PARENT, ADULT CHILD IN COMMUNITY
Frank Carpenter, D.Min., April 9, 2006
What a great pleasure it is this morning to welcome our new members. I hope everyone will greet them during our fellowship hour this morning.
At the Membership committee meeting this past Wednesday, we had a general discussion of enhancing our membership journey. Barbara Hadden remarked that when new people come, there are two main attractions for them. One is the choir. The other is the Religious Exploration program for the children.
In discussions about church dynamics the accepted wisdom is
that young people often drop out of
church activities when the graduate from high school. People begin to be interested when children
come into the family. And we saw this
morning a number of families with young children, as well as several new members
who are excited about
In joining a religious community when a family begins to have children, they acknowledge perhaps the most important truth about families: We can’t do it alone; we can’t be a family alone. As the saying has it, “It takes a whole village to raise a child.” Families always need help, sometimes just so the parents can take a break and get away. Sometimes families need help because there is someone in the family who is out of control and they can use the experience of other parents to learn new ways of coping.
I am reminded of a story told by John Spenser in the character of Leo McGarry on West Wing. McCarry was urging one of the other West Wing staffers to get some help with a personal problem he was having. As an illustration, he told of the man who was down a man hole and couldn’t get out. He kept yelling for help. A lawyer went by and dropped his business card down. Then a doctor dropped a prescription for valium down the man hole
Suddenly, another man jumped down into the hole. “Are you crazy?” asked the first guy, “Now two of us are stuck down here.” “No,” responded the newcomer, “I’ve been down here before and I know the way out.”
Families, as well as individuals, come up against problems, so that it is good to have someone else to talk them over with. You have a 7 year old child with discipline problems. You are not the first. Someone with adolescent children might be able to make a few suggestions. It does take a whole village, and a religious community is just such a village.
But what is a family? What does a family look like, sound like?
Some years ago when I served the Unitarian church in
The agency provided a variety of services, counseling, housing, help with the aging. What is a family? Is a family a group of 4 or 5 youth living with a house mother, as provided by the agency? What about three or four college students living together?
This was not an abstract discussion, because various laws, such as zoning laws, would say only families could live in a certain neighborhood. Ideas about what families were changing. Is a family a mother, father and 2.5 children? Never met such a thing in my life, although maybe old King Solomon could figure that one out. Is a family two lesbians? Is a family based on legal marriage? Can two gay men adopt children? For that matter, could two straight men adopt a child? Is one parent, one child a family? What happens if someone is kicked out of a family? Where is family in that? Is someone living alone part of family; is someone in a nursing home part of family?
I don’t recall that we came up with an answer. What is family? It is one of those things that while we may not be able to define it, we know it when we see it.
Family is a place where people are loved and cared about. It is a place where people are challenged to grow. When I conduct wedding ceremonies, I often talk about a wedding as a place where the promises of one generation are handed down to another. Whether there will be children or not, a family is where the promises of love, hope and safety are made, renewed, and then remade again.
Of course there are challenges to family living today. Whether you have elderly parents to be concerned about or not on Medicare D, the issue of universal health insurance is only going to increase until we can address this as a society. This afternoon, the Music Series Concert for the benefit of Caracole House reminds us of the impact of AIDS on families and friends. When you’re raising children, technology impacts family life through TV and video games.
Perhaps the major concern of many families is the question of work, what is happening to the middle class? What is happening with Delta airlines is naturally a frequent issue among our church members. And it goes beyond just job security, but also pensions.
Do you get the point? It takes a village, not only to raise a child, but to support a family. It’s not easy asking for help, but sometimes we need to. The need for help families can experience may start out as a sense of their being a ‘discipline problem’ in the family.
That was my experience. At one point, my ex and I had difficulties with my step children. For a while they took turns living with their father and his wife. Both came back, both acting out, including some self-destructive behavior.
We started seeing a therapist as a family. Adolescence can be a time of raging hormones and that was part of the problem, which could be treated, but it also meant we had to take a good look at ourselves.
The plus side of this for me is that I learned in no way could I act the father with my step-children. I thought that a father figure in a family was in charge. Boy, was I wrong. And I learned that in time so that when my own son came along, I didn’t try that on him.
If a family needs help, each member most likely can benefit from it. At one point in my frustration and search, a friend recommended that I attend Al Anon meetings. He explained that while al Anon was set up for family members of alcoholics, an alcoholic is a person out of control, and Al Anon helps a lot with anyone who is dealing with someone out of control -- like my stepchildren.
At an Al Anon meeting you might hear someone talking about how insane they were. They were insane: they had been trying to change something they were powerless to change, namely somebody else. The only person who can change someone is themselves.
The central concept I learned in Al Anon was detachment: how to stay in a relationship without trying to change that person. I recall one time in a meeting a women spoke of her husband who was frequently drunk. They stayed together for years. She did it by going to meetings and asking for help form her friends there. Most important for al Anon was not to threaten to leave the out of control person, or threaten to kick them out, unless you are prepared to act on it. No idle threats, no frustrated shouts about leaving. Al Anon supports members who want to stay with their partner, and those who want to leave, but no game playing.
I’ve learned that trying to control other people, especially family members, is the path of much pain and suffering. Which is not to say I don’t try from time to time.
One of the concepts that has stayed with me over a number of years was Eric Berne’s notion of playing games, and how we each have a Parent, an Adult and a Child in us. The child in us wants what it wants and wants it now. The child tries to get someone else to take care of him: all sorts of ways: Mommy, daddy, help me. Some partners have a relationship like that but if one person wants to stop playing that, the relationship may need outside help. The parent in us likes to be in charge and by offering help may just be perpetuating the game. The parent in us is the received wisdom how we should react to life, the child, how we want to respond. The adult strengthens as it makes its own assessments of wants, and regulations regarding what indeed the world is all about.
Each of us is a community of parent, adult, and child. A family is a community where these aspects of ourselves are drawn out and interact.
One of the books that was popular and stayed in my mind is Thomas Harris, “I’M OK – You’re OK.” I realize this is pretty old hat. But some of the concepts have continuously come to mind over the years, so I think of them as we talk.
One idea in this book as that every child, even from the most caring and loving family, grows up with some sense of not being OK. In the child’s need for security and attempts to overcome parental restrictions, it learns, and in learning it develops some sense of not being okay.
A sense of not being okay pops up in all sorts of places, as people project bad feelings about themselves on others. I note that this Sunday evening National Geographic Channel will have a program on a newly discovered ‘Gospel of Judas.” The revolutionary concept of this ancient gospel is that Judas is a good guy in the story. Judas furthers god’s plan, which includes the crucifixion of Jesus. The Gospel of Judas is part of the obscure wisdom literature called the Gnostic Gospels which the early catholic church thought it had destroyed.
Was Judas OK? Would Jesus say to Judas, “I’m Ok - You’re OK?” This Gnostic gospel says yes. Traditionally Christianity sets Judas up to be the one on whom we can project all our bad feelings, the traitor within. He is very much like the snake in the Garden of Eden, the bad guy. But there is a long tradition that what the snake did was good. Did human beings not gain wisdom and the knowledge of right and wrong when they ate of the fruit of the tree? The snake was a good guy, just like Judas. If we can accept that it is part of being human to have negative feelings about ourselves, because we have an inner child whose creativity means he tends to run up against walls, if we can accept this about ourselves, we won’t need to dump our negativity on others, Judas, the snake, Eve.
The different response, whether the knowledge brought by the snake is good, depends as to whether we are caught in a parent-child debate: God is the parent and Adam and Eve, along with the snake are the children: disobedient. But there is this third position, that the snake is good, and that is because the snake brings knowledge, brings awareness, brings reflection.
The position that knowledge is good is the position the adult takes in the framework of Parent, Adult Child. . Along with Parent and Child, we have the adult. Harris writes:
The adult is “principally concerned with transforming stimuli into pieces of information, and processing and filing that information on the basis of previous experience.” It is different from the Parent, which is “judgmental in an imitative way and seeks to enforce sets of borrowed standards, and from the Child, which tends to react more abruptly on the basis of prelogical thinking and poorly differentiated or distorted perceptions.” Through the adult the little person can begin to tell the difference between life as it was taught and demonstrated to him (Parent), life as he felt it or wished it or fantasized it (child), and life as he figures it out by himself (Adult). (Page 52f)
The adult acts thoughtfully, perhaps even mindfully.
Different religions favor different elements of this psychological trinity. Fundamentalists perhaps encourage members to be parents. Some churches want to keep their members dependent on them, as children. We as Unitarian Universalists favor the adult.
Indeed, Harris quotes one of our major prophets in his description of the Adult:
The adult, in the words of Emerson, “must not be hindered by the name of goodness, but must examine if it be goodness”; or badness, for that matter, as in the early decision, “I’m not ok.” (Page 53)
Perhaps we grow as adults as we learn to allow others to be adults, especially our children.
I
recall once when my son was perhaps 8 or 9 and we were at a religious education
conference at
As
adults we accept our dependency, we work for independence, and we become interdependent. We know we need others and can turn to
others. We don’t try to do it all alone.
We have to raise our families ourselves, but we do not have to do it all
by ourselves. Here at
And that’s what we mean by being a “safe and caring community.”