Jonathan Franzen's new book, Freedom: A Novel arrived on my Kindle shortly after midnight. I am happy to report that I did not stay awake for the downloading. I don't know if I am really ready for several hundred pages about a dysfunctional family in St. Paul, Minnesota, but here goes.

In the end, of course, dysfunction of one kind or another is the substance of everything, the topic of most books, the cause for most wars, the fodder for most breakdowns. That is why reading about a fictional family's dealing with it grabs our interest, particularly when the writing is as good as I anticipate this to be.

Who doesn't remember the great New Yorker cartoon showing a huge auditorium populated by only two people (both untruthful) sitting on the front row under a banner declaring the gathering "The Convention of Functional Families?" The only people to really avoid are those two! Unacknowledged dysfunction will kill us. Admitting it and living through it with faith, hope and even on occasion, good cheer, shape the quality of our spiritual journeys.

We know these vignettes, most of us: parents who slip away, sometimes in the blink of an eye, more often slowly in increments requiring us to step up and finally be real adults; grown children who want from us relationships, if we are lucky, not answers; siblings whose lives and paths are so different that we hardly know them; spouses, partners, lovers, friends who just don't quite act as we would have them (which is, of course, their dysfunction, not ours).

In my job and, I think in most jobs, interruptions are not just interruptions. They often determine my activities and sometimes redirect my priorities for a long while to come. Dysfunction is similarly endemic in the human experience. Moving toward wholeness, health, and completion is the spiritual and psychological process of demystifying, facing and even coming to honor -- if not quite love -- our dysfunctions. At the very least, these issues give space for the awakening of grace within each of us. In the crucible where God's tug toward wholeness meets the barriers that limit us, we have the opportunity to know God as the One who sustains us and awakens us with Grace, moving us, inch by inch, closer to being who God creates us to be.

That is what I want to believe. And sometimes I really do believe it. When I cannot, I just consider this disbelief an aspect of my dysfunction, which is still in process.