SALVATION BY KNOWLEDGE [SAT, 11-6-21]

CHRIST IN WINTER: Reflections on Faith & Life for the Years of Winter

Helen is reading Ed Friedman’s Generation to Generation again. She does it every few years. She says it is the best book she’s ever read.

Ed was a working rabbi, and also a family systems therapist in private practice. He wrote Generation to Generation for other clergy like himself, rabbis and pastors, because a church is very like a family. We understand the dynamics of a congregation if we understand how families function.

Generation to Generation was so enlightening to me, both in understanding my congregation and my own family. So when I was president of The Academy of Parish Clergy, I arranged for Rabbi Friedman to spend a day leading our annual convention.

Seeing Helen sitting there in her recliner, reading that book in its familiar gray dust jacket, reminds me of Rhonda [not her real name].

Her family was loosely connected to our church. Well, not the church, but people in the church. We had a lot of bright, thoughtful parents in our church, and Rhonda’s parents hung out with them, in other social circles in town, but they didn’t come to church. And we had a huge number of bright young kids in the church, and Rhonda and her brother hung out with them, but not in church. There are always “constituents” like that, in any congregation, loosely connected, but these folks were extreme. They felt like members of the church, but they never came to worship or church activities.

So I knew of them more than I knew them when they came to see me about Rhonda. She had always been the model child, unlike her brother, four years older than Rhonda, who was a wild child. He had graduated high school and joined the army. They were so looking forward to a peaceful time in the family, without the near catastrophes that he precipitated, but Rhonda, now in 8^th grade, was acting up.

I knew that just explaining how families work, brain-first stuff, was not good counseling, but I had just learned so much from Ed Friedman’s book, so I explained what was happening. Rhonda had always felt like she was the left-over child, because her brother was first, male, and got all the attention because of his antics. She thought she would get attention now, since he was gone, but they just wanted to relax. She acted out to get the attention she deserved.

More importantly, she had to fill the vacuum that his absence now left in the family. Families, like nature, abhor a vacuum. When a member is taken out of the family—and we see this most noticeably in the death of a family member—other members have to expand their roles to fill the vacuum and bring the family back to stability. Rhonda felt unconsciously that she now had to fill not only her family role but that of her brother.

“Oh,” they said, “Would you explain that to her?”

So I did. She said, “Oh. You mean I just have to be myself?” “Yes.” “Okay.”

That was it. Some folks are perfectly able to adjust if they understand the situation. Rhonda never came to church, but she came to see me once a year through high school, her “annual checkup,” she called it, to be sure she was being herself. And she wrote me once a year for a long time after she had gone off to college and moved far away and gotten married. Her last letter said that she was going to have a baby. She thanked me for helping her to understand herself so that she could be herself.

Just understanding a situation doesn’t necessarily allow us to change it. But sometimes, all we need is the explanation of why things are like they are, and then we can apply that explanation ourselves. If you want some good information about your family, or your church, I recommend Generation to Generation.  

My friend and colleague, the proudly conservative Bill Pruett, used to say: “Sometimes, you don’t feel the spirit, or anything else. Then, you have to rely on what you KNOW.”

John Robert McFarland

“If you claim you must know the name of Jesus to be saved, you are talking about salvation by syllables.” Marcus Borg