The next few posts will examine
situations of conflict that seem unresolvable – particularly those
with family. For a host of reasons, offending parties can refuse to
repent of the wrong that they've done or the harm that they've
caused. Some believe that they are entitled to behave in any way
that they want, as if they have license to sin against others.
Others believe that their offensive behavior actually constitutes
love, so they become confused and defensive if anyone says otherwise.
And some people are just so damaged and wounded by life that they
aren't capable of truly loving others in a healthy way. Some people
are just difficult to love on a pragmatic level because they are
consumed with their own pain. They don't love themselves because of
their own shames and wounds, so they can't offer a healthy kind of
love to others.
Joyce Landorf Heatherly wrote
an entire book about forgiving people who fall into this category
– those whom she calls “irregular people.” Before delving into
how Landorf Heatherly defines the irregular person and how to live
with these conflicts, I wanted to highlight where the term
originated. Landorf Heatherly lifted it from Bette Greene's book
(and made-for-TV film), Summer
of My German Soldier.
Ruth's Wisdom About Irregular
People
The thirteen year old protagonist,
Patty Bergen (Bette Greene), lives in a small town in Arkansas during
World War II. Her Jewish parents who run the local general store
lavish attention on their younger child, but they show disregard to
Patty, often treating her as an annoyance. Patty does receive much
love from the family's domestic servant, an aging black woman named
'Ruth.' Anton Riker, one of the English speaking POWs escapes from
the camp, and Patty hides him for a time. If you're unfamiliar with
the story, I won't give you any spoilers, save for the origin of
Ruth's term 'irregular people.'
I've pulled the pivotal, powerful
conversation between Patty and Ruth from both the book and the film.
I suppose that I love Esther Rolle's depiction of the Ruth character
so much that I've listed the film version here first.
Dialogue from the film adaptation of Bette Greene's Summer
of My German Soldier (1978),
[time mark approximately 1:30:00]:
PATTY: “How come my mother and my father...”RUTH: “Look here. When I goes shoppin', and I sees somethin' marked 'Irregular,' I knows that I ain't gonna have to pays so much for it. But girl, You got yourself some irregular folks, and you been payin' top dollar for them all along.”“So just don't go ways ten up your life wishin' for what ain't gonna be.”PATTY: He [Patty's father] said I was a bad person, ever since the day that I was born – and that I was a dead person, too.RUTH: “You ain't bad and you ain't dead. Mr. Riker knowed it. And I knows it. And I'm tellin you, Miss Patty Bergen, we is the only ones that matters. Cause me and him ain't irregular.”. . .“You is a whole person of your own, a creature of God, and a thing that matters in this world. . . . [Stand] straight up, girl. You've got person pride from this day on, and I don't nevah wanna see you sloppin your shoulders nor your soul again. Not nevah.”. . . “There ain't no judge 'sept the one on high.”
Excerpt from Bette Greene's Summer
of My German Soldier:
[Ruth] said slowly, “but your folks ain't nevah gonna feel nothing good regarding you. And they ain't the number one best quality folks neither.”“They shore ain't. When I goes shoppin' and I sees the label stamped, 'Irregular' or 'Seconds,' then I knows I won't have to pay so much for it. But you've got yourself some irregular seconds folks, and you've been paying more'n top dollar for them. So jest don't go a-wishing for what ain't nevah gonna be."
. . .
“Was it God a-speakin' to you?” asked Ruth, her eyes wide.“I never thought about it being God. What would God be wasting his time with a twelve-year-old for? I don't think,” I said, “that God would whisper, do you?”Ruth pressed her lips together. “The ways of the Lord are filled with wonder and mystery.”“Well, just the same, it didn't sound like God. I think, actually, it was truth. Truth growing inside like a baby, and for a long time it was just too little, too weak to say anything. But day by day it gains strength.”
Irregular People's Attempt to Keep
the Offended Silent
Note what Bette Greene wrote in her
Affidavit in the book version. Those who struggle with offenses
within their families will be able to relate well to her words. I
believe that it points out well how many families expect people to
hide secrets about offense and abuse, and how the offended are often
expected to just accept such behavior and excuse it. They will often
do anything and manipulate in any way to heap their own shame on
people like Bette, asking them to carry both the burden of the abuse
and the secret blame as well.
Throughout my career, I have felt the need to protect my parents from being seen as the abusive people that I portrayed them to be in the pages of Summer of My German Soldier. The surprising thing, though, was that most of my family did not seem particularly upset by the constant physical, verbal, and emotional abuse that I withstood. What they were upset with, in their collective agreement, was my “exploitation of the family.” . . . “Couldn't you, at the very least, have had the decency to wait until we were dead?” I thought this was too difficult a request.. . . So was my mother really telling me to wait an additional twenty-six years to begin writing the book that had, for so much of my life, flamed and flickered within me?
Honoring Parents
I would like to conclude with a quote
concerning the honoring of parents from Dr. David Stoop's book,
Forgiving
Our Parents, Forgiving Ourselves: Healing Adult Children of
Dysfunctional Families. In
the passage, Stoop defines the term “honor” as it was used in
Greek and Hebrew, meaning that we should “assign weight to” the
things that our parents say, but it does not mean that adult children
should never mention mistakes made or the pain that a parents'
mistakes have caused. The command to honor parents does not give
them license to offend or abuse, and it doesn't mean that adult
children are bound to deny offenses that they suffer.
Excerpt
from Forgiving
Our Parents, Forgiving Ourselves by
Drs. Stoop and Masteller, pages
298 - 299:
One way to understand this is to imagine that you are in a banquet hall. Part way through the banquet, your city mayor walks in. Now, let’s suppose that you are not particularly fond of this mayor. You didn’t vote for him in the last election, and you think he has made some bad decisions. Even so, when he walks into the room, you stand up with everyone else to greet him.Why? Because he is the mayor, and honoring him is the appropriate thing to do. You assign a certain value, or “weight” to him because of the position he holds. This does not mean you now have to start liking him, or even respecting him, as a person. It does not mean you have to start pretending that you agree with everything he has done as mayor. The honor is accorded to the position he holds, not so much to the individual.In the same way, we can honor our parents – accord them an appropriate degree of “weight” – because of the position they hold in our lives as parents. Similar to our example with the mayor, the fact that we honor them does not mean we have to pretend that they have never done anything wrong or hurtful to us.It is healthy, not dishonoring, to acknowledge that our parents failed us, hurt us, damaged us in some way – especially if we are doing so for the sake of forgiving them. We do neither our parents nor ourselves any honor by denying reality, eliminating the possibility of forgiveness, and locking ourselves into dysfunctional patterns of thinking and acting.
(To
explore more about issues with 'irregular parents,' please visit
Overcoming
Botkin Syndrome.)
Read
more about irregular people
in
the next post.
