Families

Families are places of miracle, catastrophe, and transformation. In a way, every family is a geographical location for extraordinary events. The range of these events is always so surprising. Sometimes — especially when adolescents are around — the homes of families can resemble railway stations. And at other times — or even simultaneously —they can resemble stations of the Cross.

No one is unaffected by their family. Everyone has experienced this, and in what I want to say, there is no judgment, no inference of things or people being better or worse, no absolute right or wrong. Families are a central location, a first and last gathering ground, where the past shapes the present in special ways, in shaping the future… A place where we practice becoming more human.

As I looked round the room at my daughter’s wedding reception in London three years ago, I saw… What, exactly? Families, family, both familiar and unfamiliar. I feel we need new words for the relationships in modern families. One word we could use well would be the Maori word ‘whanau’. It means the extended family, the ship of life or canoe we travel in — not only blood relations and the legally-joined relations but also the long-term associations of friends and acquaintances.

So, for instance, in our particular whanau we find a young woman who stayed at our house every Friday night for some years, so her solo-parenting father could have some time out. She was a bride’s maid at the wedding. And there is our children’s first music teacher, who came to London for the wedding, just as she had come to San Francisco two years earlier for my son’s graduation recital. She read a poem during the wedding service.

And seated at a long table at the reception were the seven parents (birth- and step-) of the married couple. And there were all their extended families, some in the room, the others arced across the surface of the earth in spreading patterns, like those weather systems that spiral out across the various regions of the world. For instance, we were aware of the five-year-old grand-daughter of the bride’s father’s wife (coincidentally the daughter of his god-daughter!), who really wanted this wedding to happen because at Christmas she had met the six-year-old daughter of the groom (from his previous marriage) on an island off the New Zealand coast, and they had become inseparable friends. Baffled — like you probably — by these complexities of relationship, for them this marriage meant they would be ‘cousins’.

And through all this, there are the individuals also whom one or other of us befriends, who become like brothers or sisters to us. There is no reason, no bloodline, unless it be a spiritual ‘bloodline’… A mystery to cherish.

All these people are family… And to be so, they had experienced miracle, catastrophe and transformation. Former nuclear families, in which the miracle of young married love had occurred, where births had occurred, had suffered various chain-reactions and melt-down. The equations never make the fall-out comprehensible. Lethal amounts of fission materials irradiate homes, bodies, souls. No one enjoys such catastrophes. But the resilience of people, and the capacity to not only survive but to create new futures – these are remarkable qualities. Transformation happens. The new life opens up…

A wedding — like a funeral — is an opportunity to recognise the significance of family. A point at which certain absolute values are acknowledged, either through observance or breach. History I suppose is about time, but it is also a geographical phenomenon. We establish our presence in places, and get our bearings, define ourselves, set ourselves apart, disperse, gather together — these all are spatial relations. A family is such a place.