Modern Family is a situation comedy that has been
running on network television for the last eight years or so. As the industry measures these things, it’s been
a very successful television series: it is highly rated, it has won a boatload
of awards, and it’s widely syndicated.
One of the
most interesting things about Modern
Family is that virtually all of the characters are related in some way, but
the nature of most of those relationships is a little complicated by the
characters’ histories. The paterfamilias, Jay Pritchett, is on his
second marriage, to a woman, Gloria, who is no older than Jay’s adult children
from his first marriage. Gloria also is on her second marriage. Gloria and Jay are rearing Gloria’s son Manny,
who is from her previous marriage. Manny
is a bit of an unusual kid, much to Jay’s perplexity.
Jay’s adult
daughter from his first marriage, Claire, is married to Phil Dunphy, who pushes
the tradition of the dopey TV dad to absurd levels. Claire and Phil have three children, Haley,
Alex and Luke. I find Claire Dunphy to be
one of the most interesting characters on the show. She wants, badly, to have the perfect family,
but the imperfections of her husband and children prevent them from achieving
her ideal. Claire was a little wild when
she was younger, and made some mistakes and poor decisions. One of
her goals as a parent is to rear her children in such a way that they don’t
make the same mistakes she did. And so it
drives her crazy to see her daughter Haley make some of the same mistakes she
did.
Jay’s other
child from his first marriage, Mitchell, is gay, something that Jay, who is of
the old school, tries his best to come to terms with, but doesn’t always fully
succeed. Mitchell and his boyfriend,
later husband, Cameron, adopt a daughter named Lily.
There are a
number of criticisms we might make of Modern
Family. From the point of view of
morality, it doesn’t always promote values that the Catholic Church would
consider ideal. But my purpose today is
not to condemn the show. Instead, I want
to talk about an aspect of the show that may serve as food for thought,
contemplation, discussion and even prayer on today’s feast of the Holy Family.
Whatever we
may wish to say about the Pritchett clan on Modern
Family, I think we can agree that they are not a perfect family. As you can probably glean from my brief
overview of the characters, a number of them bring their pasts into their family relationships. And every single character has his or her
shortcomings and foibles, all of which are grist for the comedy mill on the
show. Nobody is spared.
And really,
how many of us come from a perfect family ourselves? My family has its skeletons and its aspects
that fall short of perfection. I’ll
share one of those with you now. At the
time these things happened, it was high family drama, but with the passage of
time, these things have a way of receding in importance. One of
my sisters had a child out of wedlock when I was in college. My parents were, still are, faithful
Catholics, and I can assure you that this was not the life script that they had
written for her, nor for any of their children.
But my parents reacted as virtually every set of parents I’ve ever known
has reacted when one of their kids pulls a stunt like that.
Let me add
that my parents’ reaction was not the reaction that Hollywood writers are all
too likely to write into their scripts.
In the Hollywood version, the parents are filled with self-righteous
Christian rectitude: they condemn their daughter for her sin and cast her out
of the family in her hour of need.
But that’s
not how my parents operated – it’s still not how they operate. My parents weren’t necessarily thrilled by
this development, but they reacted with love and generosity. They embraced my sister and her little son,
and provided them with support and material assistance. In due course, her son, my nephew Tom, grew
into a teenager and then a young man. He
also fathered a child out of wedlock, a son named Dylan. My nephew, my sister’s son Tom, was
tragically killed in an auto accident a number of years ago. Tom’s young girlfriend, Emma, the mother of his son
Dylan, married after a few years. Emma’s
new husband adopted little Dylan, and they have a life of her own now. My parents have reached out to Emma a few
times to see if we can help support my parents’ great-grandson Dylan, but Emma has
never responded. So I have a
great-nephew out there somewhere, who should be a teen-ager by now, and whom I
hope is doing okay. I’d love to be part
of his life, but apparently that’s not in Emma’s script.
So that’s my
modern family, or one snapshot of it. I have
a lot of brothers and sisters, and each of us has managed to come up with our
own family situations that may fall short of perfection. Perhaps your family has its own histories of
things that don’t quit attain the ideal.
Here’s the
point: unlike sitcom characters, our families don’t have the benefit of a team
of professional writers to arrange events so that everything comes out great by
the end of each episode. Most of us just
do our best to muddle through our complicated family relationships and
situations.
And to my
way of thinking, the way we muddle through our family situations determines
whether or not we are a holy family. We
can choose to muddle through by being mean and selfish and hard-hearted. Or we can be like my parents and treat
unexpected and unwelcome situations with generosity and love.
St. Joseph
surely reacted this way when confronted with his own family complication. Like my sister, our blessed mother Mary was a
young woman pregnant out of wedlock. Joseph
could have publicly rejected her and the child, putting them at great risk but
perhaps salvaging some of his own honor. It seems that would have been a conventional
reaction of his time and place. Or, he
could have done what Matthew’s Gospel reports he was contemplating, and quietly
ended the betrothal. That would have
been kind to her, and incidentally put his own honor at risk. But Joseph chose a still more loving and
generous path by marrying her and adopting the child Jesus as his own. Presented with a few different possible paths
in the face of this unexpected and presumably unwelcome development, Joseph chose
the path of holiness.
There’s an
old adage that says that we don’t choose our families. That is true, but we can choose to be holy in
how we muddle through our family situations and relationships, whatever they
are. One of the reasons I really like
the television show Modern Family is that
the characters, whatever their problems, always seem to muddle through – and generally
seem to err on the side of love and generosity.
That may be what we’re able to manage in our quest to be a holy
family. None of us has the perfect family. Even Joseph and Mary had a complicated family
situation. We may or may not have a
modern family. But with the help of Jesus,
Mary and Joseph, all of us can do our best to have a holy family.
Jim, this meant a great deal to me. Thank you for posting it here.
ReplyDeleteOne anecdote from my own flawed family: My dad's father had four wives, each of whom he abandoned (except the last). Dad was born to the third wife.
Through some intense digging many years ago, I discovered that my grandfather left behind four children whom he never saw or communicated with. Before dad died, I was able to find vital statistics about his father, and he eventually met two of his half siblings. They generously shared photos and stories. Dad died having lifelong questions about his father answered and feeling blessed in having had a stepfather whom we always knew as "Grampa," a man who made many mistakes, but loved us like his own.
This week, after some casual browsing on Ancestry.com, I found two more of my grandfather's abandoned daughters. One died two years ago, but the other one is still alive at 92. I was able to find her niece and asked if the family was interested in the info I had collected.
Yes, they were. They are still processing the information. They may or may not want to meet me. (One is my age and lives 10 miles away.) It doesn't really matter if we don't meet. We will never have that sense of family that my grandfather deprived us of.
What matters is that my wayward grandfather can no longer withhold himself from his children and descendants. He is no longer a shame who has to be hushed up. Some piece of them that they struggled to accept can be put to rest, as sad as the story is.
Jean, that is really moving. I believe you really are doing holy work by connecting up these family dots. It seems to me you're offering a chance for healing and wholeness. Bless you for what you are doing.
DeleteJim, Holy Family Sunday must be the weekend for deacons to preach; my husband also preached this morning.
ReplyDeleteIt would be hard to find a family now which didn't have some similar circumstances to the one you described. Out of 12 grandchildren of my parents, there were 3 who had children, who weren't married at the time. Fortunately the family has contact with the kids, and are on friendly terms with the non-family parents.
It's a different story with our two nephews who are the children of my husband's brother, who is now deceased. The brother and his wife divorced when the boys were still young. They lived with their mother and we didn't see much of them after that point. Their mother also died when the boys were young adults. They are now in their 30s. We have a rather tenuous contact with them, we text them from time to time, and they text back. Not what you would call close, but better than nothing, I guess. It's easy to diss the social media as being shallow substitutes for real contact, but sometimes it is the only contact. And as Jean mentioned about Ancestry.com sometimes it is the means for people to reconnect, or connect in the first place.
Katherine, I expect you're right about deacons preaching this past weekend. The two Sundays of the year you can pretty much be guaranteed to hear a deacon preach in our parish are Holy Family and Father's Day. It shouldn't bother me, but it does a little bit. It's difficult not to feel that we deacon families are being asked to hold ourselves up as model families (or, even worse, ourselves as a model husbands and fathers) to the rest of the parish community. The last thing I want to do to my wife and kids is put that kind of visibility and pressure on them. So then I have to search every year for something to talk about that doesn't involve them. But I'm grateful for the chance to preach.
DeleteI appreciate your sharing that bit of your family history with me. I agree that it's not unusual. And I agree wit Tom that the church needs to find ways of acknowledging and embracing those family configurations that don't quite match up to the traditional ideal.
My husband talked about St. Joseph, and Anna and Simeon. About how not every father is a biological father, and how sometimes "family" means people who are there to lend support, in whatever way they can.
DeleteOur homily this morning presupposed the model family of yore -- Dick and Jane and several sibs, plus Spot and Mother and Father and Grandmother and Grandfather and nieces and nephews within driving distance. And, of course, we know such families are honored in their absence, not in their prevalence. As the usual boilerplate was preached, I counted the blended families and single mothers around the church.
ReplyDeleteI find it odd that in all the hand-wringing over the absence of the ideal, capitalism is never mentioned even though the pressures of our supposedly inevitable economic system account for much of the absence. When you make money the measure of worth and give job creators control of the economy, you get bread winners who are seldom home while the kids are awake, or a need for two incomes. (Try to figure out how one modern wage worker could pay for families of six or eight or ten kids as of once upon a time.) Maybe if the job creators felt a compulsion to pay wages that would support families... but labor costs are money out of their pockets. That is an iron law, we are told, and the only alternative (again, we are told) is socialism. I also find it odd, but a little less so, that the feminist movement bought into the job creators' version of the Way It Has to Be. So we have created an economy in which it is practically child abuse for both parents not to be working -- and working maybe a couple of gig jobs, because that puts more money into the pockets of the job creators, who control the inevitable alternative to socialism. And then for a few generations, kids grow up with part-time parents and are expected, by Holy Mother Church, to form those ideal families.
The Church needs either a new theology of family or a different kind of economy. As it is, old expectations leave the Church saying practically nothing to the folks in the pew, who have to find holiness without help from the pulpit.
"I find it odd that in all the hand-wringing over the absence of the ideal, is never mentioned even though the pressures of our supposedly inevitable economic system account for much of the absence."
DeleteI do agree that economic stress is hard on families. Personally, I think it's economic stress mixed with other stuff. Have you seen the Ken Burns documentary series on Prohibition that has aired once or twice on PBS? I think the first episode in that series is called "A Nation of Drunks" or some such. It talks about how amazingly inebriated the American male of the species was in the 19th century, and how that led directly to the rise of Carrie Nation's movement to smash up the saloons where the men drank away the meager weekly paycheck while the wives and children waited in vain at home for some housekeeping money.
I see something similar in the American male these days, in particular those on the wrong side of the college-education chasm. But one important difference is that what formerly used to be a labor shortage has turned into a labor surplus, especially in some of the rust belt towns where I've spent my life. So many of those men are underemployed or unemployed. Booze is still an option for them, but of course now it's supplemented by marijuana, heroin, opioids and who knows what else. And I guess what I sense at the bottom of it is despair. Why should I get married if I can just get high, get laid and hopefully not get the consequences? Or maybe I'm willing to get married but the girlfriend thinks I'm a no-account nobody and hitching her fate to mine strikes her as a really bad idea.
Raber and I have had discussions about this re "feminism" and the demise of the living wage. I think there are a number of angles to consider: Did a large influx of women into the workforce make labor too plentiful and cheap? Did the fact that "a woman could do it" erode salaries? Did women in upper management merely support the status quo? Is it possible for Americans to coalesce around a movement like feminism when the national narrative promotes individual achievement (maybe the civil rights movement of the late 1950s to mid 60s is the exception that proves the rule)? To what extent did larger numbers of women in the workforce help or hurt unionism? To what extent have the stresses of juggling work and family caused marital instability? To what extent have men been passive bystanders as the world of work and family turned upside down? To what extent are women unfairly blamed for current labor, wage, and familial instability?
ReplyDeleteAfter age 40, either Raber or I was working part-time so The Boy spent less time in day care and more time bonding with the extended family. Who was doing full-time work duty boiled down to who had employer-paid health care insurance.
The Ozzie and Harriets in the local parish who are either retired UAWs or farmers with nice savings and pensions have their heads in the sand, sometimes about their very own kids and grandchildren.
Interesting point. Never thought of the women flooding the workplace angle. It certainly wasn't an overnight thing as is the Repub tax "reform". I would still ascribe the problem mainly to government-supported anti-unionism going all the way back to Taft-Hartley and culminating in Reagan's outright war on them. And the right to work for less laws.
DeleteThose horrid "right to work" laws are also insidious. They basically allow workers to be protected by but not support a union. And they also ushered in "at will" employment.
DeleteThese are high times for the Captains of Industry.
Stanley, "...the right to work for less laws" is a pretty accurate description. Around here "union" is a dirty word. But where I work a couple of production lines had to work both Saturdays before the holidays. They have been on mandatory overtime for over a year. Of course nobody likes that, especially parents of young children. But apparently they don't connect the dots.
DeleteThey connect the dots; it's just that living paycheck to paycheck with a family to support mitigates against raising a ruckus and getting fired.
DeleteInfo can help. The Chronicle of Higher Ed's Adjunct Project had an interactive feature that allowed adjuncts to enter pay and benefit info that could then be compared with other institutions. Our college cranked up pay this year after being on the lowest paid list for a four-year nonprofit private.
Now we are only AMONG the lower paid tier of adjuncts.
All good questions. My original thought was more mundane. The job creators (including, I guess, the ones who import part-time foreign labor for their private clubs) had to assume their male employees were supporting families. Once women joined the workforce, that assumption went away. "A-ha," said clever job creator having his pockets expanded by his tailor, "I can now pay half a living wage and let the employee's spouse make up the difference." Not saying that it happened all the time. Just often enough.
ReplyDeleteI think it happens pretty much all the time for everybody in the 99 percent. People are so exhausted trying to make a living and keeping their marriages from crumbling that they don't have the focus and energy to organize and protest. The Millennials are just too scared. They know the system sucks, but they don't believe it can be changed while the current goons are in charge.
DeleteMeantime, I hear nothing in my parish that might help a family, which is why I appreciated Jim's homily so much. It addresses real stresses and how we can respond with legalism ("You are a bad bad sinner") or generosity ("You screwed up, but let's figure out a way to pull it out if the crapper.").
Amen to that. What I liked about Jim's homily-- I guess I left it out -- was that he is saying you don't HAVE to look like the Victorian ideal family to be holy. The original Holy Family began with an unwed mother, but somehow that never comes up in most family day homilies.
DeleteI agree with those who think that holding up the family of Joseph, Mary and Jesus as the "ideal" family is mistaken for several reasons. Some of those have been mentioned - there are many "imperfect" families that are "holy".
ReplyDeleteMy biggest problem with the "Holy Family" is that in many ways it does not offer any kind of real world model for most, who work to achieve some kind of harmony and holiness in their own marriages and families. After all, neither Mary nor Jesus could "sin", as they were born without the inclination to sin ("original sin"). So to begin with, in this family there are two "perfect", sinless people. What could Joseph complain about with a sinless wife and sinless stepson? They didn't just have a head start on holiness, they were born that way, unlike the rest of us.
Secondly, according to the RCC, the marriage was never consummated. This does not usually create a happy, healthy marriage. In fact, in the RCC, it is grounds for annulment, since, according to Catholic teaching the main purpose of marriage (and sex) is procreation Mary and Joseph did not procreate, according to the RCC. While the Orthodox share the notion of Mary's perpetual virginity, most other christians do not. They refuse to go through the linguistic/translation contortions needed to interpret references to Jesus' sibs as being either cousins or children from a never-mentioned-in-scriptures earlier marriage of Joseph. The teaching that Mary was "ever virgin" and represents the "ideal" woman is a bit of a slap in the face to all non-celibates, to all married people, as it implies that she was too "pure" to sully herself with marital sexual relations. Of course, the RCC reinforces this in its teachings that the vocation of celibate priest is somehow superior to that of married people (which it is not).
Mary and Joseph were parents to only one child, relying on abstinence to prevent the births of more children. If everyone followed this example of marriage, the human race would have died out a couple of thousand years ago.
While holding up this marriage as the "ideal" - no kids born of the union - the RCC also teaches that modern birth control is evil because it gives couples a safe and reliable way to limit their own family size, even though modern birth control usually reduces stress on couples, and helps support the marriage, and thus, the entire family.
Finally, as the mother of three, I would have found it far easier to be a 'holy" mother if I had only one perfect child and a spouse who was also sinless.
I can't argue with you, Anne. I don't always get it. But my sense is that we are to contemplate the sacrifices that the holy family made, particularly Mary and Joseph (celibacy, no more children, unplanned pregnancy, son's criminal execution), the better to bear the sacrifices we all make for family life.
DeleteThe notion of having a sinless spouse strikes me as a special cross to bear. :-)
I am going to go out on a limb and mention a gripe that I have had lately. Maybe it goes with the liturgical season, I don't know. Or maybe I just got in a cranky mood about it. I have lost count of the number of Scripture readings and homilies I have heard the word "womb". Please, women can't be reduced to a body part. Not Mary, not any of us. Do we, for instance, mention " testicles", or other man parts, in liturgy or prayer that often?
DeleteIsn't the Orthodox name for Mary "theotokos," which means "God bearer"? I think I'd get sick of that after a while.
DeleteNot sure how you navigate the theology with outsiders, especially when you aren't 100 percent behind it. To wit:
We were talking with the Boy and Girl, who had asked about the Immaculate Conception (because they live near a church of that name), and The Girl said, "So God had to make sure her uterus was clean enough for God to be born in? Then why was it OK for him to be born in a stable? If God wanted to be fully human, why wasn't a regular woman good enough?"
I gave her Deacon Jim's email. JUST KIDDING!
Those dang kids and their questions!
DeleteI don't have good answers for these questions, and I certainly have very little "figured out." I'm just willing to suspend disbelief and work with the story until it makes some sense, at least on a figurative or literary level. That has always been my entrance point.
DeleteJean - The notion of having a sinless spouse strikes me as a special cross to bear. :-)
ReplyDeleteLOL! So true. I hadn't thought about it that way.
Katherine, that's one of my gripes about the RCC in general. The reduction of women to their "wombs", as though we don't also have other body parts, including brains, is so insulting. The church puts women on a phony pedestal as far as their ability to bear children is concerned. This goes along with the whole "feminine genius" malarkey which is used to justify patriarchy in the church, the denial of a sacrament to the people who have wombs.
With its teaching that marriage is ordered to procreation as the most important thing (the infertile are forgiven their lapse in failing to provide children to the church) the church essentially reduces marriage to a utilitarian function - married people are expected to work not only to support themselves and their families, but to support the church (financially and with their unpaid "time and talent"), and by giving birth to new Catholics who will take their places someday in supporting the institution, especially the clerical class.
It's a vicious circle. The church will not be able to move past these distorted teachings and understandings until they ordain married people, including women, but the very thought sends most in clerical collars and miters to a near panic state.
Theotokos, God-bearer. Always liked that. Sounds like something we can all do, even the wombless.
ReplyDeleteThat's a nice thought!
Delete