We should place a higher priority on our family

The organizers of the family reunion, my cousins Anthony and Derek Albuoy, Uncle George and Aunt Maxine, and, of course, many others too numerous to mention via this medium — need to be commended for a job well done.

It is no easy task to get families together for a reunion today, with all the other distractions going on; job functions/commitments, church functions, social functions, this, that and the other all getting in most cases, priority over family, after all, who wants to be with a bunch of relatives!  Well I do! 

Kinship

I enjoy my family; cousins close and four times removed, aunts, uncles, sisters, brothers – I love them and the love I feel when I am amongst them. 

The bounds of family is of ultimate significance to one’s well being. 

Kinship is key in understanding who you are and where you come from. 

Knowing and being aware of family characteristics and traits helps one to understand their own personality and traits. 

For instance, I know that many of my traits come from my grandmother Edith Minors, some I am happy to have and others …. well, I have to redesign a bit! 

But just the same, I know where they come from, I have seen them before in her and therefore I can adapt, modify, realign so to speak the traits that are not so becoming and languish in the more charming of my grandmother’s traits!

It is important to know one’s family for many reasons.

More importantly, for kinship’s sake as well as for health reasons, often with blood donorship, organ transplants and the like, relatives are of first choice. 

“Blood is thicker than water” is a German proverb, and it generally means that the bonds of family and common ancestry are stronger than those bonds between unrelated people (such as friendship).

My mother always stressed that family came first, I was warned that in no shape or form was I to side with friends, before relatives — I was drilled that relatives stick together.

I love my relatives; though many of them try to run from me, because they know, as my cousin LuLu says - “Beware of Cousin Smoochy lips and her wet kisses!”

Significance

The bonds of kinship are very important in Islam. 

For example, you know how in the West, when a relative is disgusted with another, the first words uttered are “I will cut you off”, which means they will disown you or sever ties of kinship with you. 

Well in Islam this is not permitted. 

One cannot ‘cut’ off one’s family members, socially or via inheritance. 

Islam teaches that both close family, as well as the extended or more distant family, is important — as the lines of lineage are considered to be of high significance.

Several hadiths relay the importance of keeping family relations alive and recommend that even distant relations are to be visited, even if it would take a year to travel to them.

Adult children are duty bound to keep close ties with their parents, even after marriage — there should be no such thing as bad relations between in-laws and the like.

Siblings should be kind and supportive to each other in childhood and throughout adulthood.

There are hadiths that state that the person who severs the bond of kinship will not enter Paradise. How heavy is that?!

In an island as small as Bermuda, the ties of kinship must be honoured for the simple reason, we are simply all related! 

Unfortunately, this makes the terrible rampage of violence that has been going on lately particularly heinous, as we are maiming and killing our relatives — which is not good, and we have to stop.

Essence

When one cannot traverse upon the land, this means that one cannot visit one’s relatives, so again the madness of territory staking must cease — it makes no sense anywhere and especially in an island of 21 square miles ... please! 

We must live in harmony with one another, for one, we are all brothers and sisters, blood of each others ‘blood and flesh of each others’ flesh, in essence we are all kin of one another.

There is a Burmese proverb that states “In time of test, family is best.”

It is my prayer that Allah, the most Merciful will bless and uplift the family in Bermuda and indeed around the world –Ameen.