Family life doesn’t come out of a mould

Christmas, much like family, can be clichéd but a recent funeral reminded me that there should be no cliché to family; that in fact, family comes in too many different forms to be a cliché.

It was the funeral of my father’s lifelong friend who was a priest, a teacher and historian. It wasn’t so much a funeral but a memorial service seeing as the man had willed his body to science in death.

It took place on a cold evening and the chapel was only a little warmer than the December air outside. We were early and we settled into our pew. As we waited and watched the chapel fill up, my father recalled a conversation he had shared with his friend about the different paths they had taken in life; my father to the professions and family life, his friend to the priesthood and the world of academia. A different world for both of them yet a foot in each other’s always.

It has often struck me how lonely it must be to live the religious life, how ultimately solitary it must be and, in recent times particularly, how challenging it must be. Looking at the two routes my father and his friend took; predictably I suppose, I deduced my father’s to be the more rewarding one. But that’s just through my lens.

Interesting then that a celebration of a man who looked at life through a different lens let me see again; because if his memorial service was a testimony to his life, then it was far from the solitary one I had attributed to him.

As the service commenced, a queue of priests came onto the altar to honour, grieve and pay homage to their lost brother. But this wasn’t just a clerical send-off; there were children and teenagers there, students and scholars, handsome hipsters, nicely dressed ladies and distinguished gentleman, all there to pay tribute to a man who had impacted and made better their lives. There were two homilies, one from his priest family and one from his birth family. Although both homilies conceded affectionately his divisive academic theories, the consensus was that on a personal level he was the glue that brought people together.

It made me think.

It is easy for those of us with families and children and parents to fall into the mould of all that; the busyness of all that; the cliché of all that. Family life can be frustrating, terrifying, exciting and rewarding; a dichotomy of stuff that can break you in two or soar you to the heights. But this is not the only version of family life. People choose their own paths, some unconventional but in essence planned. But so too are paths thrust on people, many unconventional and frequently and sadly unplanned. But then Christmas comes along and pushes “perfect” clichéd scenarios on all of us; scenarios that we might not “fit”, that leave us feeling inadequate, left-out or just a little more alone.

My father’s lifelong friend never married, had children or did the school run. Still he was a family.

Family ties don’t make us valued human beings, our humanity does. And in the same way, Christmas does not belong to the clichéd version, it belongs to all of us, in all our madly different guises but ultimately beautiful forms.

Happy Christmas and New Year.