Reflections on Family Gatherings

Thanksgiving, now past, and Christmas and New Year’s, now near at hand, bring with them the prospects of family gatherings. While we often look forward to these gatherings, they may also fill us with some amount of dread. “All happy families are alike,” Tolstoy wrote, while “each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way,” an observation whose veracity is confirmed when one considers Tolstoy’s assumption that there are no happy families.

Family gatherings bring in dynamics no other of our enterprises involve for the simple reason that we don’t choose our families. The gatherings bring together decades of dynamic interactions – some positive, some negative – that cast us in particular roles that we can neither escape nor fully embrace as our own. To borrow that overused and accursed word: family life is both the condition of and the greatest challenge to our authenticity.

That challenge, however, can and must be embraced by us as a condition of our growth as persons. G.K. Chesterton – no stranger to these pages – once wrote that if you really want to see humanity in all its variety and diversity you should not look afar but near-at-hand. Attend a family reunion and you’ll have to deal with the disturbing differences among human beings not abstractly or on your own terms, but concretely and on someone else’s. Family dinners demand from us an alteration of our interests and conduct in a way that diversity seminars and trips abroad never will.

As an example: the surprisingly successful television series The Bear (and its success is, for me, a cause for hope in the otherwise dismal landscape of mass entertainment) presented in its second season an episode that re-presented a family holiday dinner. I’ll confess that it may be about the most intense hour of television I’ve ever watched, for not only was the clear dysfunction of that particular family on display, but the show elevated that particularity into universal themes. God willing none of our holiday dinners will be anything like that, but the full range of pathologies on display are universal enough that they will resonate in any gathering. And we also can begin to anticipate how those dynamics will redound down and down the line to each of the characters as they fumble their way through their daily lives. Family gatherings are opportunities for remembrance, but those memories can often be painful for us precisely because they are not hermetically sealed in the past. For whatever else may be said about the family in The Bear, they were ruthlessly honest with each other, having stripped away all the accretions of civility that would otherwise make such interactions … well … bearable. But beneath all those layers of politeness rests the naked truth about ourselves, and perhaps family gatherings are the only times we are required to face that truth fully.

I think Chesterton was getting at that in his reflections.

The modern writers who have suggested, in a more or less open manner, that the family is a bad institution, have generally confined themselves to suggesting, with much sharpness, bitterness, or, pathos, that perhaps the family is not always very congenial. Of course the family is a good institution because it is uncongenial. It is wholesome precisely because it contains so many divergencies and varieties. It is, as the sentimentalists say, like a little kingdom, and, like most other little kingdoms, is generally in a state of something resembling anarchy. It is exactly because our brother George is not interested in our religious difficulties, but is interested in the Trocadero Restaurant, that the family has some of the bracing qualities of the commonwealth. It is precisely because our uncle Henry does not approve of the theatrical ambitions of our sister Sarah that the family is like humanity. The men and women who, for good reasons and bad, revolt against the family, are, for good reasons and bad, simply revolting against mankind. Aunt Elizabeth is unreasonable, like mankind. Papa is excitable, like mankind. Our youngest brother is mischievous, like mankind. Grandpapa is stupid, like the world; he is old, like the world.

Or, even more directly, with Chesterton’s rapier wit fully on display:

Doubtless men flee from small environments into lands that are very deadly. But this is natural enough; for they are not fleeing from death. They are fleeing from life. And this principle applies to ring within ring of the social system of humanity. It is perfectly reasonable that men should seek for some particular variety of the human type, so long as they are seeking for that variety of the human type, and not for mere human variety. It is quite proper that a British diplomatist should seek the society of Japanese generals, if what he wants is Japanese generals. But if what he wants is people different from himself, he had much better stop at home and discuss religion with the housemaid. It is quite reasonable that the village genius should come up to conquer London if what he wants is to conquer London. But if he wants to conquer something fundamentally and symbolically hostile and also very strong, he had much better remain where he is and have a row with the rector. The man in the suburban street is quite right if he goes to Ramsgate for the sake of Ramsgate — a difficult thing to imagine. But if, as he expresses it, he goes to Ramsgate “for a change,” then he would have a much more romantic and even melodramatic change if he jumped over the wall into his neighbours garden. The consequences would be bracing in a sense far beyond the possibilities of Ramsgate hygiene.

Note here that Chesterton’s interest is not in “diversity,” that rather crabbed and indistinct concept that dominates so much of our discourse. His interest is in “variety,” a much more serious idea for a much more serious enterprise: the need to see life from the inside and not from the outside, for only such seeing can allow us to see ourselves properly. The narrowing of focus is actually a broadening of vision. Each person is an archetype but also a person, the paradox noted by Chesterton.

The demands of family life connect directly to our capacity for self-improvement, in a way that the interest in diversity never could:

The best way that a man could test his readiness to encounter the common variety of mankind would be to climb down a chimney into any house at random, and get on as well as possible with the people inside. And that is essentially what each one of us did on the day that he was born.

I was once conversing with a student and asked him how he planned to spend his summer. He replied that he planned on spending time in Europe. When I asked why, he answered that he wanted to experience diversity, to see the world differently – as if indulgently wandering the streets of Paris were the best means to achieving this. I asked him what his father did for a living, and he informed me his father worked in a factory. “If you really want to experience some diversity, something truly different than your ivy-league tower, you might want to consider spending your summer working in that factory. It would harden you in positive ways that a trip to France never could, it would give you a greater appreciation for genuine differences among human beings, and it would give you a greater appreciation for your father and the daily contours of his life.” The student looked at me thoughtfully, nodding his head in agreement.

Two months later, he flew off to France.

I often find family gatherings exhausting. Too often I am more conscious of a role I am playing than a person I am being. I suspect a lot of people, like myself, experience such gatherings as places where you’re never really understood or never really yourself. But I wouldn’t, for all that, avoid them. As time begins its inevitable theft of our family’s core, I lose not only a loved one but a piece of who I am. Such loss doesn’t make me more authentic or a better person.

Discussion Questions:

1. What does it say about a culture if we increasingly regard family gatherings as optional opportunities we can easily neglect?

2. Why has the idea of “diversity” seemed to replace the idea of “variety”? Is there any significant difference between these two things?

3. Does the fact that families have become more dispersed affect our moral development by affecting our moral obligations?

By Jeff Polet

Director of the Ford Leadership Forum, Gerald R. Ford Presidential Foundation

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