Recreating the Extended Family

Cultural critic David Brooks makes this insightful comment on how we’ve shifted in America from extended families to nuclear families - and the damage it has done to us. He writes:

If you want to summarize the changes in family structure over the past century, the truest thing to say is this: We’ve made life freer for individuals and more unstable for families. We’ve made life better for adults but worse for children. We’ve moved from big, interconnected, and extended families, which helped protect the most vulnerable people in society from the shocks of life, to smaller, detached nuclear families (a married couple and their children), which give the most privileged people in society room to maximize their talents and expand their options. The shift from bigger and interconnected extended families to smaller and detached nuclear families ultimately led to a familial system that liberates the rich and ravages the working-class and the poor. - David Brooks, in “The Nuclear Family Was a Mistake” in The Atlantic

Jesus went around making disciples he called ‘friends’ and doing things with them that one would normally do with extended family (like eating the Passover meal, etc.). Ask God for the grace to think of family in new ways, to expand your vision of who is included at your table, and who could be in your closest circles.

And looking at those who sat around him, he said, “Here are my mother and my brothers! Whoever does the will of God is my brother and sister and mother.” - Mark 3:34-35