"Constructing a Family" - Rev Adam Slate

This year is the hardest of your whole life.

so hard you cannot see a future, most days.

The pain is bigger than anything else.

Takes up the whole horizon, no matter where you are.

You feel unsafe, you feel unsaved.

Your past so present you can feel your baby teeth.

Sitting on the couch, you swear your feet don’t reach the floor.

You keep remembering the first time you saw a bird’s nest

Held together by an old shoe lace and scraps of a plastic bag

You knew the home of a person could be built like that

A lot of things you’d rather throw away

You keep worrying you’re taking up too much space.

I wish you’d let yourself be the Milky Way

Remember when I told you I was gonna become a full-time poet

And you paid my rent for three years?

Best Friend,

Angel of the get-through.

All living is storm chasing.

Every good heart has lost its roof.

Let all the walls collapse at your feet,

Scream “timber” when they ask you how you are.

“Fine” is the suckiest word. It is the opposite of HERE

Here is the only place left on the map

Here is where you learn laughter can go extinct

and come back

I am already building a museum

For every treasure you unearth in the rock bottom

Holy vulnerable cliff

God mason, heart heavier than all the bricks

Say this is what the pain made of you

An open, open, open road

An avalanche of feel it all

Don’t ever let anyone tell you, you are too much

Or it has been too long

Whatever keeps a stutterer from stuttering when he sings a song,

you are made of that thing

That unbreakable note

That photograph of you at five years old,

the year you ran away from school,

because you wanted to go home.

You are almost there.

You are the same compass you have always been

You are the same friend who never left my side

during my worst year

You caught every tantrum I threw

with your bare hands

chucked it back at that blood moon

said “it’s okay, everyone’s survival looks a little bit like death sometimes”

I wrote a poem called “Say Yes” while I was cursing your name

For not letting me go.

Best friend, this is what we do.

We gather each other up.

We say, the cup is half

yours and half mine.

We say alone is the last place you will ever be.

We say tonight let’s just stay inside reading Pema Chodron

while everyone else is out on the town

Pema will say, “only to the degree we expose ourselves over and over to annihilation

can that which is indestructible in us be found”

You’ll say Pema is so wise.

And I’ll say yes she is, and we are too.

Angels of the get-through. We are too.

-From ‘Angels of the Get-Through’ by Andrea Gibson

Introduction

‘You are my family.’ I first heard Pierce Pettis sing that song in 1993, shortly after he wrote it. If you know the song at all, you probably know the Dar Williams version. She covered it a few years later on the same album as ‘The Christians and the Pagans’ and it helped launch her career.

I couldn’t help thinking of the song when I was planning for this morning. The idea of family being based on the way we care for each other—the person recovering from a broken heart, someone saying goodbye to a beloved friend, a baby born into a broken human world. They all sing, ‘let your love cover me, like a pair of angel wings’—a perfect backdrop for today’s gathering.

Chosen Family

The idea for this gathering was born this time last year. I scheduled a child dedication ceremony during one of our gatherings, wrote a service for it and it was really lovely… and afterwards one of our congregants reached out to let me know that it was World Childless Week. 

It was terrible timing, and for me raised the idea that we could include awareness raising around childlessness—around people and families without children either involuntarily or by choice. And that grew into thinking about other kinds of family structures and ways that families have stretched the limits of what a family is ‘supposed to’ look like.

Sometimes our families don’t serve us and we need to find new family networks, and sometimes we simply meet others who we find are as important and meaningful to us as the existing family networks we have. Psychologist Jeremy Nobel writes about this idea of ‘chosen family.’ (1) He describes ‘chosen family’ as ‘nonbiological kinship bonds, whether legally recognized or not, deliberately chosen for the purpose of mutual support and love.’ 

Dr Nobel notes that ‘the term ‘chosen family’ originated within the LGBTQ community and was used to describe early queer gatherings like the Harlem Drag Balls of the late nineteenth century.’ The need for ‘chosen family’ in the LGBTQ community continues today, as ‘nearly 40 percent of today’s homeless youth identify as queer.’ And he quotes a study noting that nearly two-thirds of people in the LGBTQ communities ‘have built, and continue to rely on, chosen families.’

‘Chosen families… can form as a result of any person’s experience with their biological family that leaves needs unmet. Friends who become your family of choice may provide you with a healthier family environment than the one in which you were raised, or… may allow you to rely on them when your biological family isn’t located nearby.’ (2)

These are our friends with whom we become so close we not only consider them family, but interact with them as family: spending holidays with them, travelling with them, having them as our ‘next of kin’ in our contact information, and naming them as godparents and guideparents.

These are the people who we might rely on most when we need someone to pick us up when we’re down, or care for us when we’re sick.

They’re the parent who takes us in when our blood parents won’t. The religious community we join.

They’re the children we adopt. Or the couple that chooses not to have children. 

The legacy of my home country—for all its bluster about ‘traditional’ families—is built on chosen families. Enslaved people relied on them as their blood relatives were separated from them over and over again, sold or sometimes killed. 

Immigrants depend on extended networks as they face displacement or settle into a new country that is unfamiliar and too often unfriendly. 

It occurs to me that even society’s most traditional relationship, the married couple, is ‘chosen family’ in exactly the same way as the most nontraditional families.

For me, in my family, it’s important that step-siblings are seen as ‘real’ siblings, and that step-parents are seen as ‘real’ parents. I wonder what other ways some of you define family for yourself and the people around you. Would anyone want to share what some of those families look like? Let me know by raising your hand and I’ll bring a mic to you, or call on you on Zoom.

Families We Don’t Choose

You may have noticed that some of these chosen family stories begin with something that’s not our choice.

You heard it in the poem from Andrea Gibson that Emmeline shared earlier:

This year is the hardest of your whole life.

so hard you cannot see a future, most days.

The pain is bigger than anything else.

Takes up the whole horizon, no matter where you are.

You feel unsafe, you feel unsaved.

Your past so present you can feel your baby teeth.

Sometimes the family we want for ourselves is lost to us. Our parents may divorce, taking from us the two parent home we always expected to have. They may remarry, pushing us into a second family that we did not ask for.

We may want children, but not be able to have them due to infertility, because of our financial situation, or because we’re not in a relationship and don’t want to raise a child as a single parent.

We may have to navigate the death of a spouse, a child, or a parent when we’re still a child ourselves, reshaping the contours of the family we knew. In some parts of the world, entire societies of families are torn apart through war, oppression, or famine.

Our birth family may not accept who we are and reject us, especially within the LGBTQ community.

A whole book of the Hebrew Bible is devoted to the idea of a chosen family brought together through unexpected and tragic circumstances. In the story of Ruth and Naomi, Ruth’s husband dies, and her mother-in-law Naomi, who’s now lost both her sons, tries to send Ruth home to her family of origin. But Ruth decides to stay with Naomi saying, ‘where you go, I will go. Where you live, I will live.’ The entire text is devoted to this tale of two women navigating vulnerability and uncertainty to rebuild their lives together as a family. God doesn’t make much of an appearance in this story; the two women do most of the work on their own.

It’s often in times like this that we learn how resilient human beings can be. Our ability to recover and rebuild our lives is often remarkable and can even serve as inspiration to others.

Yet all of these unwanted and unexpected changes can upturn and reshape the contours of the life we knew, leaving us uncertain, vulnerable, anxious. If you’re finding yourself in this kind of situation, be gentle with yourself, and know there are resources and support networks out there that can help. Reach out to me if you need to.

Conclusion - What Is a Family?

Dr Nobel, who I talked about earlier, says that ‘chosen families don’t come to us in perfect, nuclear packages. Their very [existence challenges] the idea of family as something we’re given and must accept. These are groups of people made from those we’ve loved, found, and raised. Chosen families are made up of people we share a connection or similar experience with… They grow together like vines climbing the side of a house in summer: One day, you look up and realize they’ve bloomed.’ (3)

What is a family? What makes a family? I think to answer this question we need to change our thinking from what a family looks like to what a family feels like.

Sit with that for a minute. Try to shift from thinking of examples of the people who make up a family to the feeling you’ve had when a sense of family has been strong for you.

Are you seeing it? Now who are you with? Who are those people for you? Are they people you live with? Is it here in a church community, or another community you’re part of?

Or are you by yourself? Is that a comfortable or warm place for you?

Does this question make you realise something you’re yearning for that you don’t have? Something that needs your attention to work through?

There’s no right or wrong here. We get to make the family we want. We get to love the people we want. We get to seek support from the people we want.

May we seek those things that we want.

May we find those things that we need.

And may they show us a path to peace and love, to understanding and to comfort.

Amen.

Notes:

(1) https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/being-unlonely/201906/finding-connection-through-chosen-family

(2) https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/being-unlonely/201906/finding-connection-through-chosen-family

(3) https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/being-unlonely/201906/finding-connection-through-chosen-family