Forsaking your Family

Growing up, my family was a sort of central-hub for social gatherings. Our friends would come down for an afternoon, a weekend, or an extended length of time not only to socialize but to help us out with some homesteading tasks. If we were not hosting a formal square dance, we were inviting families over for a pig slaughter. If we were not offering a background for a homemade movie, we were welcoming family friends who just wanted to stop by, and potentially spend several nights. We were something of a spectacle at times, and offered some other families an opportunity to work with their hands, be outside of the city’s constrictions, and enjoy some fireside music. But our family was well equipped for it: hospitality was undeniably a charism of our family. And while my siblings and I may be starting our own families with our own charisms, the subsequent charisms we create in our own families can never truly be absent of hospitality.

The family my parents created manifested the charism of hospitality well, and that charism has influenced myself and many of my siblings in how we have begun our own families. My parents have continued their charism of hospitality as their children move away and their children’s friends stop coming over. The drive to host and give of themselves has caused them to not only continue hog roasts, square dances, and teaching opportunities; knowledge of their hospitable charism has caused them to adapt their implementation of this charism to open their home to some who, whether it be vulnerability or family circumstance, may even need longer term hospitality. The Curley Family Prime, as it were, is an outward-facing family who changes their activities and involvement to adapt to the calling which Mother and Father Curley heard for themselves and passed on to their children.

You might think that the subsequent generations would follow strictly in the footsteps of the parents. As my parents were of the charism of hospitality, so too my own family would therefore be driven to open-door policies concerning social gatherings. And, for the first several years of my married life, I sought to directly replicate that charism into my own family. We tend towards that which we know; starting off, all you have is a relation to your parent’s family, either replicate some way or reject it. More than that, even: personal identity is formed and is a sort of reflection of the identity of your parents. This much to say: in trying to replicate the charism of hospitality in my own original family, I was not merely reflecting or copying that which my parents had done as much as I was trying to act upon something that, as child, had become part of my own personal identity. And all this is well and good - if you end up marrying yourself.

My spouse is significantly less inclined to social gatherings than I am. In the common nomenclature, you might call her a classic introvert. Hosting, opening our home with little to no warning, extended surprise stays by friends and family, all this was pretty new to her - and not at all in keeping with the strengths she brought to the table. This seemingly opposed dynamic caused, as you might imagine, no little stress in the early years of our life together. Even today, I might add, these opposite inclinations sometimes cause miscommunications. If all we had to go off was the modern concept of marriage as contract in which I stay until it becomes too personally taxing, or changes me too much, we would be in dire straights indeed!

Thankfully, the personal identities we bring to our married lives are not the identities we actually live within that marriage. Our subjective identities are created by God and held in being by Him. My personal preferences are the specific ways in which I recognize God in the world, and seek to bring myself closer to Him. Take a talent for the piano, for example: if I were musically inclined and sought to play the piano every change I get, it is only because I see God in music, at least subconsciously. I try to only choose that which makes me happy, and whether I know it or not God is the only thing that can make me happy. I am more happy the more I live in such a way that I can encounter Him. This identity is a combination of essential mark upon you personally, placed there at your Creation, as well as the result of the environment in which you grow up. For this reason, it was not unreasonable for me as a young husband to recognize God through a hospitable lens, nor was it unreasonable to expect that identity to remain after my marriage vows. Alas! Life is never that simple!

A marriage is not merely the result of two individuals of separate personalities coming together to live under one roof. Marriage, in essence, changes the very identities of the two so joined. Our principle which places identity and subjective personality in the realm of the conscience bears this statement up: if my personal preferences are created by me choosing that which I think best allows an encounter with God, then after marriage the things which used to cause me to encounter God simply do not do so in the same way. Rather, upholding and remaining true to my marital vows is now the new way in which I most directly encounter God. 

Maybe it was true that hospitality was the closest way I encountered God once upon a time. But in the context of marriage, what is bad for one of the spouses - or, worse, what causes one such distress as to eclipse the peace that ought to reign in a home - necessarily has the same or similar effect on the other spouse. I and my wife both were suddenly tied together, and tasked with determining what sorts of things allow us to both keep the influence of our parents but also allowed for upholding our own unique family’s identity.

Marriage is not a final calling. There is no “happily ever after” once you have become joined. On the contrary: marriage is the primary vocation of the spouses, not the final. This is an important distinction. Marriage is the foundational building block from which the spouses actually further discern what they are called to do on a daily basis. It informs the individual identities of the spouses, and causes them to seek God in new ways, ways which bind the two closer together. As individuals, we are the product of how we are raised. As humans we cannot be otherwise: God has ordained that the family creates, grows, and forms every human. However, as we grow and move on, we cannot take our childhoods with us. We cannot view our marriages and our own families as mediums in which we simply try to replicate the charisms and identities we had growing up. There are no “good fences make good neighbors” within the marriage. It is not a 50/50 relationship; it is a 100/100 relationship between two people, a relationship that causes both to die to their former selves and assume a new role, a new identity, and a new charism - one which reflects the individual backgrounds of each spouse, and is yet entirely unique, all with the same aim: bring the spouses closer to God, and raise the children to seek Him.