A Talk for Holy
Family Sunday
A discussion of the
connections between Christian teaching on family and Confucian Ethics, based on
the readings for Holy Family Sunday
The Pauline letter to the Colassians recommends compassion,
kindness, meekness, lowliness and patience. Confucius, who has the same idea,
sums it as: full humanity. We need to work out of the particular thing we have
as humans that most animals seem to lack: detailed memory and imagination. We
can do unto others as we would have them do unto us because we remember how it
was for us, when we were in their shoes, and because we can imagine being in
their places.
Holy Family Sunday comes very close to Confucius in spirit,
because the readings hold up family as he did, as the principal training ground
and maintenance gym for full humanity, where, if we work out every day, we
might get somewhere in – oh – seventy years or so.
Full humanity is contrasted with being cleverer animals –
and that is visible today too, in the story of Herod, who clings so tight to
power that even a vague threat sets off a rampage of baby killing. We don’t
whether he killed these babies; we know he killed relatives (Augustus: better
to be born a pig than Herod’s kid). This was pretty common; when their power is
threatened, people turn vicious. So do poodles; just try to get something away
from our cuddly little friend Charlie when he thinks it’s his. People can get
over that. Indeed, I think it’s pretty safe to see all of ethics as about
getting over the strange grip we have on our power status: our striving to keep
it, our wallowing and obsession with the lack of it, our envy of those who have
it. All these are natural, and a great deal of scriptural ink is devoted to
making people, in this way, unnatural or supernatural – that is, able to
marinate their relationships, looking up and looking down, in memory and imagination, in understanding and
empathy.
The book of Sirach gives a set of familiar admonitions,
promises, and warnings: “Children, help your parents in their old age, and do
not grieve them as long as they live.” “Kindness to parents will serve as
reparation for sins.” And, my favorite, “A mother’s curse uproots the
children’s foundations.” Behind all of these is an old and familiar story: the
son who has been overshadowed in power and knowledge and wealth by his father
and mother gradually gains skill and strength and knowledge, and, at a certain
point, begins to exult in his strength and get his own back for all the times
he had to obey and defer. The parents are left discarded, pitiful, pointless,
dishonored, who once were the natural rulers of their family.
That’s one story of grasping after power. There are a
thousand such stories in any family, because, in any family, power is fluid.
The baby is all powerful until it can begin to do things on its own. The
firstborn is king, until the second child arrives, or the grandparent comes to
stay, or someone gets sick. The parents
consult with, defer to, borrow money from the grandparents, and then, one day,
the grandparents make some blunder, display some ineptitude, and gradually the
power shifts, until the parents are discussing how to maneuver grandma into
selling the house, into being more realistic about driving. The children watch,
waiting their turns. Among the children, one is at any given time the screw up,
the one we’re worried about, and the others get to sun themselves in the warm
light of being “the good kid.” That shifts from week to week. Power between a
married couple shifts similarly, on many levels: who makes the money, who
contributes more to the world, who has more time to think, who does the hard
tasks, who gets to be with the kids – on all these dimensions, the game of
superior and inferior is played out. We have what the psychologists call “massed
practice” in power roles, day after day.
And that’s possibly why Confucius (and the Christian
tradition) see the family as such a useful training ground and exercise ground
in humanity: the relations shift often enough, precisely enough, in enough
different ways, to enough different people, that we can begin to understand
what such shifts are, from all perspectives. We can begin, that is, to grow up,
to blunt the edges, to soften the necessary blows, to make allowances – to
practice, in the words of Colassians: compassion, kindness, lowliness,
meekness, and patience – to learn, in the words of Simone Weil, the finest
Christian ethicist I know, that it is better not to command everywhere one has
power to command.
What’s explicit in Confucian teaching is implicit in
Christian teaching. Jesus is presented as coming from a family, maintaining
relations with that family throughout his life, and recreating a kind of family
community among his disciples. His central ritual act is the opening of a
family meal to all who are willing to break bread together. His new word for
God is: daddy.
Always hearing these readings, growing up, I felt they
picked on kids – who always have to obey and defer – Later, they bothered me
because they seemed to make family this necessary thing, when we all know that
lots of people have to learn their humanity other places. So, I want to close with a power story that
has no families. It does have three monsters in it.
Once upon a time, in what is now Scandinavia, there lived a
king who was once formidable in battle.
Now he is old and scared. A monster is coming to his mead hall and dragging men
away to their deaths. He can do nothing. A young man appears, offers to help.
The king graciously accepts. The next night, as the men are sleeping in the
mead hall, the monster comes. The young warrior engages him, rips off his arm,
mortally wounds him. All parties rejoice the next night. Their rejoicing is
interrupted by the monster’s mother, bent on revenge. The young warrior again
engages, and, after a battle deep in a cold lake, kills the mother as well. He
goes home, covered with glory.
The young warrior ages, becomes king in his own country. His
reputation for fierceness keeps all the other kingdoms in check, and his
kingdom prospers. But a dragon appears. There is a young man ready to fight
him, but the king insists on one last battle. With the young warrior by his
side, he confronts the dragon and slays him, taking a mortal wound. The young
warrior helps, but he doesn’t get the glory, the opportunity he needs to do it
himself. The other nations don’t fear him, and, soon they attack and obliterate
the kingdom.
This is a Christian story of humanity, of the possible
effect of imagination and memory on human affairs. Because the king does not
remember what it was like to be young, to need to prove his valor, he destroys
his kingdom. He cannot let loose of power.
There is the injustice of the young to the old, and the
injustice of the old to the young – and against these and a thousand more,
there is what humans have when they want to use it: the capacity to remember
how it was, and the capacity to think about how it is for someone else.
May we all find families or tribes or bowling leagues to
learn that in.
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