My Strange Family Tree

I sit in my first seminary class on a brisk winter afternoon, ecstatic about the opportunity to learn, listening as the professor begins her lecture. She writes a quote by St. Augustine on the whiteboard: “What do I love when I love my God?” Then, in her lilting accent, she talks about how family is the first place where an individual should feel the force of love.

As I hear the words about family, time slows down. To ground myself in the moment, I breathe slowly and stare out the window at the yellow cedar tree that contrasts against the gray sky. I know the signs, and I ask my God for strength. I can process later. Now is the time to learn.

After class, we students all shuffle out rather quietly, saying good-byes in hushed tones. I walk slowly to my car, parked on the far side of the campus, and review my experience. I’m saddened, and I feel that usual sense of distance from others. I also feel a familiar sense of shame for what I do not have.

It’s the family thing again, isn’t it? I say to myself. Yes, it most certainly is.

***

I have always felt a strong desire to have a healthy family. I think this is normal, given that family is such a big part of our cultural experience. Fielding questions about my parents and their families used to cause me great stress when I was younger. Back then, I didn’t have answers to give because I grew up in a loving yet considerably dysfunctional home.

My parents were simply not able to provide me, their only child, with the love I needed. Our little family crumbled shortly after their divorce when I was in junior high, and for now, I’m unable to have meaningful connections with them.

I no longer fault my parents. I know they did the best they could. It wasn’t a matter of trying, I think, but a lack of skills on their part. And although I’ve been a Christian for twenty years and celebrate that homecoming, I still observe that, on major holidays, my church friends go home to their families. The absence of family is highlighted at those times, and I feel the pain of not having what I perceive others have: family connections.

How do I reconcile the complex relationship I have with my blood family when I’m part of God’s chosen family? How do I reconcile biblical passages that suggest that God is both our family and supports the bonds of family?

***

As a self-confessed fan of writer Lauren Winner, I decided to purchase her latest book as a Christmas present to myself. I was delighted to find a scholar pondering questions that have been on my heart for so long.

In The Dangers of Christian Practice, Winner examines how the gifts of Christianity (including the Eucharist, prayer, and baptism), are, while wonderful, inherently damaged because humans are imperfect creatures, capable of great good but also of great harm even while using the gifts of the church. From a historical perspective, Winner deftly examines how, over the centuries, these gifts were used by others to inflict great damage. But she also notes that these gifts are still precious because they are from God and help humanity flourish.

In the section on baptism, Winner adroitly notes the tension we humans hold between being both part of our human families and for being in God’s family. She writes, “Jesus’ teaching both erases and affirms family bonds . . . Behind Jesus’ teaching about family is Jesus’ actual life, which (to put it mildly) both affirms and unsettles lineage and family. Family is both present and unstable from the beginning of Jesus’ life . . . Jesus’ very Incarnation requires extraction from family—that is, it requires him to leave his Father. And yet: Jesus is born to a particular family, and it seems to matter a good deal to the Gospel writers that he is.”

I’m struck by Winner’s insistence that Jesus comes to place us in our true family, the family of God, while acknowledging that we still have our biological families to live with. Baptism, then, is a sacred and paradoxical act, showing us who our true family is while recognizing where we came from.

The lesson I’m slowly learning is to live in tension between being the daughter of parents who could not give me the love I needed while recognizing that I am who I am, in part, because of some of the gifts they gave me. I remain grateful for my father, who was a creative—a writer and a poet—and encouraged me to cultivate my artistic endeavors and loved supporting the marginalized. My mother was gregarious and loved people and laughter. I’m like my parents in this regard—intensely creative and a lover of people with a wickedly funny sense of humor.

But even when I’m grieved at the loss of connection with my parents, as I felt the sadness emerge at class weeks ago, I know that God was with me then and is with me now. He holds me in the tension of this strange and beautiful life, of finding gold amid the rubble of weird family baggage, of recognizing that it’s okay to lament the lack of loving parents and then to move through the experience and let it go, opening up to the gifts present all around me.

Sometimes after a trigger about my strange family tree, I feel as though life is like a back-and-forth dance. A few days after that class, I walked my neighborhood in the midst of a winter storm and lifted my hands upward to the sky in joy, reveling in the cold. I don’t understand why I’m in such a human family, but I know that despite the suffering, God loves me and I have always belonged to him. That is another lesson I’m learning, to lean into my identity as one beloved—even amid the occasional sadness. It is both holy and human to do so.

[1] Lauren F. Winner, The Dangers of Christian Practice (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2018), 107–8.

Jenn Zatopek is a lover of Jesus, people, and stories of hope and resurrection. A native Texan, Jenn is a writer and licensed therapist and adores deep conversations about God and life over small talk any day of the week. She loves empowering folks through compassion counseling, hiking out in God’s creation, and spending time with friends and family. Jenn loves connecting with others and blogs about faith, psychology, theology, and relationships at theholyabsurd.com.

Photograph © Roman Kraft, used with permission