Growing up, my family was a sort of central-hub for social gatherings. Our friends would come down for an afternoon, a weekend, or an extended length of time not only to socialize but to help us out with some homesteading tasks. If we were not hosting a formal square dance, we were inviting families over for a pig slaughter. If we were not offering a background for a homemade movie, we were welcoming family friends who just wanted to stop by, and potentially spend several nights. We were something of a spectacle at times, and offered some other families an opportunity to work with their hands, be outside of the city’s constrictions, and enjoy some fireside music. But our family was well equipped for it: hospitality was undeniably a charism of our family. And while my siblings and I may be starting our own families with our own charisms, the subsequent charisms we create in our own families can never truly be absent of hospitality.

The family my parents created manifested the charism of hospitality well, and that charism has influenced myself and many of my siblings in how we have begun our own families. My parents have continued their charism of hospitality as their children move away and their children’s friends stop coming over. The drive to host and give of themselves has caused them to not only continue hog roasts, square dances, and teaching opportunities; knowledge of their hospitable charism has caused them to adapt their implementation of this charism to open their home to some who, whether it be vulnerability or family circumstance, may even need longer term hospitality. The Curley Family Prime, as it were, is an outward-facing family who changes their activities and involvement to adapt to the calling which Mother and Father Curley heard for themselves and passed on to their children.

You might think that the subsequent generations would follow strictly in the footsteps of the parents. As my parents were of the charism of hospitality, so too my own family would therefore be driven to open-door policies concerning social gatherings. And, for the first several years of my married life, I sought to directly replicate that charism into my own family. We tend towards that which we know; starting off, all you have is a relation to your parent’s family, either replicate some way or reject it. More than that, even: personal identity is formed and is a sort of reflection of the identity of your parents. This much to say: in trying to replicate the charism of hospitality in my own original family, I was not merely reflecting or copying that which my parents had done as much as I was trying to act upon something that, as child, had become part of my own personal identity. And all this is well and good - if you end up marrying yourself.

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