Family in a time of war

One of the issues the church is examining as it gets ready this year and next to deal with challenges to the family is the impact of migration and war.

Oct 24, 2014

By Rhina Guidos
One of the issues the church is examining as it gets ready this year and next to deal with challenges to the family is the impact of migration and war.

While it’s an issue that’s been around for a while, the displacement doesn’t just affect the family as a spiritual body, but also the family’s role as an important part of the church. The demise of the family is also the demise of the church.

I can’t help but reflect on what happened to my family as political strife and eventual full-blown war in El Salvador in the 1980s to 1990s forced us to leave for the US It affected my parents’ marriage, our family, what we knew as a stable home and, ultimately, led everyone but me to leave the church.

Memories of my Sundays as a child are firmly anchored around the church in the northern Salvadoran town where my mother grew up. We would visit one set of grandparents, go to Mass, catechism, then lunch with our cousins, aunts and uncles and grandparents.

Back then, all of us were Catholic. Before we returned to the city, my grandmother would give us a blessing and sprinkle us with holy water as we piled into the car.

The week began with Sunday, not Monday. We watched and learned as aunts and uncles who lived near us spent time helping the greater community through various roles in parish life. But as war broke out and leaving became the only option for us to remain safe, one parent left, then the other. Then an uncle left, then an aunt. My grandmother came north with us but my grandfather stayed behind. When we came to the US, our family began slowly splitting up.

While I’m not privy to what happened between my parents and what led to their separation, it was clear that they weren’t the same people.

Sometimes I wonder what would have happened if someone had provided pastoral care to my parents, who – battered by war – had to adjust to a different economic reality than they were used to, to menial jobs instead of professions, to a secular world much different than what they grew up in.

The reality we faced, however, was of a church in a Western US town that provided little, spiritually or otherwise, for people like my parents who had to work more than one job, who were struggling with a shift of identity, and who had probably seen horrors and become different people.

Though I always blamed them for not working things out, as I grew into adulthood, I realized that there was no one there to help them and they, as the base of the family, were the ones who needed help the most.

Subsequently, we saw the marriages of my aunts and uncles, who also left for the same reason, deteriorate. Out of six marriages on my mother's side of the family, only one survived. Everyone stopped going to church, maybe because, as divorced Catholics, they felt that going to church no longer was an option for them. Others joined other faiths or stopped believing in God altogether.

The loss of family wasn’t ours alone. I think of all the work my aunts and uncles provided for the communities they served. I think of how they worked to build the kingdom of God on earth, fed people, taught them to read, helped them out of a bind.

The loss also became a loss of good people who served in the name of the church. Though they still manage to help others, they do so in a different way. And in this sense, the loss is for the church itself, because those good people no longer count themselves part of a great spiritual body.

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