Thursday, October 5, 2023 | Trey Comstock
Family holidays feel like yet another victim of our politically polarized moment. I don’t have solid data on this, but the anecdotal evidence seems telling. In my personal life, I hear of more people not going home for the holidays or having extreme anxiety around the thought of going home. In my online life, I see more articles about how to survive the holidays or how to create alternative, family-free holidays. The faith-based Super Bowl ads from this year offered a counternarrative of how Jesus didn’t give up on you, so you shouldn’t give up on family. Some of this can be explained by better recognition of generational trauma, the lingering effects of the pandemic, and the increasing nightmare of holiday travel. However, I sense something more fundamental. People either don’t gather or dread gathering because the poison within our body politic has infected the family. We fear the toxic discourse from our father, who has taken to wearing the red hat or our niece, who has become a devoted Communist. We Don’t want to travel hundreds or thousands of miles to be put on trial and harshly judged. Our modern political discourse no longer solely deals with opinions or worldviews but with fundamental aspects of identity. In our theoretically joyous holiday time, we don’t want to enter an environment where that identity will be attacked or litigated.
There’s a facile argument that the instruction to honor your mother and father means that the younger generation should just deal with it and show up. The Ten Commandments do place a key role of maintaining family harmony on children, and in the culture that originally received the Decalogue, they would not have seen that responsibility has ending with adulthood. The traditional way of living for the Hebrew people consisted of living in larger family units run by the eldest male relative. So, until their father’s death, adult male offspring and adult female, unmarried offspring would have lived within their father’s house. Recognizing the key leadership role of one’s father and mother would have taken up a huge percentage of the average Hebrew’s time in this realm of existence. Even if we no longer live in these broader family units, the commandments place special emphasis on how we approach our parents. “Honor your father and your mother, so that your days may be long in the land that the Lord your God is giving you.” (Exodus 20:12 NRSV)
However, the Ten Commandments have a far deeper divine logic than just kids having a forever role to deal with whatever parents will dish out. More than 50% of commandments deal with how we treat others. Murder, lying, adultery, theft, and coveting find themselves equally out of bounds with disrespecting a parent. For each of these, God bans them because in their own way, they disrupt the harmony of a community. Murdering, giving false legal testimony against, or stealing from your neighbor obviously causes discord. Adultery generally doesn’t increase harmony either, but also, in the ancient world especially, it messes up inheritance further risking the community’s cohesion and future survival. Desiring someone else’s stuff allows a psychological element of discord to enter. You have a muddier emotional relationship with another because jealousy clouds how you look at them. In part, you only see the stuff that you don’t have. By writing these into this headliner law, God elevates community harmony to a cosmic level of significance. If you internalize no other part of the law, God wants you to know that you love God and that you feed into the positive life of a community.
Thus, a broader, deeper read of the Ten Commandments burdens all of us with creating harmony. When applied to the holidays with national unity having been put through the paper shredder, I don’t think this means reverting to an old school forced silence and politeness. That’s just passive aggression made socially acceptable. We cannot create joyous holidays with a “no politics at the dinner table” or a “For God’s sake take off that hat” rule. God did not intend family and community to be something we merely survive or walk away from feeling like we dodged the worst of it.
Instead, the Ten Commandments challenge each of us to reinforce the sacred bonds that connect us. God tasks us with figuring out what exactly that means. Even if what divides us feels like it goes to the heart of our identity, the nature of God and humanity means that so many more things still connect us. God is love; therefore, we too can transcend the politics of the moment if we so choose. On a more practical level, maybe don’t talk about who is or isn’t President, and instead find ways to honor the humanity of all at the table. For each person and family, it may be different, but on some innate level, we know each other. We can figure it out – if everyone sees their role in it.
I attend more funerals than the average 37 year old. I get to observe many families deal with that particular strain, and it usually goes one of two ways. A family either comes together or gets torn apart. The ones that come together focus on the memories and connections. The ones that fly apart focus on old wounds, money, pecking orders, and money. All families have the same pressures in that moment. What determines the outcomes is how a family chooses to approach the situation.
Do we all live into our God given imperative to strengthen the bonds of community, or do we give into the spirit of the age? I know how it feels out there, but we’ve always had that choice.