Shelter from the storm
May 2, 2004 | 12:00am
Sixteen uncles. Eighteen aunts. Fifty-eight cousins. Seventy nieces and nephews. Plus twenty-four apo sa tuhod. Big clan, isn’t it? Literally my family followed what the church ordains: to reproduce and reproduce. So imagine attending a family reunion with us, you’ll surely get tired before all the introductions are done and totally disoriented trying to remember all the names. Though tiring and annoying sometimes, it’s fun to belong to a big family.
My kin’s a traditional and typical Filipino family. Noisy, complicated and filled with intense, emotional people. They argue politics and religion and they make diverse decisions about love and work. It was during one of these reunions that I started to observe the behavior of my relatives. Yes, we are a family but why do we act so differently from one another? Uniqueness? Individuality?
I wanted to figure out how everyone was wired. Why did certain people fall in love, got married and build their own family? Why was one cousin spoiled and hard to get along with and another wonderfully patient with his younger siblings? Why did one uncle drink so much and the other one smoke? Why did one family forbid rock and roll in their house? I’m certain there’s an some explanation, but I didn’t know who to ask. Then by accident, I found Mary Pipher’s book The Shelter of Each Other: Rebuilding Our Families on a bookshelf in my grandfather’s library.
The book looked old and overused that I didn’t want to read it at first. But the opening line, "Magical moments are embedded in ordinary life. The joys and sorrows of family are as mixed together as salt and pepper can be mixed, and as inseparable," got me hooked.
So what is a family? My teacher in the seventh grade once said that the family is the basic unit of government. To heal the government’s problems, we should start in our own backyard. At the time, all I could think about was how to persuade my dad to buy me a pager, the hot gadget of the year. Only now do I realize the essential meaning of that statement. Indeed, a family is the smaller sector of a bigger one – the government. So how we are molded by family, culture and experiences is a reflection of our current lives at our near future.
The dictionary defines family as: A social unit consisting of parents and children. A set of relatives; the descendants of a common ancestry, marriage, relatives. Any group of persons or things related in some way or all those claiming descent from a common ancestor; tribe, clan, lineage.
Pipher defines it as a collection of people who pool resources and help each other over the long haul. That families love one another even when that requires sacrifice. And if you disagree, you still stay together.
Families are ancient institutions; sad and happy, complicated and simple, and full of victories and failures. Family has existed ever since, and the problems are recycled through generations. You tackle ungrateful children, self-involved parents, jealous siblings, insane relatives, unfaithful mates and prodigal sons. Nevertheless, we still need our families. They are our shelter from the storm, our oldest and most precious institution and our last great hope, though sometimes we don’t always behave well with them. We love and hate them, yearn for and hate them deep in our bones.
The book discusses two versions of family: the idealized version and the dysfunctional one. The idealized one portrays the family as a wellspring of love and happiness, as loyal and true. The dysfunctional versions depicts families as disturbed and disturbing, and suggests that salvation lies in extricating oneself from all the ties that bind. The latter part seems the most influential because according to this belief system, families get in the way of individual fulfillment.
And speaking of individual, we have pushed the concept of individual rights to the limits. Laws are not our main problem. People have always been governed more by community values than by laws. Ethics, rather than laws, determines most of our behavior. Unwritten rules of civility organize civic life. Unfortunately, those rules of civility seem to be crumbling. We are becoming a nation of people who get angry when anyone gets in our way.
As Joshua Meyrowitz wrote: "We are becoming a nation of neither children nor adults. Rather we all exist in some age zone between childhood and adulthood. We’re a nation of adolescents – preoccupied with ourselves, sexualized, moody and impulsive, seeking freedom without responsibility."
It’s very sad to know that we live in a money-driven culture these days. We all suffer from existential flu as we search for meaning in a culture that values money, not meaning. Everyone I know wants to do good work. But right now we have an enormous gap between doing what’s true and meaningful, and doing what is reimbursed.
Sigmund Freud, the inventor of talk therapy, postulated a great need for sex; I say our greatest human need is love. We need to be reconnected with one another, to restore community and rebuild the infrastructure of families.
Good realistic families understand themselves and have a strong value system. They acknowledge problems and deal with them. All families must work through disagreements. It’s best to do this quickly and kindly, then return to a calm, peaceful state. What unhappy families do is just the opposite. They savor and nurse their pain on the meringues of small miseries.
Families were once powerful institutions, strong enough to withstand assaults. But now almost every force in our culture works against families. The culture of today is too hard for many families. Parents work long hours to sustain their family’s needs and wants, so they have less time with their children.
New gadgets like cell phones help us keep connected with each other. We have home entertainment systems that keep people from neighborhood events. PlayStation that keeps kids from playing with each other. We can interact on the Internet with people from all over the world. Now all these tools have their uses and their good points. It’s the whole pile that’s the problem, the cumulative effect of which is that it changes our families.
In a healthy family self-definition is encouraged, but not worshipped. Diversity is tolerated, even valued. Differences are openly discussed and disagreement isn’t seen as disloyalty. Families need core values that give members meaning and purpose and guide their choices as they navigate through our complex universe.
Families teach people to manage pain. Extracting meaning from suffering ennobles and heals. Pain makes a person more tolerant, empathic and emotionally complex, it also helps family members to grow and become more human. Along with transcendence comes forgiveness, a compassion for others and an awareness of how flawed humans all are. Strong families teach their members to be people on whom nothing is lost.
Much of the terrible craziness in the world comes from running from pain. People drink, do drugs or engage in other self-destructive behaviors so they can avoid facing pain. Healthy people acknowledge pain, accept it and talk about it. Running keeps people from learning.
Every now and then, we need to keep re-conceptualizing, to examine what works well and what doesn’t and use this knowledge in planning for a better world.
The fact that people have more choices today makes relationships more complex. Today we hunger for values, community and something greater than ourselves to dedicate our selves to. We can make a difference by simply starting the deed with ourselves and others will follow. Just remember that families are about caring for people, about feeding and sheltering the young, the old and the needy.
People seek explanation for their pain and this book is an eye opener. It tells stories of families in different situations. It sympathizes with families’ efforts to survive difficult times. It discusses the core of the family – how culture affects the life of the family, what values it teaches, what behaviors it influences.
Pipher’s goal is to help families become more conscious of how they are shaped by the culture in which way they live. And reading it challenges each of us to face the truth about ourselves and find the courage to protect, nurture and revive the families we cherish.
And if you wonder why I choose the subject of family, it’s simple. Each and everyone of us belongs to a family we love dearly. Their memories are our mandalas. They comfort and secure us.
My kin’s a traditional and typical Filipino family. Noisy, complicated and filled with intense, emotional people. They argue politics and religion and they make diverse decisions about love and work. It was during one of these reunions that I started to observe the behavior of my relatives. Yes, we are a family but why do we act so differently from one another? Uniqueness? Individuality?
I wanted to figure out how everyone was wired. Why did certain people fall in love, got married and build their own family? Why was one cousin spoiled and hard to get along with and another wonderfully patient with his younger siblings? Why did one uncle drink so much and the other one smoke? Why did one family forbid rock and roll in their house? I’m certain there’s an some explanation, but I didn’t know who to ask. Then by accident, I found Mary Pipher’s book The Shelter of Each Other: Rebuilding Our Families on a bookshelf in my grandfather’s library.
The book looked old and overused that I didn’t want to read it at first. But the opening line, "Magical moments are embedded in ordinary life. The joys and sorrows of family are as mixed together as salt and pepper can be mixed, and as inseparable," got me hooked.
So what is a family? My teacher in the seventh grade once said that the family is the basic unit of government. To heal the government’s problems, we should start in our own backyard. At the time, all I could think about was how to persuade my dad to buy me a pager, the hot gadget of the year. Only now do I realize the essential meaning of that statement. Indeed, a family is the smaller sector of a bigger one – the government. So how we are molded by family, culture and experiences is a reflection of our current lives at our near future.
The dictionary defines family as: A social unit consisting of parents and children. A set of relatives; the descendants of a common ancestry, marriage, relatives. Any group of persons or things related in some way or all those claiming descent from a common ancestor; tribe, clan, lineage.
Pipher defines it as a collection of people who pool resources and help each other over the long haul. That families love one another even when that requires sacrifice. And if you disagree, you still stay together.
Families are ancient institutions; sad and happy, complicated and simple, and full of victories and failures. Family has existed ever since, and the problems are recycled through generations. You tackle ungrateful children, self-involved parents, jealous siblings, insane relatives, unfaithful mates and prodigal sons. Nevertheless, we still need our families. They are our shelter from the storm, our oldest and most precious institution and our last great hope, though sometimes we don’t always behave well with them. We love and hate them, yearn for and hate them deep in our bones.
The book discusses two versions of family: the idealized version and the dysfunctional one. The idealized one portrays the family as a wellspring of love and happiness, as loyal and true. The dysfunctional versions depicts families as disturbed and disturbing, and suggests that salvation lies in extricating oneself from all the ties that bind. The latter part seems the most influential because according to this belief system, families get in the way of individual fulfillment.
And speaking of individual, we have pushed the concept of individual rights to the limits. Laws are not our main problem. People have always been governed more by community values than by laws. Ethics, rather than laws, determines most of our behavior. Unwritten rules of civility organize civic life. Unfortunately, those rules of civility seem to be crumbling. We are becoming a nation of people who get angry when anyone gets in our way.
As Joshua Meyrowitz wrote: "We are becoming a nation of neither children nor adults. Rather we all exist in some age zone between childhood and adulthood. We’re a nation of adolescents – preoccupied with ourselves, sexualized, moody and impulsive, seeking freedom without responsibility."
It’s very sad to know that we live in a money-driven culture these days. We all suffer from existential flu as we search for meaning in a culture that values money, not meaning. Everyone I know wants to do good work. But right now we have an enormous gap between doing what’s true and meaningful, and doing what is reimbursed.
Sigmund Freud, the inventor of talk therapy, postulated a great need for sex; I say our greatest human need is love. We need to be reconnected with one another, to restore community and rebuild the infrastructure of families.
Good realistic families understand themselves and have a strong value system. They acknowledge problems and deal with them. All families must work through disagreements. It’s best to do this quickly and kindly, then return to a calm, peaceful state. What unhappy families do is just the opposite. They savor and nurse their pain on the meringues of small miseries.
Families were once powerful institutions, strong enough to withstand assaults. But now almost every force in our culture works against families. The culture of today is too hard for many families. Parents work long hours to sustain their family’s needs and wants, so they have less time with their children.
New gadgets like cell phones help us keep connected with each other. We have home entertainment systems that keep people from neighborhood events. PlayStation that keeps kids from playing with each other. We can interact on the Internet with people from all over the world. Now all these tools have their uses and their good points. It’s the whole pile that’s the problem, the cumulative effect of which is that it changes our families.
In a healthy family self-definition is encouraged, but not worshipped. Diversity is tolerated, even valued. Differences are openly discussed and disagreement isn’t seen as disloyalty. Families need core values that give members meaning and purpose and guide their choices as they navigate through our complex universe.
Families teach people to manage pain. Extracting meaning from suffering ennobles and heals. Pain makes a person more tolerant, empathic and emotionally complex, it also helps family members to grow and become more human. Along with transcendence comes forgiveness, a compassion for others and an awareness of how flawed humans all are. Strong families teach their members to be people on whom nothing is lost.
Much of the terrible craziness in the world comes from running from pain. People drink, do drugs or engage in other self-destructive behaviors so they can avoid facing pain. Healthy people acknowledge pain, accept it and talk about it. Running keeps people from learning.
Every now and then, we need to keep re-conceptualizing, to examine what works well and what doesn’t and use this knowledge in planning for a better world.
The fact that people have more choices today makes relationships more complex. Today we hunger for values, community and something greater than ourselves to dedicate our selves to. We can make a difference by simply starting the deed with ourselves and others will follow. Just remember that families are about caring for people, about feeding and sheltering the young, the old and the needy.
People seek explanation for their pain and this book is an eye opener. It tells stories of families in different situations. It sympathizes with families’ efforts to survive difficult times. It discusses the core of the family – how culture affects the life of the family, what values it teaches, what behaviors it influences.
Pipher’s goal is to help families become more conscious of how they are shaped by the culture in which way they live. And reading it challenges each of us to face the truth about ourselves and find the courage to protect, nurture and revive the families we cherish.
And if you wonder why I choose the subject of family, it’s simple. Each and everyone of us belongs to a family we love dearly. Their memories are our mandalas. They comfort and secure us.
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