About a hundred years ago, my grandmother discovered that her husband was having an affair and promptly divorced him. She soon packed up their five children, who ranged in ages from 7 to 20, and moved the family 800 miles away to Washington, D.C.
Her bitterness and anger caused such an estrangement that my father, the oldest child, had no relationship with his father for the rest of his life. The ex-husband had a second family and none of us had contact with them. For us, they didn’t exist.
It’s the rare family that hasn’t experienced similar ruptures. The Norman Rockwell picture of a Thanksgiving family is far from typical. In today’s cultural polarization, many families are navigating difficult estrangements and hostilities, and life-long friendships are fracturing over politics. The effects of these broken relationships radiate out far beyond the immediate participants.
Research shows that negative events in childhood affect the child’s adult relationships and even extends to their children’s children. Slavery continues in the psyches of enslaved people’s descendants; the oppression of America’s Indigenous people has never ended. The wounds from today’s broken relationships will fester for generations to come.
The world needs deep healing. Most of us cannot effect change on the global level, but when we heal our relationships, change happens on other levels. After all, society consists of the aggregate of all our personal lives. There is no society without individuals.
Healing broken relationships is not easy, but it can be done. It takes patience–over years, perhaps–but mostly a willingness to let go of being right, of the need to win. It doesn’t really matter who is right or wrong. What matters is who is willing to let go of resentment or anger and be vulnerable.
If the other person is not open to discussion, loving him or her from a distance may be all we can do, and that may be enough. Even if the relationship is not mended, love helps to heal the pain of the separation.
George Fox encouraged the early Quakers to “walk cheerfully over the world, answering that of God in everyone.” I wish my grandmother had been able to answer that of God in her ex-husband and heal the rift with him, so my father could have his support in adulthood. I wish I could have had a grandfather.
I think of the alienation that has occurred in my own family and the repercussions it will have for years to come, as children are growing up missing important relationships in their lives.
It behooves us to repair as many relationships as we can. It may cost us a chunk of our ego or a bitten tongue, but in the long run it’s worth it. We read in I Corinthians that “love bears all.” I don’t see that as an endorsement of stoicism, but rather a recognition that nothing in life is beyond the reach of love–and I would add, nor beyond patience.
Read More: Maya Porter: Healing relationships isn’t easy, but worthwhile