Session Twelve 2009

Reading: Marsha Norman, in her 1983 play “Night Mother,” wrote, “Family is just accident…They don’t mean to get on your nerves. They don’t even mean to be your family, they just are.” On the one had we have the image of ‘family’ in which blood is ‘thicker than water’. On the other hand we have the idea the ‘family is just accident’ and that one’s true family is the people with whom our lives most intimately touch, whether they are related or not.

1. What needs are met with your biological family and which with your “chosen, extended family”?

2. What do you appreciate about our family of origin and what do you wish had been different? How do those experiences affect you now?

3. What has been your experience attempting to balance relationships and responsibilities within your family and outside your family?

4. Are there any particular spiritual practices that you share now as a family or did when you were younger?

Closing ritual: May the light around us guide our footsteps, and hold us fast to the best and most righteous that we seek. May the darkness around us nurture our dreams, and give us rest so that we many give ourselves to the work of our world. Let us seek to remember the wholeness of our lives, the weaving of light and shadow in this great and astonishing dance in which we move.

Call it a clan, call it a network, call it a tribe, call it a family. Whatever you call it, whoever you are, you need one.

If you ever start feeling like you have the goofiest, craziest, most dysfunctional family in the world, all you have to do is go to a state fair. Because five minutes at the fair, you’ll be going, ‘you know, we’re alright. We are dang near royalty.

Nobody has ever before asked the nuclear family to live all by itself in a box the way we do. With no relatives, no support, we’ve put ourselves in an impossible situation.

In some families, please is described as the magic word. In our house, however, it was sorry.

Family quarrels have a total bitterness unmatched by others. Yet it sometimes happens that they also have a kind of tang, pleasantness beneath the unpleasantness, based on the tacit understanding that this is not for keeps; that any limb you climb out on will still be there later for you to climb back.

The great advantage of living in a large family is that early lesson of life’s essential unfairness.

If the family were a fruit, it would be an orange, a circle of sections, held together but separable – each segment distinct.

The lack of emotional security of our American young people is due, I believe, to their isolation from the larger family unit. No two people – no mere father and mother – as I have often said, are enough to provide emotional security for a child. He needs to feel himself one in a world of kinfolk, persons of variety in age and temperament, and yet allied to himself by an indissoluble bond which he cannot break if he could, for nature has welded him into it before he was born.