Dealing with Difficult Relatives This Holiday Season

FOR MANY OF US, the approaching holiday season brings a mix of excitement and dread. We look forward to gathering with loved ones we haven’t seen for a while. But these gatherings come with land mines of casually dropped remarks that belie our togetherness. They reveal deep chasms between our understandings of what is good for ourselves, this country, and the world.

Do we respond when a family member says something offensive? Do we ignore them? Do we try to engage, even if past attempts have proven fruitless?

My own attempts to engage with family who have different political views and interpretations of scripture have come to an impasse in the past year. I’ve felt wounded and disappointed and am lowering my expectations for these relationships. But the Spirit is also nudging me to keep my heart open a crack.

Don’t write them off completely. They are still related to you, still made and loved by God. You can learn from them and receive their love, even if it’s not shown in ways you understand. Though you want to draw a line and put them on the other side, the “unrelatable” side, resist. You need those who are different from you. We all need each other.

The inability to live with difference is one of our biggest challenges, today and in all human history. When differences come up, often our first reaction is to become afraid and defensive. Differences feel like a threat to our own identity. If we accept them, we might have to examine our own lifestyles and thought patterns. We might have to change.

Differences are, in other words, an invitation into a transformative relationship. But that kind of relationship requires a lot from us. It requires open-mindedness, trust, and vulnerability. It means we might get hurt.Rather than take that risk, we often label those with differences as “Other,” immediately putting up a wall between those we deem like us and unlike us, relatable and unrelatable. We choose safety and stagnation over curiosity and transformation.

But the call of the gospel is always to lean toward those to whom we have a hard time relating. Just as Christ tore down the wall separating God and humans, we follow in his path. We take down the walls between Jew and Gentile, insider and outsider, citizen and stranger, Democrat and Republican, even human and more-than-human creation. We are called to welcome everyone to God’s lavish — and oftentimes scandalou s— table.

So, let’s extend the table this season. We can set appropriate personal boundaries, but we can still keep our hearts open to our relatives. That includes those family members who say the most incensing things over the holiday feast as well as the field mice huddling outside, looking for a crack to come in and nibble some crumbs. We are all God’s creatures, living off unearned abundance. There might yet be something we can learn from each other.