Now well into my 77th year, I reminisce and wonder: has the Catholic lifeworld of my own childhood and youth...not the broader social world in all its technological-cultural-political-social change...but the immediate, concrete, experiential, formative cocoon...been basically replicated or replaced in that of my children and now grandchildren?
In the current season of Easter, May and Spring, our immediate family is celebrating three first communions, one confirmation, two graduations, and the funeral of a dear cousin as we await two births. In the midst of this Joy, I gratefully conclude: the three worlds are essentially the same. A wise, powerful Providence is clearly and firmly in control: protecting, preserving, strengthening, and guiding us and our way of life.
Basic Structure of our World
1. Spousal Communion is the core, the skeletal structure of the formative cocoon: stable, faithful, bi-gendered, prayerful, open to life, companionable, hetero-erotic, romantic, energetic-synergetic, fruitful, inclined to request and give forgiveness, receptive of and generous to the community and Church. The anchor of the family is the tender, attentive mother, rooted in her threefold love (God, spouse, children), who subordinates career ambitions to the care of the family, and is herself supported by and collaborative with her husband who is confident in his own masculinity and authoritative paternity.
2. Church, Roman Catholic and catholic ("embracive of all that is true-good-beautiful"), is the enclosing "womb" that shelters, protects, and guides the smaller family. Four generations, including my parents, are all firmly embedded within Christ's sacramental, authoritative, hierarchical, militant, Marian "Communion of Saints." Notwithstanding immense technological change, the sexual revolution, the culture wars, societal decadence, breakdown of the family, and ominous world events...ours remains a "Hobbit" world: modest, happy, secure, comforting, trusting, filial, innocent, childlike and child-centered.
3. Schooling. All of us...my siblings, children and grandchildren...take to school like a duck to water. Without any tiger mothers, we all perform beautifully, fluidly, happily and mostly free of undue stress. There is something in our cultural, family DNA that predisposes us to flourish in the world of education...lots of books at home? respect for and trust in authority? a home environment of conversation, especially with the attentive mother? This is, of course, a key to success in the broader society which is so centered on education and credentials.
Similarities and Differences
1. Sports. My father's generation loved sports...handball, golf, and watching football and baseball. My own cohort did not know organized athletics, but played casual, free, unmentored sports. My own children played lots of unorganized sports but also formal activities of little league, basketball, and especially high school track. But my grandchildren, with the broader society, play organized sports from an early age. This is a mixed blessing. It is guarded and safe...arguably to an extreme. It includes a bonding of parent and child. But it is a loss of the spontaneity, freedom, risk-tolerance, experimentation and adventuresome of play and competition free of adult supervision. The high parental investment makes it less available to bigger families.
2. Work is a component of all three life-worlds but was more important to my generation of big families, less affluence and a memory of real poverty in the Depression. Through high school we all worked: paper routes, caddying, library, baby sitting, bus boy, etc. For us three brothers, caddying filled up our summers and garnered for us the respect of our parents as we made good money for that time and our age. Our children and grandchildren give more time to athletics.
3. Politics. My family of origin, with a union organizer father, was passionately committed to a Democratic liberalism (FDR, JFK) that was at that time very Catholic-friendly: pro-family, pro-life, pro-working man, patriotic, internationalist, anti-communist, pro-civil-rights, concerned for justice and the poor. In the wake of the sexual revolution of the 60s, I diverged from most of my generation (as did my brothers, but not so much my sisters) in reaction to the new cultural liberalism, even as I retained my allegiance to social justice concerns. Our own children in large part share my values: conservative on moral issues of life and sexuality, but more liberal on economic justice; disgusted by both Trump and Biden; more opposed to the anti-Catholicism of the DNC but uncomfortable with classic Republicanism of low taxes, low regulation and trickle-down-economics and the MAGA cause. There is a near consensus among the 15 adults in our family: a plurality cannot vote for Trump or Biden, while a few of us will vote (reluctantly) for one or the other. A basic continuity holds about politics.
4. Romance and Sexuality. We are all of us, across the generations, "late bloomers." Without any explicit instruction, we predictably wait for romance until about the end of college or early adulthood. This happens in an organic, spontaneous fashion. In my view this is wholesome as I ascribe to the thinking of psychologist Eric Ericson: genuine intimacy is available only when identity is firmly established. And this occurs, especially for the male, after adolescence. This works towards a stronger marriage and family structure.
5. Career. Our family leans heavily into the human services of education, psychology and medicine. Even our ex-JAG-lawyer son works in distributing medical benefits to veterans.
6. Location. We moved into Jersey City when we married; raised our seven children there; and none of us remain there. We are unattached to any location. Our children are dispersed: three in NJ and four in other states. Interestingly, five of our six in-laws remained near their childhood homes and their parents; two in the same house in which they were raised. I have a slight jealousy for the location-loyalty of Wendel Berry and the Jersey City firemen/policeman with whom my children grew up. Mostly I aspire that my children find, wherever they live, the Church and all the good things that accompany that.
7. Neighborhood. Raised in a modest, urban, working class neighborhood, I deliberately preferred the same for my children. This turned out to be a congenial place to raise a family: strong Catholic parish and schools, warm neighbors, diversity, lower income people, freedom from the pressures of aspirational suburban life. Our youngest daughter lives similarly in York, Pa; our oldest in Bayonne NJ, near our home in Jersey City. The rest live in suburban areas, ranging from modest to more affluent. As such they face the pressures of middle class life but they seem well aware of these and reactive against the worst aspects of it.
8. Class and Finances. Coming of age in the Great Depression, my parents knew real deprivation and were entirely happy with their modest resources in raising the nine of us in the 1950s. My father got a better paying job as union organizer for the UAW by the early 1960s and our family, with the broader society, enjoyed security and a touch of affluence. I, with my siblings, enjoyed an extended education, but retained a loyalty to the poor and working class and a quiet antipathy to affluence, prestige, and status. My children and their spouses seem to retain this viewpoint. They are all thriving at a modest, middle level of the professional class as teachers, nurses, psychologists, etc.
9. Culture War. This did not exist for my parents and in my childhood and adolescence. In my early adulthood I reacted strongly against the social revolution and maintained, intellectually, for the rest of my life the posture of a culture warrior. Our children share our values, but express them in a variety of ways. Our younger son and his wife are more radical and countercultural, by disposition and participation in the Neocatechumenal Way. The rest of our children are comfortable in the mainstream; critical; but with less of an edge than I have. In this they mirror a combination of my wife and myself.
10. Fertility. Our children retain our Catholic love for big families. To my knowledge, neither my mother nor my wife experienced miscarriage. But our children have had perhaps ten, along with 27 births and now 2 pregnancies. A miscarriage is always a mystery of great sadness. Our hope, of course, is that our grandchildren retain this love for new life.
11. Internet and Smart Phones. Our children have been fighting a battle we were spared: "screen time." My overall impression is that they are well aware of the dangers; that they are reactive against them; and while there is no final victory, harm has been minimized by restraints and vigorous involvement in studies, sports, Church and family life.
12. Piety. As a child we prayed the rosary every night after dinner, like many Catholic families of the time. Early in our marriage, as we started our family, we were deeply impacted by the charismatic renewal. However that prayer group disbanded and we raised our children in a standard parish. It is, for me, a faint disappointment that we did not pass on the charismatic dimension as we lacked such a community. But the evangelical energy we received moved us to direct our children to a rich banquet of experiences, especially high school summers, including evangelical and catechetical programs, pilgrimages, immersion/service trips, world youth days, and other. We were convinced that the negative forces across our culture had become so powerful that the combination of family-parish-school was not adequate to form a resilient, vigorous faith. This succeeded: our children and now their spouses all share a vibrant faith as well as an openness to the renewal movements. At least to some degree, the next generation seems to be following a similar itinerary of faith
13. Cousins and Extended Family. Connection to a broader, extended family provides identity, comfort, delight and a sense of belonging. This is an invaluable resource in a society that increasingly isolates the individual and the nuclear family, inducing dependency on the immense impersonality of the state and corporation. Especially enjoyable is the friendship shared across the generations with cousins.
14. Gender. Masculinity/Femininity and Paternity/Maternity are alive and well across our generations. Among my greatest delights as father/grandfather is to observe the organic, natural, gradual but irrepressible development of manliness and womanliness. The women prioritize their motherhood as they all excel in their chosen careers; my sons and son-in-laws are intensely involved with their children; a wholesome partnership informs each couple.
Conclusion
My wife and I share a primary life ambition: to hand on to our young the Catholic faith, way of life and heritage that we ourselves received. Aware of the human frailty of this faith and the ferocious anti-Catholic energies active in our society since the 1960s, we are all the more grateful to see the hand of God at work in a marvelous cosmos of faith: friends, family, priests and sisters, neighbors, organizations, and other. We are particularly in awe of our children-in-law, the wise choices our children made about spouses. We are endlessly surprised and delighted as we encounter the underlying stability along with the creativity and freshness of our younger family members.
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