Estrangement Among Family and Friends April 6, 2025 Dr. Roger Ray
I was called to the home of an elderly widow in my church by the county sheriff. When I arrived, the house was surrounded by police cars and there was a line of law enforcement officers keeping a safe distance from the three German Shepherds growling and barking in the yard. It was a stand-off, and it wasn’t going to end well. This was back in the days before cell phones so I had to go back to my office to call the home to see if they would tie up the dogs and let me come in. "No,” was her answer. She was not going to let the police come in and take her boy.
Her boy, a man in his 50’s, was suspected of breaking into a suburban home, raping a little girl, and stealing several items from the house. His mother was not convinced of his innocence. He had, after all, done it before and had only recently been released from prison. The police were patient enough to wear everyone down and they were eventually able to make the arrest without anyone getting hurt.
I did my pastoral duty and visited him in the county jail where he was being held pending trial. I was still in grad school but even then, it was not difficult to reach the conclusion that he was a malignant narcissist. He dismissed his history of pedophilia as mere social conventions and he said that when he robbed houses, the people he robbed came out ahead. He explained that he would take about $500 worth of jewelry and electronics and then look in the paper and see where they claimed to have lost thousands of dollars worth of stuff which they then claimed against their homeowner’s insurance. So, he explained to me, he was really doing them a favor because they came out way ahead on the transaction.
The visit that has lived in my skull from that whole incident was the conversation I had with his mother. She knew that her son was a criminal. She knew that he did horrible things, but she insisted that there was a good man inside of him and that she would never give up on him. I, by profession and disposition, am always inclined to give a person a second, third, or fourth chance. If I don’t believe that people can change then, clearly, I am in the wrong profession. But I will tell you, I didn’t detect a good man hidden deep inside her son and I was perplexed by her loyalty to him.
She knew that he was a rapist, a thief, a liar, an addict, a con man, but she loved him and refused to give up on him. A few years earlier, in my own family, my eldest brother had reported to our parents that he and his wife of only two years were getting a divorce and that he was going to be marrying an employee in the retail store he managed who was carrying his child. My parents reacted to this news by taking me and my brother into our room and telling us that our brother, John, had humiliated the family and that we were never to speak to him or talk to anyone about him ever again. So far as they were concerned, John had died.
My parents did eventually relent and reconciled with my older brother, but I couldn’t stop thinking about how differently the mother of a rapist and criminal felt about her wayward son and the way that my parents reacted to a son who had made the moral mistake of having an affair.
My brother went through a pretty rough patch, with the whole infidelity and remarriage thing. In a period of a very few years he was married to four different women without ever spending a day being single, and then, ironically, he became a Methodist minister. Life can take some odd turns . . . you would think he might have become a Mormon but, I stuck it out with him, insisting that my parents show grace to a son who was clearly hurting himself as well as others . . . until, as it turns out, he became an avid Trump supporter which, for me, was a bridge too far.
As a minister who has spent my life advocating for the rights of gay and lesbian people and as the father of a brown skinned immigrant, I could not rationalize my brother’s decision to support a homophobic, xenophobic, racist, misogynist for president. What is the price of estrangement? When does it make sense and when is it a moral travesty in its own right?
In the early part of my ministry, most of the cases of family estrangement that came to my office were instances of parents feeling morally obligated to reject their gay children. It was often very painful on both sides of the equation, but it was rooted in unhealthy religious devotion and ignorance of both psychology and biology. Still, I have to say that it shouldn’t have been that hard. Any theology that teaches you to reject your own child should be suspect in a prima facie way. Just as my parents who, for both religious and social shaming reasons, believed that divorce was equal to death in my brother’s case, if they had more heart and less irrational shame, they would have seen their way through it immediately.
The Broadway classic, the Fiddler on the Roof, has a father with three daughters, each of whom chooses to marry in ways that rejected their Russian Jewish traditions of the day, but the father’s love managed to remain in a relationship with the first two, but the third one pushed the boundaries more than Tevya was able to accept. No matter how many times I have seen the play or the movie, I still tear up when Tevya rejects Chava (ha’va). It takes me back to the moment when my mother told me that my brother was now dead to us, it takes me back into my church study every time I sat with parents yelling at their son or daughter to just “stop being gay.”
But folks, these clear-cut examples are not why I wanted to bring this topic up today. There are therapists who specialize in counseling with families struggling with estrangement for much more subtle and hard to define issues. None of us who watch that painful scene with Tevya and Chava agree with Tevya, but in context, the Tevya character could not allow himself to conceive of marrying a non-Jew.
I accept that there is a price tag on estrangement. There is no such thing as “unconditional love,” or, at least, there shouldn’t be. We shouldn’t tolerate abuse. We shouldn’t, by our actions, imply endorsement of grievous offenses. But our list of cardinal sins evolves, doesn’t it?
In the seventh century, Pope Gregory 1st distilled the teachings of the Bible and the church down to seven deadly sins: lust, gluttony, greed, sloth, wrath, envy, and pride.
That is surely a pious list, but it doesn’t include things like murder, theft, dishonesty, rape, torture, or invading another country on false pretenses. I mean, if we are only going to name seven deadly sins, I don’t think that sloth gets to make the cut. And when it comes to something like lust, you know, St Jimmy Carter confessed to having feelings of lust but having lusty thoughts is not the same thing as having serial affairs, is it?
I accept that psychologically healthy able-bodied people have sex. How and with whom they have sex becomes a matter of nearly constant ethical re-evaluation. What is pedophilia in our day may have been a common arranged marriage in another age. Killing someone for being gay is still common in many nations but here, we are shocked when parents refuse to attend their son’s marriage to another man. Ethics is not easy. It requires not just thinking but it requires re-thinking, re-evaluation and change.
In our time, people are spending more and more time alone. An increasingly large percentage of families have instances of estrangement that have nothing to do with the complexities of schedules and geography. Why? Why do we do it? Why do we allow it?
Over the holidays last fall, I was in regular contact with a young woman whom I have known since she was in high school. She was a very bright student and a very attractive person who evidently had some itches that she needed to scratch which made her difficult to deal with and a regular embarrassment to her parents. She went through her goth phase, her excessive drinking phase, her sexually acting out phase, and her phase of having constant excuses for not working, not applying herself, and generally not getting her stuff together.
Eventually, however, she managed to process whatever attention needs, or resentments had driven her to such difficult acting out, and she got a responsible professional position, started dating a responsible, professional guy, and seemed to get her life on the rails in more or less all of the ways that her parents had longed to see 15 years ago. But now the shoe is on the other foot. She wants to have a closer relationship with her parents. She wants to introduce her boyfriend who may soon be her husband to her parents, but they keep coming up with excuses for why they want to avoid her and emphatically avoid meeting her partner . . . . excuses which, in my professional opinion, would embarrass Charles Darwin . . . excuses that make Tevya’s rejection of Chava seem almost rational.
Perhaps we should not judge other people’s choices about such things but while I am not in the family and cannot presume to know everything they are feeling, I am close enough and have listened to everyone so much that I am confident in saying that this estrangement should not exist. Are the parents attempting to exact some kind of revenge for their daughter’s adolescent and young adult acting out? Are they so filled with hubris that nothing that their daughter can do is good enough, perfect enough, to melt the icy wall between them?
Pastorally, I want to say that people in our day have simply become too disposable.
Again, there is a point at which estrangement is the only logical and practical choice but that point is, I believe, very very rare, especially when judged against how often it happens.
In the Atlantic’s January cover story, author Derek Thompson called this “The Anti-Social Century,” because we are all isolating more, we have fewer friends, fewer real social connections, and, people, we have fractured families that could be healed if people could manage to suspend judgement and resolve to stop trying to control the details of other people’s lives even the details of their thoughts.
I have a good friend who lives in rural Arkansas whose daughter is in a polyamorous, inter-racial marriage. And she babysits the grandkids and is lovingly accepting of all of the adults in this rather awkward group marriage. . . in rural Arkansas! My daughter is in an interracial relationship. I am in an interracial relationship, but I wouldn’t be too cheery about it if my daughter was going to marry a guy who was already married and who wanted to keep both wives. My friend has stretched to accept this, but I might be a tad Tevya on that issue. And I, as a joke, told my significant other that she was the only one for me, just her and Hallie Berry and that’s it. She didn’t think it was funny, and I hope she doesn’t listen to this talk, or I will have to go through another round of shaming for having said it the first time. Still, while I would not choose a polyamorous relationship, such relationships exist and, in the end, the fact that other people make that choice is none of my business.
And while I may play racquetball with, have dinner with, even go to a movie and celebrate Thanksgiving with a supporter of a treasonous, misogynistic, homophobic, xenophobic, criminal president, I certainly couldn’t marry one and I am not yet able to accept it in a sibling, but I am realizing that my brother and I are old enough that we may not physically survive Trump’s second term and it is time for us, and by “us”, I mean, “me,” to do better.
If I am waiting for him to wake up and see Trump the way I see him, to repudiate his last three astonishingly stupid presidential votes, then I may be the one who is being unreasonable . . . not entirely unreasonable, but the net results are the same. Estrangement happens but it should be so rare that very few of us would ever feel compelled to choose it. We should love our friends and our family members to the highest degree that we can muster, and it may just be that hubris is the only thing standing in our way.
