Emotional Homelessness
These are the sons of Shem, according to their families, according to their languages, by their lands, according to their nations. Genesis 10:31 NASB
Families – Italy. Ah, imagine the life. Beautiful scenes. Amazing architecture. More amazing food. Our images of life here aren’t just shaped by travel brochures. They are formed by movies like Under the Tuscan Sun, or (who can possibly forget) The Godfather. What’s very clear about life in Italy is this—family! Everything is about who you know and what family you come from. In fact, native Italian speakers can tell the difference between those who were born in the countryside and those who were born in the city, even in the same geographical region. Accent and intonation reveal family origin.
But the truth about living in Italy isn’t quite so romantic as the movies and the travel brochures portray. There is a kind of suspicion about people who aren’t from your family; a distrust of anyone who isn’t very familiar. At Christmas we gave cookies to our neighbors. They were shocked! No one does that sort of thing with strangers. While we slowly become recognized as the odd Americans who live on the street, things loosen up, but not entirely. American openness is not the norm. Closed family connections—that’s the norm.
This is both good and bad. It’s good because it maintains a sense of belonging. People know who they are because they have family around them—for hundreds of years. They live in the same town, on the same street as their great-great-great grandparents did. They have the same routine, they shop in the same stores, they travel to the same places. Belonging is very important.
But there’s another side. One friend of ours here told us that his parents lived in the same apartment for 18 years before the next-door neighbors invited them to have dinner together.
There’s an emotional distance that’s hard to overcome. Perhaps it’s related to the fact that Europe has experienced so much more trauma and tragedy than America. Wars, plagues, economic collapse, tyrannical politics—over centuries. Family meant protection.
What happened when those European populations moved to America? At first, of course, they brought the culture with them. But two hundred years later, the world is no longer a safe haven for families. Now it’s difficult to find any place where you really belong.
“A major source of this great disruption is globalization, which is driven by neoliberal economic forces and technological advances. The idea of a bounded community is increasingly obsolete in a global society; people can freely move around and interact with each other online without the mediation of states. They are increasingly disembedded from face-to-face relationships and communities; this mobility is altering people’s experiences and habits as well as their sense of identity and social relationships. Thus, global civilization is entering a new, unknown era. In the midst of this change and transition many feel like Rip Van Winkle, a character in Washington Irving’s novel, who woke up after a long sleep only to find that the world had dramatically changed. In this era of profound disruption, nobody knows what the future will look like.”[1]
The world of the Bible is an ancient world; a world where family and tribe provide identity. Perhaps that’s one of the reasons we find it so difficult to read the biblical stories with any sense of true meaning. Our world is radically different than the biblical world. Our world is global—and fractured. The biblical world is particular—and cemented. Genealogies provide continuity in the biblical world. “The sons of” is a key phrase for understanding who I am and what is expected of me. Not job title, bank account, or luxury living. The biblical world is made up of closely-knit connections—private and public. That’s what matters. In our contemporary world, filled with emotional homelessness, the Bible offers a remedy, but it only works when you knock on the door and say, “I live next door and I just wanted to let you know I’m glad you’re my neighbor.”
Topical Index: family, homelessness, genealogy, Genesis 10:31
[1] Hak Joon Lee, “After 70 Years – Exile or Exodus” Fuller Magazine Issue 12 (2018), p. 38.
