Broken Family Glass

The above photo is a pictured-framed compendium of my family Christmas pictures from 1962 to the late 90's. It was a gift from my mom, the keeper of Christmas pictures, to all four boys when she left the family home in Pennsylvania to move to Florida. A closure I suppose.

When I was moving the other week, I contemplated throwing it out. It was big and bulky, the covering glass weighing about 15 pounds. Maybe that is an exaggeration, but with its size--and what the pictures represented psychologically--the thing felt like it weighed a ton. A pictorial ball and chain. Despite all of the happy smiles, there is a lot of pain in the pictures. Me, a premature baby, early pics of the family life that was far from ideal, my teen years of tumult, and young adulthood in all of its lack of polish. I don't like who I am in a lot of the pictures. Looking at it often in past caused sharp jagged pain in my soul. The framed pictures spent the last 6 years in the shed out back at the previous house.

I have never hung it up in my house. Seeing it daily would be like tearing off a scab to bleed anew. The only reason I didn't toss it during the move was a lingering guilt that it was not the right thing to do, plus it was so heavy, I wasn't sure that it qualified as refuse under our trash plan. I decided to drag it back to Columbia. In the move, somehow the heavy plate of glass cracked like the Liberty Bell. Hmmm...a fitting familial metaphor. Family life ain't all that it is portrayed as...Normal Rockwell. Yet, I found the picture perfect before the cracking of the glass even more burdensome. Things looking all happy, preserved memories like precious heirlooms rather than the visual obituaries to days gone by. Best gone too.  For once I would like to get an honest Christmas picture and letter where the writer admits that life ain't been that great, instead we semi-fictionalize in some odd competition of keeping up with the Jones's.

The Bible portrays family life through a broken glass. From the start, murderous sibling rivalry, step-brothers and step-sisters with wives scheming for prominence and attention, lying, deception, estrangement, casting away. And that is just Genesis. That what makes stuff like Focus on the Family's mantra of "standing for biblical values" so flimsy. As if biblical characters got it right and so should we. I created a firestorm of sorts about a decade ago when I was speaking at a conference for older teens going to college by one of these organizations that is on the Right in the Culture Wars. I noted that Jesus was doubted and criticised by His own earthly family when He started His ministry and walked through the next three years. The feeling I get from the biblical accounts is sort of, "Hey, big shot, don't forget where you came from Nazareth man."

While it is true that His family came to embrace his Messianic role, it was a work in progress. My point to the kids was that their familes were not necessarily the arbiter of their life mission. Evangelical Christianity in fact has been the progenitor of soul-killing suburbia, where the bad people are kept at bay by the lack of public transportation to one's neighborhood and where we hide in the anonymity of blocks and blocks of houses that look the same, so why rob mine? Needless to say, I wasn't invited back. The interesting thing is that this organization is underwritten by a big junk food manufacturer here in Pa that stands for traditional values, while feeding crap and illness- creating "food" to society. A serious disjunction if you ask me. Junk food holiness.

Healing and wholeness come through telling the truth. Take off the shiny glass and let the family pictures interact with the air of reality. The pictures will perhap fade but in my case, that is really a good thing. The picture frame with the picture sans the glass now weights a spright 5 pounds. I plan  to keep it...I might even hang it up in my house somewhere.