I don’t know about you, but I was a really bratty teenager, like skipped family events, ignored relatives’ phone calls, criticized my parents, type of bratty. Christmastime was especially difficult for me and no doubt those who loved me, because there was added pressure to connect as a family. So, dragging my feet and rolling my eyes, I would reluctantly head to grandma’s house. It was not enough for me to hear the old platitudes that “family is important” or “you’ll be glad you have a family later in life,” because all I could see was everyone’s idiosyncrasies and their inability to understand my “complex” teenage self. During college, I began to understand the significance of family better and became (I think) a bit more gracious and involved. However, I couldn’t explain the new value I found in family, until I read a bit of Charles Taylor and listened to a lecture on Wendell Berry’s idea of convocation. Taylor and Berry encouraged me to challenge certain ideas I had about personal fulfillment and to embrace the discomfort of familial relationships as a transformative aspect of human life.
Charles Taylor indirectly explores why we’d sometimes rather avoid our family Christmas party in his book, The Ethics of Authenticity. Taylor tracks a historical shift in the place where individuals find their significance (26). Before the Enlightenment, he notes social status determined the purpose for each individual’s life, and those individuals accepted suffering as an unsolvable fact of life. By contrast, in our egalitarian societal structure, each individual is far more self-determining. Thus, people become less defined by their family, church community, or social station and more defined by obscure values they articulate for themselves (47). Taylor explains philosophically why Uncle George’s jokes were so annoying to me and Grandma and Aunt Martha just can’t see eye to eye. All these people (even the older folks!) define themselves based on internal values not a universal societal value that guides our behavior and attitudes.
The way forward in modern life, according to Taylor, is to embrace relationships even with their conflict and stress. He suggests the quest for individual autonomy is untenable and that human life requires a “dialogical” relationship with the outside world. Through his idea of dialogue, Taylor suggests everyone participates in a transformative relationship with other people. He believes everyone, even the staunchest individualist, is shaped by and shapes those they love (34). Through this inevitable dialogical process, Taylor recognizes some hope for families and communities to flourish through the process of the dialogical relationship.
Although Taylor’s concept of the dialogical offers some hope for the future, he does not provide much concrete advice for individual action. Reading The Ethics of Authenticity won’t help you get along better with your cousins or tolerate your mother’s impatient plea for you to have grandchildren before it’s too late. Trust me, I tried. What Taylor suggests philosophically, Wendell Berry realizes in literature.
Berry offers optimistic images of communal life that flourish despite the obstacles of modern individualism. Dr. Jeffrey Bilbro in his lecture, “Wendell Berry and the Virtue of Convocation,” succinctly defined Berry’s concept of convocation and said that convocation is the idea that there is no true autonomous existence, only responsible or irresponsible dependence. In other words, we can respond graciously to our relatives’ demands on our time. We can bake cookies with grandma and the kiddos, sleep on the couch when Aunt Louisa comes to visit, and participate in the little slice of community we have been given. Or we can pout about how misunderstood we are and watch TikToks in our bedroom, while the family carries on without us. Even if we choose to be antisocial, the demands of family life still exist. We can choose not to participate, to receive and never give, but this is not the ideal of autonomy, only selfishness. Berry teaches that burdens involved with relationship are in large part our purpose in life and opting out of these responsibilities only breeds more discontent.
Despite my newfound philosophies of community, Christmastime still presents a struggle for me. For a week, I operate on familial overload, remember old hurt feelings, and must choose continually to maintain relationships anyways. Sometimes December 25th fails to live up to our Hallmark movie expectations and more closely resembles The Nightmare Before Christmas. Although there is no magic under the Christmas tree or up the chimney, there is healing in dialogue, in convocation. By accepting a realistic view of the difficulty of relationship even at Christmas time, I find it possible to make generous choices about how I love my family even amid conflict.
The views and opinions expressed in this piece are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the values and beliefs of Cogitare Magazine, nor of Grove City College.
