Word Magazine February 1974 Page 13-15

CHRISTIAN COMMUNITY:

THE FAMILY

In the discussion of the Christian Community which we began with Miss Bobin’s article two issues ago in THE WORD, we move to a more practical and concrete discussion of the family as Christian Community. It is in this context that all theory about human relationships and ef­forts at community are tested in the daily one-to-one contact. It is also in this relationship that our children first gain their ideas of community and the interaction within it. Hence the discussion will deal with the fam­ily generally and with the role of the family in Christian nurture of their children specifically.

Added to the difficulties inherent in the subject matter is the almost universal complacency of audiences when the subject turns to Christian nurture and the family community. Everyone is in fact prepared to af­firm the importance of the family. Everyone, however, is not clear on the reasons for this importance. It has been my experience, for instance, that for many parents, especially those of teenagers, the centrality of the family is interpreted in terms of parental authority over rebellious youngsters. Needless to say, this un­derstanding is inadequate to a crea­tive understanding of Christian community life. The discussion of the role of the family as community and Christian nurture must be taken be­yond the level of the pious affirma­tion of its importance.

At the same time that we Chris­tians affirm the absolute centrality of the family to the Christian nurture of children, we are experiencing a gen­eral decline of family life (note, I did not say a decline of marriage) and those elements in Western so­ciety which have traditionally been supportive of the family. It will no doubt strike a familiar note when I say that the Christian family is under attack. The family structure and the very notion of permanent relation­ships seems to be giving way to a world of rapid social and moral change — sexual promiscuity, free love, easy divorce, communal experimentation, and in general what can be characterized as “future shock.” The failure of much of family life, the failure of husbands and wives to adequately meet each other’s needs without exploitation, is part and parcel of the failure of the family to provide its younger members with a Christian milieu in which to grow. Both are functions of the much more fundamental failure to agree on a common goal of the family unit and the subsequent failure to direct its efforts and orient its attitudes to­wards that goal.

It is indicative of the disintegra­tion of the family that it has ceased to perform certain functions which have been traditionally ascribed to it. Many of those traditional family functions have of necessity devolved upon other agencies — we no longer, for instance, raise our own food and we no longer face the necessity of maintaining a large family unit to work a farm. This is all fine and good. It is unfortunate, however, that the loss of many of these econ­omic functions seems to have con­verted the family in the minds of many people into a, useless social agency; this would perhaps be true if the family were essentially an ec­onomic institution. It is not, but has behaved as if the loss of these func­tions has robbed it of its meaning. It has, with the old economic func­tions, given up others, especially in the realm of education (i.e., sex edu­cation) and discipline.

Into the vacuum of uncertainty a new vision of the American family is being put forward; the image is pro­vided by the media and advertising. The family is less and less defined in Christian terms or for that matter in biological terms, sexual needs seem­ingly being adequately satisfied out­side of traditional family life. The family is defined in commercial terms. American affluence necessarily transforms the family into a consum­er of those commodities which the greatest manufacturing system in history produces beyond the level of sat­isfying basic human needs. This, in fact, is the basis of our prosperity and trillion dollar economy. Needless to say, this is hardly an elevating view of the family — consuming things it neither needs nor wants. Yet, in spite of all this and the fu­ture possibility of test tube babies, embryo transplants, and new pat­terns of sexual association, we are as­sured by certain sociologists that the family will survive and individuals will continue to seek out a one-to-one relationship in the traditional marriage structure. The family as we know it will survive as one among an increased number of life-style op­tions. It is because of the increase in these options that a reconsidera­tion of the Christian family is essen­tial.

The role of religion as an agent influencing family life has been wan­ing for many years. In brief, all churches are experiencing the fact that their members in general do not actively live their faith daily. Unhap­pily, there seems to be no demon­strable connection between religious life on Sunday and the family life on Monday. On a more general level sociologists have sought in vain for a significant correlation between church membership and ethical con­duct. For the purposes of this discus­sion, the Church exerts less of an in­fluence on the family than do other forces. The family is not seen in Christian sacramental categories.

In the face of this social and re­ligious disruption of the family, we must affirm that the Church has al­ways taken the family seriously and has concerned itself with the qual­ity of family life, seeking to influence it along very distinct lines. Why this is so will, I believe, lead us to a deeper understanding of the nature of the Christian family and its role as the “primary educator.” First, the emphasis on the family as a social structure is based on the understanding that Christian life grows and is worked out not in a vacuum but in concrete human situations. Second, spiritual and moral life is challenged and fulfilled in interpersonal encounters, in community situations. The family in a very real sense is the primary community and as such is subject to the same stresses and forces as any other community. Third, the Church which is itself the type of all communities understands communal relationships as funda­mental to all human life and the quality of communal life as funda­mental to the quality of the spiritual and moral growth within that struc­ture. Now these three points are all interrelated and perhaps say the same thing. The New Testament empha­sizes that it is the love of our neigh­bor which is the pattern of our love for God. St. John (I John 4) writes that if we say we have love for God, but do not love the people with whom we come into contact every day, we are simply liars. Man is man, and Christian man is Christian man, when he is in relationship to other men and to God. This two­fold understanding, that is our rela­tionship to God and to other men, is fundamental to any understanding of Orthodox moral and spiritual life, including the nature of the family and Christian nurture within the family.

If we look at the Church’s history we can see this social concern clearly reflected. It is a belief that life, to use educational jargon, is a “learn­ing situation.” On this basis, with this intuition, the Church has sought to establish and stabilize those situa­tions which are most conducive to Christian growth and the develop­ment of Christian personality. The Church throughout her history has tried to change the community of which she was part, not by great rev­olutions, which by their nature are ambiguous, but by slowly transform­ing certain aspects of society — mari­tal relationships being just one.

Now let us look at a more limited and formal structure before affirm­ing the same principles for the fam­ily. Monasticism will allow us to see this a little more objectively since none of us is directly involved with it. In the Church’s history there have been two types of monasticism: the loner or the hermit variety is prob­ably the earliest, dating from the very first centuries of the Church, and the communal type in which men or women live together in a structured relationship of worship, work, and service. The latter pattern has become the norm in the Ortho­dox Church; allowing for the special vocation of the hermit, the Church has canonized the communal mon­astic life as the type most suitable to the nature of men and to the formation of the Christian life. In a real sense, it is as St. Basil the Great said, “If I live alone, whose feet can I wash?”

The family, like the monastic com­munity, has been endorsed by the Church as a style of life generally conducive to the creation of an en­vironment in which Christian growth can most fruitfully take place. It is again an affirmation that the Chris­tian faith and the Christian life can­not grow, or be lived, or be com­municated in a vacuum, because it cannot exist in a vacuum. It is in the family that the child, as it were, will “catch” or learn Christianity as it is actually lived. He will not ab­sorb abstraction, he will absorb life; in a real sense we cannot teach Christianity, we must rather be Christianity. The parents are in Au­gustine’s conception the sign through which the child begins to form his first ideas of God as good, accepting, and forgiving. In the family the child will hopefully learn forgiveness and love, not because he is told about them but because he sees them and experiences them. He will learn of the essential goodness of sex not from those well-intentioned sex education courses, but from the family where sex as an overall and total relationship between a man and a woman has its natural and authen­tic home and where it is associated with mutual joy and self-giving in and out of the bed.

The Christian family is the con­cretization of Christian love built on mutual self-giving, forgiveness, and trust. We know that no community, whether familial or monastic, can survive when it is characterized by self-affirmation, self-aggrandizement, and selfishness. (We must be cau­tious not to idealize the family as necessarily positive; we all know families that are destructive to their members and in fact are not com­munities at all.) The family as a structure is then a learning situation and in that sense it serves essentially the same function as the monastic

community and the two styles of life are not antithetical.

What I have attempted to estab­lish to this point is that learning takes place in life and more specifically Christian learning in broad inter­personal situations. I have conscious­ly avoided the more limited reference to Christian education in the sense of a formal learning situation, teachers, and textbooks. Unfortunately, the larger definition of life as the learn­ing situation may allow some a sigh of relief as responsibility seems to disappear among the numerous peo­ple with whom the child comes in contact. In fact the description means quite the opposite; it is an effort to take the responsibility out of the hands of the church school and put it where it belongs, with the family and the larger parish com­munity. The community does the ed­ucating; the parish, the friends, the family are the real learning agents and to speak of Christian nurture is to speak of Christian community and cooperation among the various people with whom the child comes into contact.

All of this emphasis on the determining influence of the family on the growth of faith-life must neces­sarily be conditioned by a sober ap­praisal of influencing factors outside of the family and the Christian com­munity. This includes in general the world outside the control of the home — friends, television, school and the general social milieu. Perhaps we must think more in terms of a type of censorship of experiences, changing the nature of the forces af­fecting the family and the child, and finally educating the child in such a way so as to more specifically counter these forces. In short, what I am saying is that it is the responsibility of the Christian family to try to shape the environment outside of the home — happily, in a democracy we yet have this possibility.

For the purposes of our discussion, I would like to refer to a study completed in England by a religious edu­cation specialist, Ronald Goldman, and published in his book Religious Thinking from Childhood to Adoles­cence (New York: Seabury Press, 1968). Goldman’s study affirms that the church school does play a role in Christian formation, but only a minimal one. The relationship between church school attendance and growth of “religious insight” though it is positive is not significant. His conclusions: few children who attend church school regularly achieve high “religious insights,” and many children who attend church school are not religiously motivated nor do they develop the ability to think with “religious insights.”

As a corollary to this conclusion, Goldman discovered that the deter­mining factor in the development of this ability to think with “religious insights” was the supportive role of the family members, which, for his purposes, was demonstrated by Church attendance. Children, ac­cording to Goldman’s findings, do imitate their parents. Something we have all been saying for a long time.

We are here discussing specifically the early childhood years, but much of this is applicable to older children. During this period the family per­forms or should perform certain very distinct functions which can be sum­marized for our purposes under three categories. First, and perhaps fore­most, the family provides a stable environment of security, confidence, and love. All of which are indispensable not only to a normal emotional life but to the normal development of a mature faith-life. The ability to trust mommy and daddy is direct­ly related to the growth of ability to trust God as essential to a mature spiritual life. Here is where the no­tion of and the relationship to God as “Our Father” becomes a living possibility. I think many of us are familiar with the aspect of Freud’s understanding of religion and Chris­tianity in which God is reduced to a great “father image.” The Church has always intuited this sort of re­lationship, but in the reverse; in the family the father is in fact the God-image, as inescapable and uncom­fortable as that may be.

Second, the family assists the child’s growth in faith by appropriate reflection on subjects as the occasion arises — a beautiful day, trees, a new baby, the dinner table, animals, etc. We must, of course, be careful to avoid giving the child, especially in the formative years, a mistaken no­tion of Christianity. Again, referring to Goldman, it is important not to force the child too early into a for­mal learning situation which will channel his thinking into words and crystallize it into inflexible concepts such as a God with a big white beard sitting on a throne in a place in the sky called heaven, dealing out rewards and punishments. In general, it is true that a child will attempt to simplify anything he cannot un­derstand, the process of simplifica­tion often results in distortion and we are all familiar with the religious malversions which include such confusions as “And lead us not into Penn Station,” the three angels which vis­ited Abraham Lincoln in the White House. While these may be very cute they also are very telling as to what children can handle conceptually in the pre-school years. Unhappily some Christians never overcome these sim­plifications and the distortions in a real sense lead to a terribly stultified spiritual life.

Third, the family can consciously attempt to create an environment where the child is initiated into cer­tain “religious” activities which car­ry with them no formal explanation and no attempt is made to have him understand them. Remembering that his understanding is limited, we can reach the child with his normal learning tool — his body and senses. The child can be taught to make the sign of the cross, to recite certain simple word prayers such as “I love you, Jesus,” “Bless so-and-so,” or “Thank you for this or that.” Little family rituals which are very often some of our most cherished memories of childhood can be created — ­lighting candles before an icon on Saturday night or on a holiday, fam­ily Communion, prayers before meals, common church attendance, and blessing Easter baskets and fruits on Transfiguration. At this particular age, and perhaps even in a sense right on through most of the church school program, we must attempt to move away from the “word” to the “action.” From this point of view active participation in what can be described as the multimedia Ortho­dox liturgical activities is a natural. The focus of Orthodox liturgical ex­perience is very often non-verbal and filled with movement, with col­ors, with lights, and intimacy — all of which provide the child with a total “sensational” atmosphere which is quite self-evident and in need of no explanation. This perhaps clarifies for us where our emphasis should be placed in our family and parish edu­cational efforts.

Before closing, it is necessary to say a few words about the distribu­tion of responsibility within the fam­ily community. Many people consider religion and religious instruction as the exclusive responsibility of the mother; it is somehow interpreted as woman’s work. This is a serious error and a mistake for the healthy de­velopment not only of the child’s spiritual life, but of his emotional life as well. Very often in the Amer­ican situation the child sees his fath­er infrequently and comes to rely al­most totally on his mother for the satisfaction of emotional and spiritual needs. We must, from a specifically Christian motivation, begin to think in terms of a rebalancing or redistri­bution of familial responsibilities in a more flexible manner. The father’s role in the Christian family and Christian education is a complimen­tary one and Christian education ne­cessitates a close cooperation between parents in the growths of the child’s faith-life.

It is not, I believe, sentimental to claim that the child, at any age, will learn nothing but cynicism unless he sees the Christian life, which he learns about in the church school, alive and well in his own home. We cannot expect any authentic Chris­tian education without the family. We have realized that church schools and text books, no matter how ade­quately they conform to the needs of the students and the needs of the material, are by their very nature in­adequate to the development of the Christian faith-life in our children.

There can be no better place for Christian maturation for both adults and children than in the Christian family community. This is perhaps especially true in educating our chil­dren for mature and a mature rela­tionship of Christian love in estab­lishing a new community. It is here, in the family, that the child will see and learn those elements which make for the foundation of a crea­tive Christian community in mar­riage, which is indeed, the very image of the relationship of Christ to His Church. (Ephesians 5:32-33)