In any given family, if you were to pop open the door, or slice away a section of the walls, you would find laughter and conflict, trading and gift-giving, the blooms of romance, and the hard secret of learning to love over the long haul.

You might see sacrifice, betrayal, and hidden generosity, meanness, forgiveness, rage, and ecstasy, many, many thousands of diapers and as many meals, faucets repaired, mortgages sweated over, lonely tears in the middle of the night, and joy that comes with the morning.

The family is by its very nature a crucible of pain, and of good pleasure. It is by turns utterly exhausting and utterly exhilarating, though most of the time its meaning is hidden from our eyes in the daily grind. Its immense secret is veiled.

I once heard Jean Vanier, the founder of the l’Arche communities for the mentally handicapped, speak about the different lifestyles which believing people choose to live. “If you wish to think you are a saint,” he said, “go and live alone. But if you wish to know what you are, then go and live in community.”

Very few people are called to be hermits, and even monks live in communities. Community is the crucifixion of the false self, that aspect of our inner life which is always pushing to be the center of the universe unless it is checked and re-directed.

The family is the first and foremost community of the Church; indeed it is called the “domestic Church.” It is the place where we begin to know our true selves, the good and the bad aspects alike, the place where we discover daily that we need a Savior. Here we learn that, yes, human nature is “dysfunctional.”

This is surely one of the odious “buzz words” of our times, a word spread by the growth-industry of social pathologists, who for the past several decades have placed the blame for most human unhappiness on the internal politics of the family.

Traditional marriage and family life are more and more considered to be a form of bond-age, even slavery.

This, coupled to the widespread loss of the sense of sin, has created a generation in which people no longer feel ennobled by self-sacrifice and the honoring of commitments, a generation unwilling to undergo “the dying to self” (to use an old Catholic phraseology) which enables the false self to die and the true self to be born.

I have been tempted lately to have one of those special T-shirts made. You know, the kind with any logo or personal message you want printed on it. I’d buy them for my wife and children, too, (if they wished to join me), and we’d wear them in public places such as social workers’ conventions or educational conferences.

Our logo would read “Dysfunctional and Proud of It!”

Because, sure enough, our families are dysfunctional, by which I mean to say that they are composed of imperfect human beings who are in the pro-cess of learning to live together and to respect one another.

Messy?! Yes, and it’s meant to be that way. The alternative is a cold, tidy universe, a society regulated into strictly functional, self-centered units, everyone “fulfilled,” all “well-adjusted”—a secular “salvation” in which the real problems are not faced, only avoided.
Real, living, breathing family life is all about facing our essential nature, the fallen human condition.

In this arena any false dignity is burned away—but here, also, the true dignity of each member of the family gradually emerges.

The family is where we learn to love. It is the great school of the soul.