As a pastor, I love being invited to officiate at weddings and to have the privilege of getting to know a couple better as we prepare for that special day. In the months before their celebration we meet several times to plan the ceremony, but also to explore the story and dynamics of their relationship. The first time we meet I ask them to write down and speak face to face to their partner why they love the other person and want to marry them. I hear the story of how they met and fell in love. I hear how their love blossomed. I hear proposal stories. I hear hopes and dreams. I hear plans for the wedding. It is all fun and even pretty mushy! The second time we meet, we do what is called a family genogram. This can be fun too in its own way, but rather than mushy, it leads us into all sorts of good honest conversations about the nature and patterns and dynamics of each of their families, and how they now come together as they bring those into this new relationship. A family genogram is basically a modified family tree that pays more attention to the dynamics and patterns and characteristics of the various family members and how they relate to each other, than to all the details of dates. Here is a sample template of what a genogram looks like. You can see a Family system with all sorts of symbols. There are some basic symbols that get used to mark down the people and the basic facts, and some of the relational and emotional and trauma elements get added to the genogram – lots of lines and squiggles and symbols. Here is a very basic Family Genogram of 3 generations of a family – with things like deaths, divorces, mental illness, and substance abuse added in. It can all get a lot more complicated than this.
In my office with a couple, I do this much more informally and quite a bit messier with my hand writing! I get out a flipchart, and we start to chart out parents and siblings and grandparents and other family members – and then I ask things about the kinds of relationships they have with each of them. What was the nature of the marriages you witnessed, or the separations and divorces? What sibling dynamics were going on? Was there a favourite child in the family? or a pariah – bad apple – found more on the outside? Where was there conflict and tensions in the system? What happened around the deaths, especially unexpected ones? What are the family secrets? What are the unspoken rules? What were the gifts received from each side of your family; what were the curses? What has it been like as the partner to enter into the other person’s family system – inevitably with very different ways of being and doing things? With the couple I draw all sorts of lines, and breaks and conflict symbols and starred areas and notes that begin to show all these patterns visually between people and in the whole system. Seeing all of this, and beginning to have some self-awareness I then ask what they would like to do differently in their marriage and their family? A family genogram recognizes that we do not exist as totally independent isolated individuals. We come with our whole family systems, and the decisions we make, including our mistakes, whether intentional or subconscious or despite ourselves, create systems that carry into subsequence generations. I like the phrase we hear from First Nations Haudenosaunee wisdom about the healing of the 7 generations, that recognize that both harm and healing can arise over 7 generations, and take 7 generations to work themselves out – not just in our families but in society as a whole.
I wonder what a family genogram would look like with the Genesis family we have been following this Fall? You would need lots and lots of paper and a good red pen to mark all of the strange relationships and patterns and dysfunction, as well as the blessings and promises of God that wind their way through the generations. We heard so much of this last week already with Don’s unpacking the Jacob and Esau story, and their father Isaac. Today we jump to the next generation, the children of Jacob, centered around Joseph, a story we will follow for 3 Sundays. Mathieu already did such a great job describing this scene and the characters involved. He framed it in terms of the various mistakes that get made by each of them that have long lasting, often unforeseen, consequences. He also named how many different kinds of mistakes are made – some with full intention, and others without full realization. We can step back now and see the repeated or inherited family patterns that may have led up to the circumstances in our story, and yet each character is also responsible for their own decisions and actions. This first violent scene in Genesis 37 sets up a trajectory that take the next 13 chapters to unwind, and that continues in many ways for generations to follow. Yet God’s grace and God’s promises also wind their way through these stories, healing and offering new possibilities for life.
So what comments or probing questions would a counsellor or therapist make on this family system? What would they notice in writing up a family genogram? To help us, I am projecting the Family Tree of Jacob. It is not a genogram, but it reminds us of the complicated family story and who is who. You start with Jacob, now the patriarch of the family. Remember him from last week – the younger son of father Isaac, who with the help of his Mother Rebecca, tricked his father into giving him, the younger twin, the family blessing instead of Esau. There is this reverse youngest instead of oldest family order – both challenging the established systems and expectations, but also upended and upsetting the family. Hmm… now a generation later, Jacob is favouring Joseph, from the youngest set of brothers. We will hear more about Benjamin in future weeks. A genogram often puts a little star around the blessed child, and in this system it keeps going to the youngest. You also see the 4 mothers in this system. Their complicated stories are recorded in the previous chapters. Jacob journeyed to his uncle Laban and falls in love with the youngest daughter Rachel. But trickery and deception is involved there too when Jacob works for Laban for 7 years to marry Rachel, but is fooled into marrying older sister Leah, working 7 more years to marry Rachel. What kinds of resentments build in Jacob for his 6 oldest sons birthed from Leah? It is no wonder he treats Joseph better and gives him this coat of many colours. Like with Hagar earlier, there are also the 4 sons born from the slaves or concubines Zilpah and Bilhah. Talk about complicated. What kind of dynamics does that build up among all these siblings from different mothers? There is also one daughter, Dinah, born from Leah. 2 weeks ago Janet named the sexual exploitation and violence against women found so often in these stories. Whether the 4 mothers or Dinah, these are women with very few choices or voice. There is a chapter given to Dinah and her sexual relationship with the non Israelite Shechem that the brothers name as being defiled and take revenge on Shechem, killing him and all his tribe, all the time treating their sister as a possession themselves to be avenged. There is a whole patriarchal system here that needs challenged and simply that the Bible records these women’s names and their stories, often with some commentary or with windows of agency or with God’s interventions, is a subversive way of starting to challenge these assumptions. Never the less, you can see these unhealthy patterns going down the generations.
Back to father Jacob and all these brothers in our scene. We see the favouritism of Jacob towards Joseph. We also see Joseph playing the part of perceived privilege. He is the dreamer, but does not yet know how to share dreams in ways that can be heard. He offends the brothers and even his father with his dreams first about the sheaves in the field, and then even the sun, moon and stars, all bowing down to him. His brothers are jealous and his father angry. Soon Joseph becomes the outcast. Violence is unleashed. There would be all sorts of jagged lines of conflict on our family chart.
I wonder why Father Jacob sent Joseph off to find his brothers – was he becoming aware and embarrassed by the favouritism he had shown? Did he want Joseph to learn a lesson – a bit of toughening up? Or did he hope there would be the same kind of brotherly reconciliation he had experienced with Esau? Or was he just naive? The brothers find Joseph and with a kind of mob mentality, jump into revenge. They are this close to killing him outright, when a few pangs of sober second thought, and a few ways out present themselves. The appearance of a pit allows the oldest Reuben to somewhat soften the consequences by throwing him in the pit. He does not want to totally disappoint his father. And then Judah has the idea to sell Joseph to the passing Midianite traders who happen by. They can both be rid of Joseph, but also wash their hands free of any guilt, or at least they think they can. Finally the story returns to the Father Jacob, who assuming Joseph is dead, cannot be consoled. He is racked by grief and guilt and shame!
In this opening Joseph scene, the dysfunction of this family is on full display. The therapist would have a heyday with the family genogram. There would be lines and symbols everywhere. Things have been set in motion. Tragic mistakes have been made. Family patterns have set a trajectory towards destruction. The promises of God, which we have also been following through these Genesis stories, are fragile and only held on to by a shoe string. From our position now, we know that the story is not over, that there will still be more chapters written, and we will watch this unwind and transform over the next Sundays, but for each family member at this point, they cannot see a healthy way forward or the possibility of new life. This chapter ends in wailing and mourning, refusing comfort. This story gives us permission to acknowledge that there are times in our lives, in our families, in our communities, when we too are at a place of mourning, a place of grief, a place of dysfunction or confusion, a place of anguish, where it feels like there is no good way forward. We may be there for a short time, or we may end up sitting there a long time. We may need some people around us to hold us or hold on to hope for us. We may need to do lots of hard self work – on ourselves, within our family systems – to look honestly at our family genogram. We may need confession, truth telling, repentance. We may need that gift of time, the promise that there will still be more chapters written, more story yet to come. Today’s story leaves us in an unsettled place – and maybe that is okay, because we sometimes live ourselves in unsettled places.
Yesterday, September 30, was the National Day for Truth and Reconciliation in Canada. It too points to a sobering and unsettled time and place in our collective history, even as the day is one filled with so much hope and promise. The day honours the children who never returned home and the survivors of the Indian Residential school system in Canada, as well as their families and communities. It is also named as Orange Shirt Day, an indigenous-led grassroots commemorative day started in 2013 intended to raise awareness of the individual, family and community inter-generational impacts of residential schools, and to promote the concept of ‘Every Child Matters’ – the phrase on all the beautiful orange shirts. https://mcec.ca/res/pub/Documents/Program/Why-Mark-National-Day-of-Truth-and-Reconciliation-in-Worship-September-2023.pdf Several of us from SJMC joined the powerful and moving Orange Shirt Day walk yesterday morning from The Healing of the Seven Generations on Frederick St. to Victoria Park.
I couldn’t help but notice this week the parallels or resonances of our Scripture story with that of Orange Shirt day and Canada’s history. These are not one to one direct comparisons, but there are echoes, resonances, reverberations. For generations First Nations Children were ripped out of their families and sent to residential schools. These were intentional acts of cultural destruction meant to take the Indian out of the student. There were staff that deliberately caused much harm and participated in physical, sexual and cultural abuse. There was so often a mob mentality. There were well meaning staff caught up unaware in a larger system, naive to what they were a part of. In today’s language, there were actions taken and mistakes made that set trajectories that have had tragic consequences for generations.
There are pits is this story too. The Mohawk Residential School at Six Nations was called the Mush Hole. In the last couple of years, unmarked graves of children have been found around so many schools, with many still unearthed. I even think about the generational echoes now with missing and murdered women – and the bodies abandoned in garbage pits, and the unwillingness to address this.
The intuitive connection for me is the Orange Shirt story itself, where someone is thrown into the Pit so to speak for the colourful garment they are wearing. (https://orangeshirtday.org/phyllis-story/#story) It is the story of Phyllis Webstad from the Dog Creek reserve in BC. When she was 6 years old, in 1973, her grandmother on the reserve bought her a bright new orange outfit to go the St Joseph Mission School in Williams Lake, BC. When she arrived they stripped her and took away her orange shift, never to be worn again. It was a symbol of all that was being stripped of her culture and her identity. She writes ‘the color orange has always reminded me of that and how my feelings didn’t matter, how no one cared and how I felt like I was worth nothing. All of us little children were crying and no one cared.’ Each year Canadians wear orange shirts to remember the kinds of damage that was done in residential school.
Working on this sermon and finding these echoes, I began to wonder what a family genogram would look on the country of Canada itself – First Nations, English, French – not to mention all the many migrations and immigrations of so many peoples as this history moves through the centuries to today. There are the original stories of colonialism that set a trajectory. There has been a dysfunction between peoples with too much violence, separations, discrimination, racism, dislocation, favoured and non-favoured children, use and abuse of power, Indian Act definitions on the status of some, and unfair policies and legacies. There have been parts of the genogram that have benefitted tremendously from privilege and status, while others have suffered. There have been pits. There would be squiggly lines and cut off lines all over and lines and symbols of conflict and family secrets and markers of deaths and destruction. There have been patterns passed on from generation to generation. It is covered with red ink. It is not a pretty genogram. Like our Joseph story, there have been action taken and family patterns set that chart trajectories that continue to play out. And yet, when I am in a sea of orange shirts at Victoria Park, with hundreds of people of all sorts of backgrounds, and hear the drumming and speeches and stories, I am left with hope. There has been a reclaiming and restoring of identity. The term I have heard so often from First Nations Individuals and communities has been that they are on a healing journey. There is a resurgence of community and strength and power. There are so many amazing things happening in First Nations communities. One of the speakers yesterday morning commented that the efforts by the churches and government to stomp out Indigenous identity failed. ‘We are here!’
Part of Family Systems theory and geograms says that a big part of changing directions and healing next generations is truth telling and self-understanding. When you step back and recognise and name and claim that patterns you see, you can also break these. This is what I see happening in Canada. This is what I experience with Orange Shirt Day. We end our Biblical story today with Joseph thrown into the Pit and then sold into slavery. But in the next Sundays this story will wind itself out in surprising ways, and Joseph’s own healing journey will bring him to reconciliation with his family and to become the key figure and leader to save not only his own family but the society around him. I wonder, is it the healing journey and reclaiming of First Nations identity that we are seeing now in Canada that is the key to the future health of Canada? Might the redemption of Canada come back around as a gift from our First Nations neighbours as we learn to journey together in new and healthy ways?
The bulletin was all printed and the song of response chosen for the service. It would have worked fine. But then as I was finishing my sermon, a different song emerged suddenly in my imagination. It is Voices Together 612 – When Pain or Sorrow, also called Hold On. You can turn to it now. I was struck by the phrase in the chorus – ‘Hold on, hold on, to find a way to get through. And when your hope is gone and you can’t hold on, we will hold on to you.’ It reminds me of the long healing journeys needed in our families, in our communities, in our society, in our world – and that sometimes the pain and the sorrow are too much to bear. The hymn, text and music, was written and composed by Hymnal Committee member Adam Tice, upon hearing the tragic story that a fellow committee member’s brother had died by suicide. It is a place of no words, when hope is gone. And yet it is others that hold on for us, and ultimately God that can hold and embrace us. This is our hope for all our family systems and genograms and whatever else we might carry. Thanks be to God.