Family Frictions

Happy Independence Day to all of my readers in or from the USA!

I’m way out of sequence with posting to Instagram and to my blog this week because we have had family visiting. It was a precious time for us all since normally we are separated by at least 8,500 miles or about 13,200 kilometers (which sounds so much further!) and visits are not frequent. In my opinion there is not much in life that is more important than the support and love of family.

My family is a complex one, like most families.  There is a degree of estrangement among some members, as there is in most families. When I wrote “Bound by an Oath” I assumed that the dynamics in families have not changed much over time. Human beings are human beings, after all. As I get further into writing the sequel I am still dealing with conflicts within families and balancing that with the love and loyalty that are also found there. Aethelreda’s children, Aedisonne and Merewenne are complicated people like their mother before them. At the risk of spoiling the plot line for anyone who has not yet read “Bound by an Oath,” I offer the following thoughts:

Perhaps one of the clearest examples of a family in distress in my novel is demonstrated by the family of Blaedswith. At the beginning of the story, she is cut off from her two brothers and has no desire to be reconciled. Even when she hears the teachings of Jesus from the local priest, she rejects them, deciding that a God who would allow himself to be tortured and crucified is not one she could respect.

Both she and Aethelreda find the forgiveness and reconciliation that is so prominent in Christian theology to be a total mystery, their own culture being tied together more tightly by revenge and retaliation.

On page 346 Aethelreda says “Forgiveness is a hard thing for me, Paulos. It was my sticking point for years. Neither Blaedswith nor I could come to terms with it. We thought Christianity would be far more palatable if it was a more militant religion, with less emphasis on the weak idea of forgiveness.”

She goes on to tell Paulos how Blaedswith finally realized that forgiveness was not weak, but that it took a tremendous amount of strength.  Ironically it was Blaedswith who demonstrated that strength as she sought forgiveness and reconciliation from her brothers, who were the ones that had initially hurt her so badly. In recounting the story of how the strong and stubborn woman had opened her heart to forgiveness and healing, Aethelreda says, “I realized then the power of forgiveness. I realized that it sets a person free, and most often the person that is freed is you, yourself.”

Families were then and are still the basic units of social life. Those of us who have lived for many years apart from the main unit have had to find support from other sources. For me that has been my church and my own two little saplings who have grown into self-supporting plants. I hope all of my readers have their own support systems, whether they be natural families or those they have gathered around themselves. There is almost nothing sadder than a person who ends up cut off from other people and dies alone.