that predominated in many national areas for many centuries. It is not our own kind of family, but it was family to them.

The so-called "nuclear" family, in fact, dates only from the beginning of the so-called "nuclear age," which began in the '40s of the last century in Alamogordo. Leave it to Beaver and Ozzie and Harriet, which portrayed certain family forms on television, were entirely creations of the post-War era, a kind of social engineering, you might say, as Stephanie Coontz establishes well in her book. In the years before the war, many smaller family groups shared housing, and the grandparents and nieces and nephews were often under the same roof. And before the World Wars, in the era of Western expansion, families of every description were torn apart by vast distances beyond the reach of the telegraph, and reconfigured by disease and disaster. This was also true for immigrant families. I know my own grandparents never saw or talked to their beloved parents and aunts and uncles again once they arrived on these shores from the European continent. For thirty years, their blood family existed only at the other end of the trail of an onion skin letter shipped slowly across the Atlantic on a boat.

History is simply filled with differing family shapes. You cannot find any clear unifying theme between them, except perhaps love, and even then, love can be expressed mighty clumsily sometimes. And what I say is true even when you go back thousands of years. For example, all the famous biblical stories which some of us learned as children reflect family structures about as far away from Ozzie and Harriet as you can get without travelling to another planet. Abraham, for example, had several wives and encouraged his chief wife to have an affair with the King of Egypt so as to better his financial status. He coldly sent an unmarried woman who bore his first child out into the desert to die. King David had his share of wives too, as well as male and female lovers on the side. The teacher Jesus rejected his single mother and his several brothers and sisters in favor of his students, whom he calls his "real" family. Lot did all the cooking in his family and, after his wife's untimely death, had children with his own daughters. Noah lived with all of his children and their families and a large number of barnyard animals in a houseboat and for a very long time. Isaiah was a single man who often walked about in the nude and had many critics. Ruth, once widowed, promised to live her life with her mother-in-law, but instead married a foreign man, and they all three made a family together, including the new grandbaby, Obed.

Many of the folks who talk about "traditional family values" quote the Bible as their authority, but I am not sure why, since I cannot find therein any family that remotely resembles the families they proclaim as ideal in form. Like I said last week however, the Bible does often provide sober and unflinching descriptions of the way families actually can be.

As Stephanie Coontz reminds us in the first reading, when political and religious conservatives talk about the word "family" they seem to have a very clear idea what that word means. It does not mean gay men or lesbians living together, that's for sure. Single mothers on welfare barely count, and single men are all up to no good and are somehow "anti-family" if they go around carousing. The two parent, never-divorced mother/father/child family is ideal, they say. And now we sinful Americans have fallen away from these traditional ideals. Worse, these damn liberals prate on about diversity shamelessly, when anyone knows that evangelical uniformity is the way of God in the world.

But the liberals and progressives are no better than the conservatives, says Coontz. They have bought the fairy-story definition of proper family form lock, stock and barrel too, and they defensively try to proclaim "the diversity" of the modern family landscape as an improvement on the old model which they affirm was simply not just.

Both liberals and conservatives have missed the point, she says, and I think I have to agree. There is not now, and never was there, a traditional family form. There has always been diversity. And thus, for me, a family is an arrangement of people related by blood or commitment or adoption who love each other, sometimes admittedly clumsily, and work together, for the common good. Family, I say, has no required shape. None at all.

My old "family doctor" out in California, Alan Steinbach had a very clear understanding of what his "family practice" meant. His understanding illustrates how much I mean by affirming that family has "no required shape." He used to say that he treated lonely single women and men in their eighties, who had out lived everyone, as "family." But, because they had memories of family and love in the center of their heart, their health was affected by their family. The memories were enough for him to count an individual as part of a family. And it's enough for me.

Most of the stuff I hear bandied about on the topic of families on TV, in books, in conversations, is simply baloney. I hear all the time that black families are different than white families in structure and form. Do you believe that? Most black fathers have flown the coop, whereas white fathers stay around forever. How do you know that, if you believe it? Do you really think that the color of our skin really determines the shape of our families? How? Show me the evidence, please. So are we really talking about black families and white (or Asian or Latino) families? Or are we really talking about poor families of any color in the city? Or in the countryside?

What does the economic reality of local urban areas have to do with family structures and definitions? A lot, in some cases. But there are other factors that figure as well. For example, police officers and members of the military show substantially higher rates of divorce and family violence than others groups. Statistically, there is no doubt about that. So are they now to be considered some sort of dangerous underclass? Should we try and bulldoze law enforcement schools in order to preserve "the family?"

And how does work availability figure in the shape of families? And public transportation… something we here in Central Ohio vote against often on our ballots? And what about day-care? And the quality of schools? Are there really no social factors that erode the optimism and energy of new young families, no matter what side of the tracks…or freeway… they live?

I say there are. And I also say prejudice and ignorance inform our attitudes about what a family is, more than almost anything else, liberals included with conservatives in that number.

For example, do you believe that Catholic families of origin are large? I hear that all the time around here. Ten kids per family, maybe? Do you believe that? Why? Fact is, some Catholic families are large, most are not. Most in this country are not. And Italy, a decidedly Catholic country culturally, has the smallest birth rate in Europe. And that has been true for a long time. My own Catholic family of origin was small. My parents grew up in small Catholic families of origin too. One child per pair of parents. I had Protestant friends with seven and eight children when I was growing up. Like all Protestant families? No, like some. And like some atheist families, too. And some Unitarian Universalist families…I know one with twelve. But not all UU families have twelve kids. Some have none. Some have two. Others, five. Is one configuration more a "real" family than another? I don't think so.

And thus I, personally, have come to the conclusion that any statement about Catholics, Protestants, Jews, blacks, whites, Asians, Latinos, the elderly, any particular generation, the young, children, etc, which claims universality is simply prejudicial. And such prejudice is an entrenched form of ignorance. And ignorance is something my religious faith urges me to confront with questions and documented knowledge, wherever I can.

Parents spend less time with their children now than they used to in the fifties? That is not supported by studies. But it's commonly believed. The fifties were economically better times than those evil sixties with all that sex, drugs and rock and roll? There was actually more poverty in United States during the fifties than in the much maligned sixties and seventies. But there has been a downward trend in recent years. These rises and falls in the economy extract their tolls on the formations of family much more than anything else does, including religious sensibilities among conservatives.

What is a family? As I said, a family is an arrangement of people related by blood or commitment or adoption, who love each other, sometimes clumsily, and who work together for the common good.

My colleague at that conference knew very well I have a family to come home to. That is why she apologized. For a minute, she had fallen for the old Ozzie and Harriet model, which she well knew was a mere blip in the history of the family. She knew, when she apologized, that, when I went home, my family would be there. She knew that a home is not necessarily a small roof. And she knew that family is not necessarily determined by geography.

My family is beautiful. Among my family members, there are my beloved godchildren, like Ben who is singing Les Miz in his high-school production out in San Jose, or my dear Andrea who emails me daily from Chile with her 17-year-old questions of what it means to fall in love. When I come home, I come home to my spiritual grandfathers like Harry Scholefield. My brothers like Richard and Doug and William and Chuck and Kevin speak often with me. I have breakfast or work out with my friends like Jim and James. I love difficult cousins like Daymond who rob me of my sleep because of their addictions. Then there are my sisters, like my blood sister Lynne and my sister Jane who tells me the truth and whom everyone knows as my wife at General Assembly because we spend so much time together. And my blood brother who is not much of a communicator. And my mother, both my birth mom and also Jacqui James, who helped me to give birth to a bright, brand new shining hymnbook eleven years ago. My beautiful family. And there's my blood father who visited his cousin, and several spiritual fathers who have blessed my life a thousand times over.

I have a rich family life. A very rich family life. And like most anyone I can think of - liberal or conservative, American, Canadian, European, African, Asian, Latin - my family is more important than anything else in my life. More important than my career, my work; more important than my own dreams for myself, more important than anything I can think of. My parents taught me well after all. I wonder. What does your family look like?

And I wonder, what would the world be like if you and I actually found a way to respond to that homeless man in the doorway as if he was, in some very real way, our brother?

Offering [Next][back to top]

The opportunity to give is one with the opportunity to receive. As we receive the blessings of stars, of mountains, of waters and sunsets, of robins and horses, of friends and family, of service and solace, so may we feel free to offer of our own bounty to the common good of this, our religious community. Let the circle be unbroken, universe, world, community, family, friends, and self. The offering will now be given and received.

Song Prayer [back to top]

Gonna keep on walking forward…etc.

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Last update: 02/16/2003