[So sorry for not reading the post out today! I keep having coughing fits—we’re all getting over a slight cold—and every time I start to speak I have the sensation of being about to lose a lung.]
A really long and fascinating piece in the New Yorker passed across my feed yesterday as I was pondering the lections appointed for today over a morsel of cheese and some bread and butter. It’s by someone named Anna Russell and it’s called “Why So Many People Are Going “No Contact” with Their Parents: A growing movement wants to destigmatize severing ties. Is it a much-needed corrective, or a worrisome change in family relations?” Russell begins by telling the story of Amy, a young Canadian woman who grew up in a Christian home but then went away to university and, essentially, though I don’t think Russell uses the term, deconstructed.
Amy’s experience of slowly and completely cutting her parents and siblings out of her life is movingly woven through the data and analysis that Russell presents. At first, I was inclined to shake my head, expecting to hear the same tired story I’ve heard so many times, but Russell handles the subject with pathos and charity. By the end, I felt not only sorry for Amy’s parents, who were clearly bewildered in the face of the cultural and ideological chasm that now separated them from their daughter, but also grieved for Amy herself, who, as we all are, is simply trying to be a good person.
I commend the whole piece to you, and have also pulled out some bits that I think are most profitable as I consider the texts appointed for today. Russell writes that:
Family estrangement—the process by which family members become strangers to one another, like intimacy reversed—is still somewhat taboo. But, in some circles, that’s changing. In recent years, advocates for the estranged have begun a concerted effort to normalize it. Getting rid of the stigma, they argue, will allow more people to get out of unhealthy family relationships without shame. There is relatively little data on the subject, but some psychologists cite anecdotal evidence that an increasing number ofyoung people are cutting ties with their parents.
This phenomenon, as the title of the piece indicates, is called “going no contact.” It is something, of course, that has always existed since Cain wandered alone over the earth after murdering his brother, since Jacob stole his brother’s birthright and blessing and had to flee, leaving his father and mother behind, since David, crushed under the weight of grief and loss, cried out “Absalom, Absalom,” since the Father turned his face away from the Son who hung there, exposed and cursed, between heaven and earth for the redemption of the alienated sinner. The Bible, as I’m sure you know, is replete with family estrangement, the raw pain of parents losing their children etched in every page.
In these latter days, though, it’s something thought to be a novel curiosity and therefore deserving of “normalization” and acceptance. Russell interviewed a lot of people for the piece. One Becca Bland told her that
society tends to promote the message that “it’s good for people to have family at all costs,” when, in fact, ‘it can be much healthier for people to have a life beyond their family relationships, to find a new sense of family with friends or peer groups.”
I love the idea of disembodied “society” that has the power to “promote messages.” I expect that there is no nefarious inclination on the part of anyone to try to further fracture and destroy the last civilized bastion of affection and sanity. Anyway, Russell explains,
The field of family estrangement is still in its infancy. The tome-like “Handbook of Family Therapy,” a mainstay among psychologists, does not contain an in-depth entry on estrangement. “The cliche ‘hiding in plain sight’ is really appropriate here,” the family sociologist Karl Pillemer, who teaches at Cornell, told me. Kristina Scharp director of the Family Communication and Relationships Lab, at Rutgers University and Michigan State, defines estrangment as an “intentional distancing” between at least two family members “because of a negative relationship—or the perception of one.” Sometimes it comes from an accumulation of grievances. Other times, it’s because of one fight—for example, after a parent rejects an LGBTQ child when they come out. According to a survey conducted in 2019, twenty-seven percent of Americans are currently strange from a relative. If you haven’t experienced it yourself, you probably know someone who has.
I recently watched a horrible TikTok (which I can’t possibly find now because I have no idea how even to search) of a millennial woman performatively weeping because she had “lost” her father “to Donald Trump.” As if he had actually died or perished from the face of the earth. As if she couldn’t just pick up the phone and talk to him about something besides politics for a few minutes. In the case of Amy, the tipping point came when her family wouldn’t get the covid jab in order to attend her wedding. Russell manages the tell the saga so well that you can feel in your bones how deeply upsetting and terrible it was for both Amy and her parents. Both felt the other to be choosing ideology over familial ties. Both believed the other to be making unreasonable demands. Both had no tools or framework to consider reconciliation let alone a peaceable meeting in a neutral location.
But also:
Coleman believes estrangement is becoming more common, in part because of “changing notions of what constitutes harmful, abusive, traumatizing or neglectful behavior.” He cited a paper by the psychologist Nick Haslam that showed that the definition of trauma has expanded in the past three decades to include experiences that were once considered ordinary. “The bar for qualifying as a trauma today is much lower,” Coleman writes. He’s seen parents cut out because they say negative things about a child’s sexuality, or romantic partner, or because they refuse to accept a child’s boundaries. A growing number of clients cite political differences as reasons for estranment… “Today, more than at any other time in our nation’s history, children are setting the terms of family life in the United States,” he writes.
I expect this is true from the anguished expressions of helplessness I have observed on the faces of parents contemplating their young children, whom they do not know how to parent. When frustration and pain are the background spiritual dissonance of every hour of every day, what is anyone to do? But also:
The problem with calling someone “toxic,” Karl Pillemer, the Cornell sociologist, told me, is that “it’s completely in the eye of the beholder.” No one self-identifies as toxic. “It’s a label applied to someone by someone who is angry at the other person.” The term also forecloses the possibility of bridging the divide. “If you consider a family tie toxic, then there’s no reason anymore to try to work on it or to consider the other person as a human being,” he said.
How can we have come to this point? How is it that some are trying to “normalize” family estrangement as if it’s a good thing and not something continually to be mourned? Turns out there is a very good reason, in fact:
Bland has noticed a generational divide. Older people often have a sense of duty when it comes to family, and this means that “they won’t break relationships even if they find them very dysfunctional,” she told me. Parents tell her that they tolerated worse behavior from their own parents. But members of younger generations “feel that they need healthy relationships, rather than any relationship.” They don’t see family relationships as mandatory. Coleman told me that divorce often plays a role. The liberalization of divorce law in the seventies helped people escape terrible marriages, but divorces can also provoke feuds, introduce new allegiances, and “cause children to feel more like the parents are individuals, with their own assets and liabilities, rather than a family unit that they’re a part of.” There’s been a shift away from “honor thy mother and father,” Coleman said, and toward nations of happiness and mental health. “In some ways, the ideals we now have for romantic love are really parallel to the ideals we have for parent-adult-child relationships.”
It’s so interesting to me that Jesus takes on the question of divorce in the gospels, not in the least shying away from it, or trying to pretend that it does have deep and, in human terms, unsolvable implications for every generation that endures it’s effects. How can anyone “honor” their mothers and fathers when those mothers and fathers, in so many cases, blithely cast away the spiritual bond forged in marriage that then produced children with fathom’s deep need for love and the stable arrangement of two parents who were willing to forgo temporal and fleeting happiness for the sake of generations to come?
Anyway, as I said before, it’s not like family estrangement is a new thing. It is one of the plot points that drives the scriptural narrative towards its denouement. Let’s just wander over to that most ancient conversation between Moses and Jesus, the Law and the only remedy for failing to keep it. As usual, the people of God are hunched in their tents waiting to cross into the Promised Land and Moses longs for them to do the very simple things that would make their lives there pleasant and secure—follow the commandments of the Lord their God:
See, I have taught you statutes and rules, as the Lord my God commanded me, that you should do them in the land that you are entering to take possession of it. Keep them and do them, for that will be your wisdom and your understanding in the sight of the peoples, who, when they hear all these statutes, will say, ‘Surely this great nation is a wise and understanding people.’ For what great nation is there that has a god so near to it as the Lord our God is to us, whenever we call upon him? And what great nation is there, that has statutes and rules so righteous as all this law that I set before you today?
The only trouble is, that the family bond, which has already through the previous books of the Pentateuch shown itself to be impossible to preserve or nurture, remains at the center of their spiritual success:
“Only take care, and keep your soul diligently, lest you forget the things that your eyes have seen, and lest they depart from your heart all the days of your life. Make them known to your children and your children's children—
And so we all try. We drag our children into the pew. We teach them the Bible at home. We do everything within our power to communicate to the babe in arms that the ground and basis of our love for them is that God first loved us. We try to raise “Christian” children. But it’s not like we’re any better than Eve or Adam or Esau or Rebecca. It’s not like you can just get your emotional world together and not be toxic, to use the nomenclature of the day, at least some of the time. Sin, toxicity, alienation, and estrangement were the desolating remains of that first meal in the garden.
Which is to say that God gave to his own people a command they had already not been able to keep. And they went on not keeping it until Jesus—whose mother probably felt all the feelings of Abraham raising his knife to slay his son, stooped there at the foot of the cross—looked upon his own people, his family as it were, and
said to them, “You have a fine way of rejecting the commandment of God in order to establish your tradition! For Moses said, ‘Honor your father and your mother’; and, ‘Whoever reviles father or mother must surely die.’ But you say, ‘If a man tells his father or his mother, “Whatever you would have gained from me is Corban”’ (that is, given to God)—then you no longer permit him to do anything for his father or mother, thus making void the word of God by your tradition that you have handed down. And many such things you do.”
For, indeed, the scholars and intellectuals of the day had worked out a way to do what the law required—worshipping God in his holy Temple—in such a way that allowed them to cut their parents out of their lives. They were meant to honor and care for their parents, including by use of their material wealth, but, for a whole host of reasons that we might guess at, they didn’t want to, and so “devoted” everything to God, declaring it for the use of the Temple, but also, thereby, to remain safely stashed away in the bank. Ungenerosity, and, one might speculate, unforgiveness were justified on the grounds of being a good person.
Except that Jesus saw through it all, and rebuked them in terms that must have seemed harsh and untoward, for the normalization of cutting off one’s parents and divorcing one’s wife was fairly complete in that day, as it is in ours.
Russell wrote that most of the parents she spoke to would accept anything from their children just to regain some contact. A broken and ruined state of affairs was to be preferred to the total estrangement that now shaped their lives. And, in the end, even Amy is anxious because she wants to start a family, and she only lives two hours from her parents, and how will she feel when she is holding her own child? Russel tells the story of the Runaway Bunny, a book I have always felt deeply weird about. She writes:
In the book, a bunny tells his mother that he wants to run away. “If you run away,” his mother says, “I will run after you.” First, he says that he’ll escape by becoming a fish in a trout stream, but his mother counters that she’ll become a fisherman and catch him. If he becomes a rock on a mountain, she’ll become a mountain climber. And on it goes. “Shucks,” he sighs eventually. His mother replies, “Have a carrot.” Since its publication, in 1942, “The Runaway Bunny” has never been out of print. The idea that a child might reject his parents is frightening. But there’s a question buried in the story as well: Is it even possible? If we make ourselves into a boat and sail away, will our family turn out to be the wind?
As a person who has endured with a lot of people in terribly broken situations, I would say the answer to that question is obviously yes. Your family, even if you never speak to them, is always the wind. They will always live rent-free in your head. They will form and shape the way you see the world even if you manage never to see them at all. For we do not have the power to autonomously choose a path toward goodness and happiness because our very first parents rejected God so swiftly and with so little thought about what it would mean for us.
But there is that other Son who chose to endure the fullness of our alienation and estrangement to reestablish the bond, the love, the comfortable warmth of acceptance that only comes when all the sins are washed away, when a full measure of forgiveness has followed you to the very ends of the earth. He is there to give himself to you today, if only you will go and meet him.
Seriously, go to Church. It’s the first step to making things be ok.
I think it's long past time that we "cut off" all these universities that indoctrinate students and are largely responsible for much of this family estrangement that is happening. Think about it. Parents are paying these schools to turn their own children against them! It's time for a boycott. Send your kids to a trade school instead.
Cutting off family, especially publicly doing so, is very much encouraged by Marxist ideologies. Communists have long encouraged children to rat on parents. And a disproportionate number of those who are no contacting their parents are doing so under the influence of Critical Theory ideologies.