“So what are your holiday plans?”
I hear that a lot in polite conversations this time of year. And invariably, after I explain that we’ll visit my husband’s parents in another state, the follow-up question is whether we’ll visit my parents too. That’s when the conversation gets awkward.
I’ve had a full decade to master the art of demurring without much detail, but it’s still difficult to explain even a vague version of the truth—namely, that my parents will not receive me in their home because of my faith.
The story of my estrangement, to which I’ll return in a moment, is somewhat unusual. But estrangement itself is increasingly common. One recent study found that “as many as one in four people are estranged from at least one family member.”
After a decade, my estrangement leaves me numb rather than in full-fledged pain. But as I prepare to celebrate Christmas, it adds another dimension of longing for the promises that Christ’s birth holds out for us all. This is a season in which we speak often of reconciliation and decorate our homes and churches with images of a perfect family—the holy family, with a doting Mary and Joseph leaning over the baby in the manger, as if they don’t have a care in the world.
Our Nativity scenes may lean saccharine, but they tell an important truth about family. They depict a love and togetherness we all want and need. We all long for others to look at us as Jesus’ earthly parents looked at him, and the absence of that affection, the inability to reconcile (Rom. 12:18), is particularly hard at Christmas.
I was born in the Soviet Union, back when there was such a thing. In 1991, shortly before the collapse of the USSR, my secular Jewish family took advantage of temporarily opened borders and moved to Israel. Then, in 1996, when I was in high school, we moved to the United States.
It was supposed to be for only a year, but here I still am, almost 30 years later. I deferred military service in the Israeli army to attend college in the US, then deferred it again to go to graduate school. At some point, I received a polite letter informing me that the Israeli military forces would not need my (undoubtedly valuable) services after all and I was free to finish my PhD and pursue an academic career here. So I did.
A few years later, after a bizarre series of events in a year of compounding crises that upended my life and thought, I came to realize that the promises of Christianity were true. I started attending church. At Thanksgiving that fall, around the table with several families from church, I talked with a lifelong missionary about the theology of family. “Isn’t it remarkable,” I said, “that because of Christ, we’re all related?” He laughed with delight.
I was struggling then with my worthiness—or, more precisely, unworthiness. Was I ready to be baptized? He assured me that if I was asking that question, it was time. I was baptized a few weeks later, during the Wednesday night service the week before Christmas. My Thanksgiving conversationalist emailed me after hearing the news and wished me happy holidays celebrating with all my families, both the new one in Christ and the original one.
To be honest, I didn’t expect my secular Jewish mother and atheist Russian father to have any significant feelings about my conversion. Surely, I reasoned, for people who had spent their lives not thinking about God, it wouldn’t matter one way or another if their daughter now did.
I was wrong. “Don’t you know that it was Christians who killed Jews, including your relatives, in the Holocaust?” my mom queried in anger mixed with shock and dismay. She later mailed me a New Age book as an example of something more acceptable for me to explore, if I was so bent on finding some sort of supernatural presence in my life. After that, our conversations about faith ground to a halt.
The estrangement was not instantaneous. But by the time I married a fellow Christian three years later, it was complete. My parents refused to attend my wedding. And so, over the past decade, when I pick up the phone a couple of times a year and call the familiar number, it rings for a while and goes unanswered. Occasionally, my husband will email family photos, trying to keep the communication channels open—but to no avail.
I understand now Christ’s surprising statements on the loss of earthly family as one of the costs of discipleship, such as in Luke 14:26: “If anyone comes to me and does not hate father and mother, wife and children, brothers and sisters—yes, even their own life—such a person cannot be my disciple.”
I don’t hate my parents, nor was Christ calling for animosity. And yet it is a simple fact that my conversion was the reason for our estrangement. It sounds dramatic to say it came down to such a choice—parents or Christ—but it did. After so many years, it has dawned on me this fall that perhaps this estrangement will not end in this life.
But didn’t Jesus foresee this very possibility? It seems that he was expecting such scenarios to be the default rather than the exception—why else list all immediate family members among those one might have to lose to follow him?
The cost of discipleship for most of us in America doesn’t involve martyrdom of the sort Jesus’ earliest disciples faced. But estrangement is a very real cost too. This loneliness and division is not what God intended for family, and this is not what the fully redeemed world will be like. But it is the world we inhabit now.
Those questions about Christmastime plans remind me every year of that tension of already and not yet. For now, to follow Christ can mean severing bonds we never wished to sever. It can mean conflicts we never wanted, division from our closest kin. We long for a peace that we cannot create, a peace “the world cannot give” (John 14:27, NLT).
A few years ago, my husband and I took our children to a local live Nativity put on by another church. Sheep, goats, bunnies, llamas, and alpacas were joined by a very bored-looking angel, watching over Mary, Joseph, and the (plastic) sleeping babe.
At first glance, I wanted to laugh at the incongruous mix, which included animals that certainly were not in attendance at Jesus’ birth. But what a glorious promise we can see in this scene. God’s family makes no sense in earthly terms. But sometimes the alpacas remind us something the familiar witness of Bethlehem sheep cannot.
Nadya Williams is the author of Cultural Christians in the Early Church and Mothers, Children, and the Body Politic: Ancient Christianity and the Recovery of Human Dignity (IVP Academic, 2024).
