Christianity & Culture
The Messiness of Families, Today and in the Bible Song-Mi Suzie Park
F
or many months now I have ended every phone call with my elderly parents with a reminder to refrain from going out of the house. I don’t know if they listen to me, but I suspect they do so only partly. Having not seen them over the year, I don’t really know what they are doing. Hence, the phone call ends with lots of mixed emotions: anger, frustration, fear, sadness, and also, to some degree, understanding and resignation. I understand it is difficult to isolate. For some, like “essential workers” from Amazon warehouses to hospitals, it has been impossible to do so. And many people are forced to make complicated evaluations about risks and rewards where livelihoods, solvency, and last chances to see loved ones hang in the balance. As experts have frequently discussed, in increasing isolation and stress, the impact of this pandemic upon those most vulnerable, such as the elderly, children, or single adults, is particularly cruel. Covid-19 turns wonderful parts of a full life— contact and connection—into poisons, transforming the very things people need to survive these difficult times into things that can potentially harm or even kill. Miscalculations are deadly, and their consequences may inflict devastating wounds.
Suzie Park is associate professor of Old Testament at Austin Seminary.
She earned her PhD from Harvard in 2010 and began teaching at Austin Seminary the following year. Park is the author of the new book for the Wisdom Commentary series, 2 Kings (Liturgical Press, 2019), in which she engages the latest in feminist biblical scholarship. Her newest book, The Flawed Family of God: Stories about Imperfect Families of Genesis, is due in 2021.
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