By Greg Erlandson

Strangers together

Finding a way this holiday season to make family gatherings opportunities for intimacy, not angst

A counselor told me recently that the best thing for his business is the holiday season. Family members get together for Thanksgiving and Christmas and invariably dredge up old pain, resentments and trauma. By Jan. 2, they are rushing back to counseling, and he has another winter’s worth of business.

It doesn’t take much of a sense of irony to see that the holidays have, for many people, become anything but.

Part of the problem is that families are now widely dispersed. Family members may get together once or twice a year, but they don’t actually have a lot in common outside of their shared past. Family gatherings, it seems, are inhabited much more by the ghosts of Christmases past than by the celebration of the present. If brothers and sisters are not in touch with each other or their parents on a regular basis, if their lives are barely entwined at all, the holidays become less a coming together than a realization of differences.

If lives aren’t shared, then the past is all that there is to fall back on, and in many families, that can be a problem. I remember one successful businessman who told me that it is only when he goes home at Christmas that he is no longer James or Jim, but Jimmy. Falling back into old habits, his family treats him like the kid brother, and he actually reverts to that role. By the end of the holiday he feels the same old frustrations that he hadn’t felt since, well, the previous Christmas.

As someone who has been in voluntary exile for almost 25 years now from my hometown, this topic is of more than academic interest.

It is hard to maintain the frequent contact that keeps family relationships fresh and vital. Even with all of our various communications tools, none of them are a perfect substitute for time together.

Unfortunately, this is not just a dilemma for families. Neighborhoods, at least in suburbia, sometimes feel more like single unit motels than a community. Neighbors come in all sorts of preferences and inclinations regarding sociability, but life is hectic for them all. They work all day (usually both spouses are gone). If they have kids, they are slaves to their sport and extracurricular schedules. At night the people they have most contact with are images on a television screen.

Robert Frost observed that good fences make for good neighbors, but who needs fences in the modern workaday world? We don’t see each other enough to be annoyed with each other.

So where do we get the kind of intimate human contact that enriches the soul and feeds the heart? In our immediate nuclear family, perhaps, but that puts enormous stress on a social unit that is already suffering. At work, where we often spend more lucid waking hours with our colleagues than our spouses, but that is rarely a substitute for deeper relationships.

The truth is that we are an intimacy-starved society. We do superficial really well. We call lots of people friends. But statistics would suggest, and counselors agree, that for all of our social network sites and cell phones glued to our ears, we are a pretty lonely people.

I don’t know what the Church can do to ease this. In fact, the parish is often a casualty of this culture of loneliness. People seek community, but they have a hard time investing in it. They want the parish to meet their needs, but on their terms and their timetable.

Perhaps this holiday season can be different: Times are tough, and money’s tight. Maybe we skip the cards, dial back on the shopping and instead look for that one opportunity to really connect and renew a relationship. If it happens, we might finally receive the gift we’ve been hoping for all year long.

Greg Erlandson is OSV president and publisher.