Reconciliation is messy
Knowing when and tolerating the "how" require care
When we left for seminary in 2006, I felt like we were leaving our family. We were only leaving our church. In fact, we’d be closer to my side of the family, and, at that point, I knew I had a charmed life when it came to family. We’d experienced very little estrangement compared to grandparents, cousins, and some in-laws.
When we returned four years later, assigned to our home parish, I threw myself back into ministries and relationships with relish. And for ten years, despite my busyness, I felt deep connections with the people I worshipped alongside. Sure, we had a few who we knew worried we’d bring our “liberal” ideas into the congregation. Cognizant of living in peace and harmony, David and I worked at distancing our personal views, and often our personal advocacy, from the folks at church. I suppose we lived a bit of a double life—creatives who rubbed elbows and built friendships with people that wouldn’t come to our church, either because they weren’t curious about institutional religion or because they’d likely not be welcomed because they were LGBTQ or because our congregation was/still is predominantly white middle class.
I taught and wrote. David ministered and performed music. We made friends with a good many gay people, a handful of trans people, people who support abortion, people with no religious affiliation or affiliated with another faith tradition. Over the years, I had long conversations with my Muslim students about the rigors of fasting. Then I’d pivot to a conversation about why a person left Christianity.
Sometimes I’d be listening to a person and also observing myself. I took on the persona of the Christian I’d been raised to be, one who could only be friends with those people if I was making them into a project. I couldn’t truly be friends with them. That would mean I was “unequally yoked with unbelievers.” I was being led astray instead of leading those people into the Kingdom of God.
By the time COVID closed down the country in March 2020, I’d wrestled with a lot of noise in my head about not being the right kind of Christian. But it was too late.
My family had cracked in 2017 under the pressure of the death of our sister/daughter, Ruth, and under the division created when Donald Trump was elected.
I didn’t expect the same fractures in my church family, but considering the way I compartmentalized my church community from my writing and professional communities, I should have been more clear-eyed about what happened, including my own behavior, when the pandemic crushed everyone under its weight.
As restrictions eased, David held liturgies six days a week, first allowing for five people, then ten, twenty-five, and so on in the building, as local guidelines prescribed. He worked closely with the bishop and other priests to try to keep people safe while still allowing them to receive the Eucharist. He had a signup sheet online, and families could pick the service they’d attend. Once it was full, no one else was supposed to add to the numbers inside the building. Some weeks, I’d sign up, walk down to the church, and see how many cars were in the parking lot. I’d about-face and tune in to the livestream from home.
“Gotta protect my mother-in-law,” I’d say. Like others, we live in a multi-generational household. I put a buffer around myself, grinding my teeth when someone showed up unmasked at our door. This included our son, whose apartment was full of nineteen-year-olds, certain of their invincibility. That boundary around my heart hardened into frustration and despair at how people just put their own wishes before the best interests of others. Couldn’t they see that honoring what the researchers, scientists, and policymakers asked of us was a short-term sacrifice in exchange for longer lives for our elderly and sick?
My heart shrank a few sizes during that time.
“Teach me to act firmly and wisely, without embittering and embarrassing others,” I’d pray in the morning. But it embittered people that the minister’s wife drew such a hard, moral line about social distancing and masking.
I ended up joining a team researching congregations’ and pastors’ responses to the pandemic about the same time as our congregation hired a therapist who specializes in family systems to lead a retreat on reconciliation.
Why? Because the period between March 2021 and about March 2022, our church family fractured. I won’t go into the whole saga, but a lot of people were wounded. 1
During one of the breaks, I asked the therapist what I should do, if anything, to be reconciled with my sibling. She’d never said what I did wrong and didn’t seem to want to be in the same conversation as me. I felt like I should try for reconciliation. That was the Christian thing to do, but how, when I hadn’t caused the rift and didn’t know what I’d done wrong.
Of course, I could see that I’d been salty with some in my church family, even when I felt my reasons were sound.
But I’d read that proverb, “A man’s ways seem right to him, but the Lord knows the motives of the heart.” I’d read Stanislaw Lem’s Solaris, where humans cannot even know their own minds and hearts, yet presume to try to conquer the universe.
My sibling didn’t cut off contact with me because I’d done nothing, and she was a nutter. Clearly, there was something there I needed to work on. I told the reconciliation specialist about my therapy work. He suggested a plan of action. And he reminded me, it might not work. Or it might take time.
But I was taking the right steps.
I didn’t rule out that I bore some responsibility.
I worked with a therapist to examine and reflect on probable causes.
I’d learned that my locus of control was myself.
But, I also bore the responsibility for trying to or being open to rebuilding relationship.
And, I’d learn later, the relationship would never be restored as it had been.
This week, I want to share two pieces that I think will help anyone who is navigating estrangement, wondering how long to keep hard boundaries between themselves and the person harming them, when to crack the door and see if the other party is ready for reconciliation, and what to expect. These are from trained professionals. I am NOT a licensed therapist.
First, when do you know you can be reconciled?
It may not be clear, especially if you have to keep the door closed most of the time. This piece from Pepperdine advises that you do prioritize safety, consider a mediator, prepare for rejection, work through your own issues, reflect on the source of the conflict, ask for help, avoid lurking on social media, but also use it as a tool for communication, and avoid showing up unannounced.
One article from Wondermind reminds us to look for words to line up with actions, which means we need a means of monitoring that. David and I have been asked about how so-and-so is doing. While neither of us will play mediator in our family situations—that is highly likely to backfire and have terrible consequences—David will do so as in a chaplain, non-therapeutic role when both parties request or are open to it.
But the one piece that I think speaks best to the vulnerability and non-linear, often very prickly experience of reconciliation is this one from Rachel Haack, LSCW.
It took my sibling and me another 15 or more months to have a conversation where we could trust and rely on each other, and another year and a half to build more trust. And our relationship will never be as close again. I grieved and accepted that my mother may be right. It’s best not to let a person get too close after such a wounding. For me, particularly, because I still don’t know what broke the relationship in the first place.
Right now, I’ve settled on: “Grief is a hell of a drug.”
Lastly, I want to add this piece. While it’s about parents whose adult kids are estranged, I don’t know if I have any of those in my audience. I have more readers who have needed to pull back from intimacy with parents and siblings. For those people, if you are looking for signs of when to reconcile, read these six steps as indicators:
Why does your family want to reconnect? Do they really want to know you for who you are? Are they regretting that they’ve missed a chance to know you well?
Are they willing to let go of their defensiveness and “reasons” for doing what they did?
Will they listen to what you have to say? Will they hear you speak about the long road you have been down and what snowballed into you cutting off or reducing contact?
Will they park the “two sides to every story”?
Will they let go of the notion that they are owed respect from you because you are their family member? Will they see that relationships are lifelong and require work from both parties?
Will they see a therapist?
Pepperdine University offers some important considerations on forgiveness and family estrangement.
Neither they, nor my husband, and in the end, even I, felt safe in the ways I discussed in my previous post. But we’re a church whose theology of salvation is based on reconciliation and healing, not divine justice (or something called penal substitutionary atonement, aka, Jesus had to be penalized with death in place of the rest of humanity to pay off the injustice of humanity’s sins). Instead of judgment, the Orthodox Church’s approach to needing to be saved and being saved is:
Creation was made for love and relationship. The Creator greatly loves Creation, but…humans broke off relationship with the Creator.
This wounded creation. It wounded humanity. Jesus Christ is the physician.
By dying and being resurrected, Christ created the path out of the separation caused by death, and if we accept it of our own free will, we can be healed.
We will not be forced. I don’t think God will close the door on us, and I’m not alone. The writings of St. Gregory of Nyssa, Isaac the Syrian, Maximus the Confessor and Origen and Evagrius Pontius speak to this.