Thicker Than Blood

With a pin prick and a promise, Joey and I became blood brothers.  Childhood friends with a closeness that felt as much like family as good family can feel.  His wasn’t stable.  For him, I imagine now, our act felt like a sacrament:  an outward sign of an inward grace.  A commitment of flesh cast into stone, just like the tablets Moses brought down from God’s mountain.

We’ve all heard “blood is thicker than water.”  There is something that is yet thicker.  The ancestors knew that there was more to being family than blood.  The beautiful phrase from the Lakota people, “Mitákuye Oyás’iŋ”, means ”all my relations,” and is often said in prayer and ceremony as a bold acknowledgement that everything is related:  people, animals, plants, and the mycelial network weaving underneath everything.  

When it was my turn to speak at Paul’s surprise birthday party, I regaled the crowd with the myriad ways in which I have been inextricably bound within his family, involved in every significant event in their lives over these thirty years.  I closed by saying, “friends are family of our own choosing.”  Lee Ann, his sister-in-law, told me later that she understood that in her own way.  She and her husband Mark “adopted” a local boy whose family needed help raising him.  The boy asked, after their bond had been sealed, “we’re not blood related, we’re heart related…aren’t we?”  An outward sign of an inward grace.  

The young rabbi wasn’t being disrespectful to his mother and brothers outside of the house in which he was teaching.*  He was simply widening the family table.  Including, not excluding.  Communal containers of belonging are the veins that carry what is thicker than blood, which flows to the heart of God.