My Family Twisted Me...

I can’t believe how my family twisted me as a kid. Oh that’s harsh.  I was brought up in a loving home.  It would be better to say “formed” instead of “twisted” but then nobody would be interested in the rest of this. I think I got it from mom’s side mostly…  a sense of the sacredness of blood.  The expectation was that family members were less likely to have arguments out of respect for that bond. But let’s get real.  People are people with or without a genetic tie.  Parents can make mistakes.  Parents can misunderstand their own kids and vice-versa.  It wasn’t until after his death that I began to understand the suffering my father endured as a child, and how that formed him as an adult.  Dad and I never broke down that clumsy barrier between father and son, a barrier that prevented us from speaking openly about ourselves.  Oh we talked theology, we slandered the neighbors, but we never spoke about the reasons for his unrealistic expectations of me and my heroic efforts to meet them and would that we would have. Every living thing is born with a genetic code and we all carry genes from our families right back to a tiny group of proto-humans that didn’t resemble us much at all.  The code has changed over the aeons, it must for survival.  My father’s, and my mother’s codes changed just a little bit before I was conceived, the result of their environment and experiences.  This, in theory, provided their children better survivability.  When people talk to me it changes me just a tiny, tiny, microscopic bit. And now we have a crisis.  In terms of history, the last few thousand years of human development has been but a “blip.” It’s been one “tic” on a clock that’s been running for a long, long time.  And in this short time we have to change our notions of justice and of a Higher Power from patriarchal or authoritarian models to that of collaborative, and a significant part of the human population is opposing this direction with violence.  It is change.  It is difficult, and it will become part of our genetic makeup only if we as humans accept it over a long period of time.  Jesus’ prophetic call to true repentance is a call to changing one’s thinking, not changing one’s piety.  It’s exactly what was needed in his time and remains what is needed in our time.  It cost him his life and I can only pray that myself and enough other humans are willing to devote our lives to this cause.  For me, “salvation” isn’t deliverance from sin, but rather the shedding of false values in order to embrace God’s universe instead of exploiting the world and the people around us.