“Making Family Joyful Again”        Nov. 18, 2018   Dr. Roger Ray, pastor

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Langston Huges, Thanksgiving Time

When the night winds whistle through the trees

and blow the crisp brown leaves a-crackling down,
When the autumn moon is big and yellow-orange and round,
When old Jack Frost is sparkling on the ground,
It's Thanksgiving Time!

When the pantry jars are full of mince-meat

and the shelves are laden with sweet spices for a cake,
When the butcher man sends up a turkey nice and fat to bake,
When the stores are crammed with everything ingenious cooks can make,
It's Thanksgiving Time!

When the gales of coming winter outside your window howl,
When the air is sharp and cheery so it drives away your scowl,
When one's appetite craves turkey and will have no other fowl,
It's Thanksgiving Time!

For the past couple of years, when Thanksgiving rolled around, I have felt some homiletic urgency about correcting some of the romantic myths about the warm relationship between the early pilgrims in America and the Native Americans they encountered here. As absurd as images like this one really are, there were some instances of sharing and mutual aid between white European invaders and our indigenous Indian population but those instances were still mere prelude to the genocide that historically and factually followed. 

I appreciate the fact that you let me get some of that out of my system over the past couple of years but, as I faced the holiday this year, I realized that the myth that really haunted us was not fanciful stories about what happened three hundred years ago but the fantasy that really informed our childhood experiences had little to dowith pilgrims or Indians but more to do with romanticized expectations.

Our myths have had a distinctly Norman Rockwell influence. Christmas has its own dangerous pitfalls with unrealistic hopes for joy from receiving perfect gifts in a perfectly decorated environment but Thanksgiving is more about this . . . a multi-generational family gathered around a traditional feast. 

In this idealized image, grandma and grandpa not only are still living, but they never got a divorce. There is no drunk uncle at the table, no black sheep of the family who always messes things up for everyone. This is a holiday that is wrapped up in the hope for a loving family. I am so happy for the people who actually get to experience this. 

I can say that in my own rather Puritanical home, even though there was no wine and laughter was rare, we managed to pull off some pretty big family celebrations, the smells and tastes of which have never left me, though my grandparents, aunts and uncles are now all long gone, my parents are deceased, my sister succumbed to cancer a dozen years ago, and my older brother, with whom I celebrated several Thanksgiving dinners, voted for Trump two years ago which has hastened the disassembling of family gatherings. 

Family, for all intents and purposes, for me, is now down to just me and my daughter, Valerie, though we are fortunate to have many close friends who fill up the Thanksgiving and Christmas dinner table in enviable fashion. 

The holiday season that holds out the promise of a Norman Rockwell moment, most often fails to deliver for most people. And sometimes, it is quite the opposite. There is a myth that has long circulated among helping professionals that depression and domestic violence increase during the holidays. Statistically, it isn’t really true but anecdotally, I can give you 40 years of stories that might make you think that it is true.

Seasonal affective disorder is a real thing. As days get shorter and the weather gets cold and gray, people spend more time indoors, they miss out on the good serotonin their bodies make on long walks in the sunshine and family gatherings are often filled with the material that will keep therapists busy until May. Still, factually, the suicide rate is lower in the winter months and higher in spring and summer. Domestic violence stats actually dip down a bit on Thanksgiving and Christmas though not enough to celebrate. 

The holidays are not quite here, yet and both David, our associate pastor, and I, have been exhausted by demands to respond to domestic violence and have opened our respective homes in times of crisis. That is statistically insignificant but existentially relevant as we have had to respond to the violence, suicidal threats, and child custody complexities that come up when a family comes apart at the seams. 

Domestic violence is usually rooted in jealousy and control. Because the people we see in shelters are often poor, we tend to associate these problems with poverty. The difference is, however, we only encounter people in shelters who do not have the economic wherewithal to rent a hotel room or an apartment. The people we meet in shelters do not have a network of middle- or upper-class family members or friends who can put them in a guest room and make breakfast for them. However, it is absolutely true that domestic violence cuts across all economic, educational, racial, and national lines. 

Years ago, David and Holly were living in Cambodia trying to teach some of the most poor and least educated people how to solve problems without violence in their homes. At the same time, I was serving a large denominational church where my most frequent domestic violence calls came from a mansion where both husband and wife were physicians. Their live-in au pair would call me when the violence escalated to the point where it endangered their children.

I can’t remember how many times I pretended to just be in the neighborhood and dropped by at 11 p.m. or even after midnight so that they would not know that their babysitter had called me, but I could show up and stop the fighting. And, mind you, I am not a physician and I am getting a bit out of my lane here, but I am convinced that there is such a tight connection between our mind and our body that the cancers and heart attacks experienced in this family have always seemed to me to be at least partially a consequence of the mental illness in their family system that provoked and sustained the violence. 

Leo Tolstoy's book Anna Karenina, begins by saying:

All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.

In every family, there is the potential for success and there is the potential of ending up in misery, or divorce court, or a spouse abuse shelter, or, let’s be honest, a morgue. There are about 2000 domestic partner murders in America every year. One in five women report that they have been victims of domestic violence at some time in their life. Again, my own experience does not amount to statistical research, but during my time as a pastor in Kentucky, I had two domestic murders within my parish family . . . in the first, a husband shot and killed his wife, and in the second a wife shot and killed her husband. Drugs were involved in the later, and money in the former, but as Anna Karenina says, unhappy families find a host of ways to turn their lives into a hellish existence. Jealousy, control, infidelity, rape, molestation, addiction to drugs, alcohol, gambling, or shopping, hoarding, greed, dishonesty . . . all feed resentment which becomes the glacier that can freeze the most generous of hearts and the best intents of any marriage. 

What is less obvious is the kind of bonding that happens in chronically violent homes. Crisis bonding seduces victims into a nearly unbreakable bond with their abuser. It is painful to those of us who love and care for a victim when we see them returning over and over again to their abuser. The national average is that a woman will leave an abuser seven times before successfully staying away. Even in the shelters, when we finally have a woman safely housed behind secured doors, we often find them trying to sneak their abuser in for a visit.

Victims lose friends and family confidence when they have told everyone about the horrors of their abuse but then, a week later, they are back with their abuser. The national average is 7, but I have known some victims who skew those numbers by going back dozens and dozens of times. Their abusers will tell them, “No one will ever love you as much as I do,” and “You can’t survive without me.” Many will even threaten to kill their victim if they try to leave them, making it seem like it is actually safer to stay and endure the violence than to try to return to sanity. This is almost impossible to understand unless you have lived through it but the last thing a victim needs is to be abandoned or shunned by their more stable and sane friends.

None of us live static lives. For all of us, we are living in transition, as if we were forever on a moving train. We are going somewhere, either towards failure or towards success. For a family to be successful, that is, that they have meaningful, mutually supportive, and generally happy relationships, there are several factors that must be present, many of which are obvious but the one that seems to need to be said, particularly, to be said from a pulpit in church on a Sunday morning is the element of forgiveness. 

Not amnesia. Let’s make that distinction very clearly. Every abuser, almost every addict, wants amnesia from their family. They want to pretend that what happened last week or last year is now in the past and cannot be discussed and that you are a bad person if you bring it up or remember it. Forgiveness is not denial of facts. Serious forgiveness acknowledges reality and chooses not to turn past wrongs into present resentment. Forgiveness requires love and compassion but in no way is forgiveness supposed to be rooted in stupidity. 

Love and compassion are also not martyrdom. There is no merit, no heroism, no virtue in staying in a toxic relationship. When people try to draw you into a reality denying, violence accepting, self-destructive relationship, the most loving thing that you can do is to refuse to be a part of it. 

We are all on a moving train, we are just going to different places. Sometimes you have to roll through some dangerous neighborhoods to get to where you want to go but you shouldn’t get off at the “This will mess up my life” station and stay there. I have been known to just flatly tell some people, both former denominational judicatories and dating partners, “I have an honest, mutually respectful relationship to offer you. I do not have a dishonest, competitive, jealous, or toxic relationship to offer to you. So, you get to decide, do you want what I have to offer, or shall we part company?” And you would think that would be a really attractive offer but most of the time, it is not accepted. 

It is sad that many people with whom you might choose to be a professional peer, or a friend, or even a family member, only want to enter that relationship with you if you are willing to at least episodically be their victim. That that is their problem. What I am begging of you is for you to choose to go in the direction of health and happiness and never to consciously or unconsciously choose to be a victim.

And, yes, I know it is not a simple thing. The motivations of love and family are often as crooked as a cork screw and you find yourself living in a victim role without even remembering the convoluted steps that go you there. But, as Winston Churchill said, “If you are going through hell, keep going.”

In preaching, I often try to engage you in conversation by talking about the extremes. On this eve of our annual holiday season with all of its likely family gathers and office parties, I apologize for contrasting the idyllic Normal Rockwell scenes with scenes of domestic violence. The nature of my work, both professionally and in my community volunteering, brings me into much more contact with the frightening underbelly of domestic violence than most of you. For every family that gets down to fists and guns there are dozens that just quietly simmer in contempt and resentment which is, in my opinion, just another piece of the same cloth. 

Few people ever achieve the perfect family status, and no one wants to end up seeking shelter from violence, all that I’m saying is that we are all on a moving train, but you shouldn’t just jump on a train and assume that it will take you where you want to go. You have to carefully study the map, choose your destination, go to the right track and board the right train to get to where you want to be. 

There is a saying in A.A. that I love. It says: Don’t tell me how sick you have been, tell me how well you want to be. Don’t dwell on the past. Take the sweet potato casserole to your Thanksgiving Day family reunion but leave your cold resentment behind. If you get to choose between a family debate about President Trump and a backyard game of touch football, choose the football. Regardless of the choices made by your Fox News – infused uncle or your alcoholic cousin, you choose sanity. Don’t dwell on how sick your family has been. Focus on how healthy you want your family to become.

It may not entirely depend on you, but you have no idea how powerful your choices can be.