Saints And Sinners In The Family

Labels can be helpful, sometimes not so much. We humans have a way of dividing in order to conquer. Even families can be split up by ideology. We need more openness and willingness to accept others as they are. Enthusiasm for one's own hobbyhorse(s) is no excuse for being overbearing.

 

My own family had been fractured from way back. I hardly know anyone in my family outside my immediate members. We were divided into various "saints" (cults, Catholics and various forms of Protestants, including my immediate family's Pentecostalism - which by nature of itself separated from even other more "worldly" forms of Christianity) and "sinners" (including harlots, drunks, several freethinkers, and a homosexual uncle).

 

The older I get the more keenly I feel the sense of loss. Damage of this type, once done, is extremely difficult to repair.

 

There could have been a real rift between my parents and me over my dabblings in unbelief. There could have been, had I been more outspoken with them. However, I tended to do no more than gently probe what I thought to be weaknesses in some of their more excessive religious tenets. Then we just loved each other anyway.

 

I can't help thinking that if Jesus was truly the model for the spiritual-minded in my family - and he was! - there should have more harmony and less friction. Jesus did not seem to want to fragment those trying to do the right thing ( "he who is not against you is for you," Luke 9;50), and certainly he did not seem to think himself above the sinners, because that was one of the "religious" knocks against him, that he "rubbed elbows" with them.
 

Yet here I stand at age 54 with family associations consisting of my elderly mother and my younger brother. The other members of my immediate family are dead now. The rest of my family are either dead or distant.

 

I'm glad that I have friends who are both believers of various sorts and unbelievers of various sorts. I'm glad that I have "sinners" who are my friends as well as "saints." I'm glad I cultivated the habit of looking beyond the labels. I guess I'm an unbelieving believer and certainly more of a sinner than a saint!

 

The older I get the less I care for extremism (or excessive enthusiasm).

 

It's not that I'm wild about people who lack some type of direction. I just think that people are more important than ideas, the human family is greater than it's various tribes.