In a memorable scene from Edwin O’Connor’s Pulitzer-Prize-winning novel, “The Edge of Sadness,” Father Hugh Kennedy returns to his old neighborhood, an Irish Catholic enclave in a New England city reminiscent of Boston or Providence. There, around a brimming table, in the company of those who had been a sort of adoptive family to him, he should have felt a sense of contentment and warmth.
And yet the scene seethes with alienation, as when Father Hugh learns that the family patriarch, Charlie Carmody, is uninformed about his grandson’s planned congressional run: “And this came as a shock to me: the old man with the iron hand over all his family did not even enter the lives of his grandchildren! The gulf between the old and the young was clearly wider than I had suspected: here was another reminder, if I needed it, of how isolated I’d become. I looked at this young girl (the would-be congressman’s wife) seated next to me, smiling at me, and realized that I knew nothing about her at all.”
The unease at shifting family dynamics is amplified by Father Hugh’s own struggles: “I drank none of the wines that were poured with a surprisingly lavish hand (and here, once again, I saw that my abstinence did not escape sharp eyes).”
While we may not all be alcoholic parish priests witnessing the dissolution of family ties in the acid bath of suburban, postwar affluence, most of us can probably identify with Father Hugh’s sense of alienation, even inner exile, upon coming home.
In fact, any time away from our origins has the potential to create homecomings that are challenging. Our life’s sufferings and joys push us in new directions, and our affections, preferences and routines begin to change — and as this happens, we change too. Whether we are hopping in the car for a quick drive across town from a newly rented apartment, motoring down the highway to make it to Grandma and Grandpa’s in time for Thanksgiving dinner, or enduring unpredictable TSA lines and cramped airline flights, each of us brings home a self that is ever-so-slightly different from the one that last walked into our family’s gatherings and celebrations.
This election year, in particular, heading home may be even more challenging than usual. Not unlike Father Hugh’s postwar, pre-Vatican II New England, our era is experiencing tectonic cultural shifts — along with the resulting tremors. Add to the mix any personal changes we may have undergone — a religious conversion, a political shift, a marriage — and the tremors can become full-blown earthquakes.
According to a 2024 study from the Pew Research Center, Americans are finding it increasingly difficult to perceive common ground between Republicans and Democrats. The study notably tracks people’s perceptions, not actual differences between Republican and Democratic policies. It is frequently our perceptions, rather than the facts, that come into play when we are gazing over the green bean casserole at someone across the table who we think (or know) does not share our worldview.
One of the most prevalent fears is that we might be asked to do something, or agree with something, that we consider offensive.
In every single subject surveyed by Pew — foreign policy, the environment, the budget deficit, immigration, gun policy and abortion — people’s perception of the major parties’ common ground decreased by an average of 12 percentage points over the time between January 2023 to January 2024. This means that no matter what the reality may be, if these trends continue, it is increasingly likely for us to perceive that we share little to nothing in common with those whose opinions and beliefs differ from our own. As we’ve all experienced, this has the potential to introduce tension, alienation and pain into the midst of moments that are meant to be merry and warm.
Certainly, we all hope for more from going home for the holidays. But how, in such contentious times, might our gatherings of family and friends become more like celebrations and less like debates (or, if our families are the kind that keep things in, frozen wildernesses)? How can our homecomings entail more consolation and less controversy? How can we more truly encounter one another as sisters and brothers, daughters and sons, aunts and uncles, nieces and nephews, cousins, grandchildren and grandparents, and, most crucially, as people with God-given dignity and worth?
Here are four suggestions to consider, as many of us try to make our way back home during a season that has the potential to be fraught rather than festive.
Practice empathy
Years back, in a moment of stress and anxiety, I related to a priest friend a particular struggle I was having with a family member. The next day, as I was sitting in our homeschool co-op’s hallway going over a lesson with a student, he breezed past me on his way to teach a class, and dropped a single photocopied page on the desk in front of me. “I read this yesterday,” he said, “and I think it might help!”
Later on, as I puzzled over the page, I realized that it was a short excerpt from St. Edith Stein’s autobiography, “Life in a Jewish Family.” This was not the first time I encountered this 20th-century martyr and saint — my husband and I had even named one of our daughters after her. And yet I had always found it difficult to connect with Stein’s challenging philosophical and theological writings. This excerpt was simpler and more direct than what I had previously read from Stein. It related an epiphany Edith had in her young adult years as she walked the tightrope of keeping up with both her studies and the many familial relationships that were important to her. One of her sisters had unwittingly given offense to another in-law, and Edith was called in to help. She managed to convince her sister that a humble explanation and apology would help restore the peace, and the situation was smoothed over.
Certainly Edith Stein, also known by her religious name, Teresa Benedicta of the Cross, is an example of courage and faith to us given her martyrdom at Auschwitz during World War II. At the same time, her other writings and life experiences can also be fruitful sources of instruction and edification for us. When she was a young adult, Edith had realized that she was less prone to “falling-out” with her friends and family once she had made a complete change of her attitude toward those around her. She had a particularly “keen eye for the human weaknesses of others,” and yet she realized that she could use this gift — perhaps one might call it a gift of empathy — not as “an instrument for striking [others] at their most vulnerable point, but rather, for protecting them.” She wanted, she said, to always take people as she found them, and to resist the temptation to think she could “reform” them by “telling them the truth.” She had realized that such confrontational truth-telling was not normally effective, and that her time with others was better spent getting to know them, especially if their ways or their opinions differed markedly from her own.
The listening person is able to be present to the other, and yet retain the interior recognition that one’s own feelings and experiences are distinct from the other’s.
I was floored by this practical side of the saint. The turn young Edith had made, thanks to her empathetic temperament, was exactly the turn I needed to make in my own heart with regard to the situation in my family. I needed to lean more into empathy, and less into my desires to control other people and situations. Empathy, says Pope Francis in his recent “Letter on the Role of Literature in Formation,” is what “enables us to identify how others see, experience, and respond to reality.” The empathetic practice of standing in the shoes of others can sometimes be a joy, but at other times, it is difficult, not only because we have to move outside our own perceptive habits, but because sometimes we’re called to bear the sufferings of others, as may have been the case with Stein and her family.
St. Edith Stein is a saint who has experienced the challenge of hard homecomings: Although her heart was convicted by the truth of Catholicism, she knew her baptism would be a sorrow for her Jewish mother. She shared the news of her conversion as gently and as sensitively as she could with her family, and one day it became not just a sorrow for them, but a blessing. One of her sisters eventually became a Catholic, although, hoping to avoid any further stress to her family, was only baptized after her mother’s death.
Dr. Elizabeth Mitchell, S.C.D., points out in her recently released book, “St. Edith Stein: Living Image. Her Witness and Aesthetic” (Gracewing Publishers, Fall 2024) that the saint was well known among her friends and family members for her empathetic practices. Edith was an excellent person to offer both a listening ear and helpful words of encouragement and counsel. At the same time, empathy was one of her intellectual fascinations: She titled her doctoral dissertation “On the Problem of Empathy.”
One crucial insight from Stein, as we endeavor to practice empathy at holiday gatherings, is that a person who is able to offer others healthy empathy is able to both feel and perceive alongside them, and at the same time maintain a certain level of “clarification.” This means that the listening person is able to be present to the other, and yet retain the interior recognition that one’s own feelings and experiences are distinct from the other’s, having their own particular, separate integrity.
Set boundaries
Given St. Edith Stein’s example of prudently practiced empathy, it seems clear that we ought to prepare ourselves to approach our holiday gatherings with recognition of our potential differences, and with a sensitivity that allows for our interactions to be less contentious. Dr. Kathleen Musslewhite, Psy.D., executive director of the Alpha Omega Clinic, a mental health private practice with offices in the Washington, D.C., metro area offering Catholic, faith-based counseling services, notes that she gets many questions about Thanksgiving and Christmas gatherings each year. What are we to do, people ask, when we inevitably are confronted with the emotionally complicated task of being present at, or even hosting, family events? She suggests that any gathering can be approached with a sense of interior peace if we do a bit of personal groundwork before the actual celebrations begin, particularly in social environments like today’s, when so many topics have the potential to spark controversy.
The tensions and anxieties some of us may experience are due to our fears, she explains. One of the most prevalent fears is that we might be asked to do something, or agree with something, that we consider offensive. Dr. Musslewhite suggests that this fear can be avoided by setting up, communicating and maintaining appropriate boundaries as we interact with friends and family. Boundaries will vary widely depending upon the family environment, and whether or not children will be present at particular events. If boundaries are transgressed, we ought to have peaceful yet efficient strategies for exiting a situation. Although this may feel awkward or even hurtful, demonstrating that we ourselves respect the boundaries that we have set is the most effective way of encouraging others, in future years, to respect them too.
Our attentive, curious presence will very likely be a more compelling witness than any dinner-table digressions into dogma or catechesis.
Although it may feel strange to state such boundaries to one’s hosts prior to an event or to discuss them with a spouse, Dr. Musslewhite suggests that this is the key to fruitful presence with one another during the actual family gathering. “Setting up these boundaries helps enable us to be with other people, and this is particularly profound, because in this day and age, people are so rarely able to entirely be with one another.” Our goal, she says, is to maintain a detached curiosity about other people. “You can be with almost anyone if you have appropriate boundaries, because then you don’t have to have fear, and you can sit with that person and be present, and maintain that goal of having detached curiosity about them.” Such detached curiosity helps to recognize the dignity and value of the other, no matter your personal differences, and yet maintains a healthy separation between their opinions or behaviors and our own.
The other fear that many Catholics have, relates Dr. Musslewhite, is that we ought to be actively evangelizing when we come home, and if we’re not, we’re doing something wrong. Yet, resonant with St. Edith Stein’s realization that one ought to resist the temptation to reform others, we should recognise that overt apologetics are often not called for or effective when we are with our friends and family. If we focus on simply being with them, all the while remembering that God is “in charge” of the big picture of our journey and of those around us, our attentive, curious presence will very likely be a more compelling witness than any dinner-table digressions into dogma or catechesis.
Be an illuminator
In my own life, one of the homecomings that left me most disoriented was my arrival back after studying abroad in Spain for a year. For a while after I arrived, the rhythms, patterns and relationships of my time in Madrid seemed to suit me better than those that I returned to in suburban America.
One thing that eased the transition was a job I took on only a few weeks after coming back. I spent the summer as part of a Catholic ministry team in St. Paul, Minnesota, running youth retreats and putting on conferences and various other faith-building events for high school and college students. I had little time to spend ruminating on my own struggles; most of my time entailed attending to the needs, large and small, of the young people who surrounded me. I knew, without much prodding from the leaders charged with our team’s formation, that a morosely introverted missionary wishing she were walking the streets of Madrid rather than Minnesota would be of little edification to others.
Each and every one of us have come into being — unbidden by our own whims, desires or wills — thanks to the actions of various “someones,” both human and divine.
The art of turning toward and attending to other people is explored by David Brooks in his 2023 book, “How to Know a Person: The Art of Seeing Others Deeply and Being Deeply Seen.” There will be plenty of people who long to be seen at our holiday festivities. We can be, he explains, with insights that resonate with St. Edith Stein’s, “diminishers” of others or “illuminators,” depending on our ways of interacting with them. Proximity to others does not guarantee that we are able to bring out the best in them, or vice versa: One of Brooks’ anecdotes is about a mother-daughter dyad who trapped themselves in a smothering, “diminishing” relationship even as they lived together for over 40 years.
On the other hand, “illuminators,” people who seem to bring out the life in others, and who seem to encourage others toward their better — rather than their lesser — tendencies, interact with one another with tenderness and receptivity. This promotes a sense of actually seeing the other person, rather than the label we may be tempted to slap upon them. Illuminators are appropriately affectionate rather than distant, and exhibit a generosity of spirit that is, at the same time, not flippantly permissive. Finally, illuminators are able to see the whole, and look at a person not just at a single moment in time or for one particular characteristic, but as an entire, complicated, beautiful package of a person, who has the potential not only for mistakes and failings but also for growth and change.
Perhaps we might all pray for the grace to be empathetic illuminators who approach the holiday season with appropriate boundaries and with an enthusiastic readiness to simply be present to everyone we encounter: This may be a challenge, but it is certainly one worth undertaking.
Remember your true home
Whether going home is a joyful duty, part of the yearly routine of maintaining connections with family and friends, or is a trial that must be endured with as much grace as one can muster between bites of pie, there is something deeper beneath the tidal flow that hits us at the holidays and pulls us home. Beyond the hustle of packing suitcases and prepping gifts, there is always something more.
Poet Czeslaw Milosz, exiled from his Polish-Lithuanian childhood home as a young man, had an opportunity to return to this place 50 years later. He composed a haunting collection of poems titled “Facing the River” about this homecoming journey through the Issa Valley. Much of what he remembered of his childhood home had changed, and the poems ring with the sorrow of people and places that had been lost irrevocably to the eddies of time, drifting by like leaves on a river current. Although the visit was both searing and sad, with the sensitivity of a poet, Milosz seemed to perceive the hidden depth in his homecoming. The poem “A Meadow” records one of his visits to a familiar childhood spot:
It was a riverside meadow, lush, from before the hay harvest,
On an immaculate day in the sun of June.
I searched for it, found it, recognized it.
Grasses and flowers grew there familiar in my childhood.
With half-closed eyelids I absorbed luminescence.
And the scent garnered me, all knowing ceased.
Suddenly I felt I was disappearing and weeping with joy.
Describing a pointedly incarnate experience — the warmth of the sun, the scents and sounds of the grasses surrounding him — the poet expresses a pull, not toward sorrow, but toward joy. Why might this be, when on the surface, the visit of a changed person to a changed place might be merely fodder for regret, as it was for Father Hugh Kennedy at Charlie Carmody’s table?
It is perhaps because whoever we are, when we turn toward home, there is an unavoidable reenactment of the most basic human journey, a journey that St. Thomas Aquinas explains to us as the exitus and the reditus. Although not every homecoming is “dramatic,” this is the unavoidable human drama that is constantly at work at every moment in our lives. The moments when we are pulled back home for holidays, birthdays, funerals, weddings or other significant events have the potential to be moments when we realize it ever more deeply.
Each and every one of us have come into being — unbidden by our own whims, desires or wills — thanks to the actions of various “someones,” both human and divine. We make our exitus, or departure, from the creating hand of God through the mysterious cooperation of our parents and the Blessed Trinity. As we continue on our life journeys, departing from our familiar origins for other new places and spaces, and as we exercise our God-given freedom of intellect and will, we continue our exitus. All the while, our soul longs for our reditus, our return, as we continually pine for union with God as much as is possible in the midst of a complicated and fallen world, always hoping for our ultimate union with him upon passing out of this life.
Whether we are coming home from abroad or across town, and whether our gatherings are jolly or jarring, may we all remember that God is our ultimate hope and solace. Toward the end of his “Confessions,” St. Augustine reminds us to be faithful to prayer, and though our hearts and our lives are “torn with every kind of tumult,” to continue to look forward in hope to the day when we “shall be purified and melted in the fire of [God’s] love, and wholly joined to [Him].” Then we will truly be home.
