Single Parent Families

Welcome back to our 4 minute focus on building strong families!

One chapter in Building Christian Families by Mitch and Kathy Finley deals particularly with single parent families. If you are, or have been, part of a single parent family you will recognize the truth in what they write. If you are blessed to be part of a two-parent family, please read this anyway in order to build empathy for the special challenges you have been spared and perhaps to consider helping struggling families.

The single parent family is a true family and a legitimate form of home-church. Let’s follow the example we see throughout the Bible as God shows a soft spot in his heart for “widows and orphans,” or any family who needs extra consideration.

We all have our limits, and it’s only realistic to accept them. However, single parent families have special challenges we should be sensitive to:

• Both parent and children have gone through painful disruptions, whether because of abandonment, divorce, or death. Sources of income must be developed, a move to a new house or apartment may be necessary, and children might need to attend different schools. The grieving process may continue for many months, or even years.
• Parent-child relationships must be redesigned. A non-custodial parent may struggle to pay child support, worry about religious upbringing, have more time to be depressed, or feel acute loneliness.
• While couple parent families sometimes deal with the temptation to leave the main responsibility for parenting to the other spouse, the custodial single parent responds to the demands of children all day long and does it alone.
• Where a widowed parent may be looked upon by the wider community as courageous, others often view the divorced parent with suspicion or judgment. In some worship communities, the single parent who is divorced often feels shunned, ignored, even subtly ostracized. Yet divorced single parents have a deep desire to belong, to be a part of their church community.
• Single parents worry that their children will never have witnessed a normal man/woman, husband/wife loving relationship.
• Single parents must often deal with two particular temptations: the temptation to self-pity and to resentment.
• Many single parent families experience degrees of fear and anxiety that the typical couple-parent family does not usually know with such intensity. Financial anxieties may head the list, but a vague, undefined fear of what the future may bring is not far behind. The single parent is unable to share these fears and anxieties with another intimately known adult. She or he lives with these feelings constantly, so the fear tends to compound itself.
• In the two parent family, it is crucial for spouses to spend time regularly on themselves and on their friendship as a couple. It is equally important for the single parent to carve out of the week a few hours for leisure and, now and then, for prayerful reflection.
• The single parent often finds it necessary to struggle against the tendency to become isolated. Single parents have a need for sympathetic friends and for warm relationships with two-parent families. Single parents often need little more than a sympathetic listener, and they can frequently find this by forming friendships with other single parents and hopefully, by membership in church groups.

On the other hand, single parents may have some advantages over couple parents.

• They build strength as survivors, even though both parent and children have known much anguish.
• Children of single parent families are sometimes more mature than many of their peers from two-parent families. They have, of necessity, been trusted with significant responsibilities at home.
• Single parents may be more free to lead their children in their chosen faith life. In two-parent families, value conflicts which relate to the spiritual life of the family sometimes develop between husband and wife.

Single parents are like all parents:

• No parent or set of parents can give children everything they should ideally have.
• Most parents today often feel guilty about not spending enough quality time with their kids.
• All families know insecurity.
• All parents are called to conversion of heart and life, to trust God above all, to turn away from fear and anxiety as motives for action, to love God and others as the source of life’s meaning and purpose. Parents are called to do this even in the midst of meaninglessness and the temptation to despair. This is true faith, in the real world.
• All parents need other parents to simply commiserate with, to talk to and share their burdens and joys. We should never underestimate the value of honest talking and listening among peers, for it is a terrifically valuable service that all church communities should offer to parents.

Finleys remind us that a basic principle for all parents’ spirituality is to “keep on keeping on.” May God help all of us, married and single to persevere in our effort to parent well.

The Family as Church

Blessed Pope John Paul II declared, “The family in fact is the basic unit of society and of the church. It is the ‘domestic church.’”

Mitch and Kathy Finley, in Building Christian Families, write:

“Within the family, the foundational experiences of the Christian life happen best, for both children and adults. For most people, it is within the fabric of family life that faith becomes real. In family life, we experience the deepest joys and our deepest anguish, which means that in family life we most often discover the Cross and Resurrection of Christ in our own experience. […]”

“Within the family and around the family table, children experience the meaning of the Eucharist long before they receive their First Communion. Within the fabric of life in the domestic church, child and adult experience the meaning of forgiveness and reconciliation, apart from any official sacramental celebration of the experience. In the family, both adults and children experience the Christian life at its most immediate, where the seeds of faith are planted and cultivated daily.”

The family is the fundamental building block of the Church. Family spirituality is defined by the Finleys as, “A family’s ongoing attempts to live every dimension of its life in communion with the Cross and Resurrection of Jesus the Christ.” We first learn our spirituality primarily from our family. As Christians, our purpose in life is to serve God and his people, to work for the good of others, that we may all grow closer to God as we build his kingdom here on earth and spread the Good News of his love through our actions.

Do your children know what it is to be Christian? And what it means to be Catholic (or your denomination)? Or, more broadly, what are your children (even grown children) learning about spirituality as they observe their parents’ everyday life?

If your children are little, think back to your own childhoods. What did you look forward to about how your family expressed its faith? What were your family spiritual traditions on Sunday mornings? On holidays? On vacations? I remember whirling around the living room with my grandpa on Sunday mornings after Mass, my feet placed carefully on top of his dress shoes. Does that memory make me more Christian? Actually, yes, I think so. I knew in those moments that Sundays were special days of joy. Days to spend with family. Not simply because they were days off, but because they were God’s day.

If your children are teenagers, do you speak openly with them about your faith? Do you ask them what they think about social justice, or priests they have known, or some of the ethical questions we struggle with today? Do you visit other parishes so they begin to understand the universality of our Church? Do you reach out to the less fortunate as a family?

Last weekend, my husband and I watched a documentary, Into the Arms of Strangers, about the 10,000 children who were sent away in the 1940s from German occupied lands to strangers in England, in their parents’ desperate hope of saving their lives. The separation traumatized both parents and children, but their children lived, when 1.5 million children who stayed behind did not survive. The story touched us deeply as we listened to these children, now grown into elderly men and women, talk about how their parents struggled, in the few days between learning their children were accepted to the freedom trains and sending them off, (in most cases, never to see them again) to impart to them all the wisdom and faith that they would have spoken and modeled over their lifetimes.

Whatever the age of your children, even if they are greying themselves, don’t leave for later what you want them to know about your very personal faith. If you are uncomfortable at the thought of talking about such a personal issue, (Why are the most important things to say the hardest?) consider writing it down today. Here’s a start:

I know there is a God because once…

I know He loves me because…

I believe He wants me to treat his children with love and respect. I learned this when….

I know God answers prayers. He answered mine once when… (Maybe he said no, and you only came to understand what a good thing that was later.)

I believe in heaven. I’m not looking forward to dying, but I’m looking forward to asking God a few questions when I get there. And I’m looking forward to seeing my loved ones: _____.

I know God forgives. I learned this when I was forgiven once by ____. If they could forgive me and I know God loves me even more than they, He must forgive us even better.

I chose the church I attend because______ (our family always has been, or I converted because, or whatever your story is)

Our faith should be so important to us that we take care to pass it on to our children as a family treasure. May we recognize our treasure this week!

Blessings,

Betty

Unconditional Love

Welcome to this new Lenten series of 4 Minutes for Growth!

This year we concentrate on the family.

John Powell, S.J., starts us off with his timeless book, Unconditional Love: Love without Limits. I chose this book because unconditional love must be the basis of family life. Though we all fall short at times, loving without preconditions should be our goal—the type of love we continually strive to achieve and maintain. Unconditional love says, “No matter what, I will not reject you. I’m committed to your growth and happiness. I will always love you.”

Powell reminds us that love is not a feeling, but rather a decision and a choice. We choose to place another’s welfare on the same level as, and sometimes even above, our own. By so doing we bring true meaning to our lives. Such meaning, or self-fulfillment, is an elusive quality which we can’t capture by direct pursuit but only attain as a by-product of loving.

Unconditional love says: I will love you, I will encourage you by helping you to be aware of your strengths, and when necessary I will challenge you to grow.

Most times this love will be tender and gentle, but not always. Sometimes unconditional love must be tough love, when truly wanting what is best for someone’s growth and happiness means not giving them what they want, but rather what is essential. A spouse may need to firmly point out a loved one’s self-destructive choices, or a parent will set limits to protect a child who is not ready for the independence he or she demands. A wife might ask her husband to cut back on his time away from home, or a mother might forbid a son to attend a party that “everyone else” is allowed to attend. Love is not unconditional if it weakly allows poor choices in order to avoid uncomfortable confrontation.

However, even tough love is not harsh. Sometimes as parents we think we need to constantly correct in order to assure our children’s proper growth. But a child does not flourish under criticism. Rather, Powell contends:

There is nothing else that can expand the human soul, actualize the human potential for growth, or bring a person into the full possession of life more than a love which is unconditional. […] Unconditional love is liberating. It frees the loved one to be authentic and real.

I think most people would agree that our children deserve unconditional love. We parents know we fall short, but we remain determined to love our children no matter what they do. It gets harder, though, when we turn it around. Shouldn’t we love our parents unconditionally, too? They weren’t perfect, but neither are we. And, even more difficult, what about our siblings? Heaven knows, siblings can find and attack our vulnerabilities. Do I need to love them unconditionally after what they did… or continue to do?

(Apologies to my two brothers. I’m speaking generally here, not specifically. Though I also apologize for when I didn’t treat you with the love I should have.)

Granted, not all family members are healthy to be around. Sadly, some are caustic, and boundaries must be raised in order to protect our emotional well-being. We mustn’t fear that loving another unconditionally will mean losing ourselves. In fact, in order to love another we must first love ourselves, as much as we are able, unconditionally. God has made us and declared us good and he has shown us we are loveable and worthy of the greatest sacrifice. So we come to love others, not out of weakness, but out of strength and awareness of our worth. It would be unloving to allow others to treat us with disrespect.

Yet, for spiritual and emotional health, unconditional love calls us to endeavor to forgive the wrongs of the past, even from a distance. That way, if the family member ever makes changes for the better, we will be ready to reconnect.

God’s word to us in the Bible is full of stories of unconditional love. We read of the prodigal son’s father, who knew unconditional love requires forgiveness and so ran to embrace his son at his penitent return. We believe that Jesus demonstrated unconditional love as he died for our sins and yet bid his Father, “Forgive them, for they know not what they do.”

These are our models for building strong families. We must offer our family a lifetime of striving to love them unconditionally, forgiving them for their mistakes and asking forgiveness for our own, but always trying again to love, encourage, and challenge each other to be the best we each can be.

Next week we will turn to Building Christian Families, by Mitch and Kathy Finley.

Blessings on your first week of Lent!