January 18, 2022

Here’s a gem from poet and memoirist Mary Karr. "When I set out on a book tour to promote the memoir about my less than perfect Texas clan, I did so with soul-sucking dread. Surely, we'd be held up as grotesques, my beloveds and I, real moral circus freaks. Instead, I shoved into bookstores where sometimes hundreds of people stood claiming to identify with my story, which fact stunned me…. After eight weeks of travel, I ginned up this working definition for a dysfunctional family: any family with more than one person in it."

I taught an Adult Ed class one year on the book of Genesis and entitled it “The First Dysfunctional Families.”  The point is this - we are all in this thing together and it all goes back to the very beginning. And Jesus is there with us too, unsurprised and unfazed by the chaos or repression or whatever your family’s brand of dysfunction may be.

Don’t you remember what we read in John’s prologue? “The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it.” (John 1:5)

“Almighty God, we entrust all who are dear to us to thy never-failing love, for this life and the life to come, knowing that thou art doing for them better things than we can desire or pray for; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.” (For those we Love – BCP p. 830)