RBWords

     When this passage from the Letter to the Ephesians is read at a liturgy when I am presiding, I watch carefully to see if there is any elbow-nudging going on between parent and child out in the congregation!  I am old enough and have been a priest long enough to be baptizing the grandchildren of couples whose weddings I celebrated back in the 70's and 80's.  I have seen many different approaches to parent-child relationships and listened to many stories - glad and sad - from parents and offspring that begin:  "If only I had listened......"  or "Where did I/we go wrong?"  A  friend of mine who is a grandmother many times over has a plaque in her kitchen that reads:  "Grandchildren are a reward for not killing your own!"    At many family gatherings, I see anxious grandparents who see the grandchildren acting in ways that would not have been permitted to their parents!  I also hear parents say to their own parents, "Was I ever like that?"

     The Bible does not offer a single divinely sanctioned model of child rearing or family life.  We celebrate the feast of the Holy Family right after Christmas, but this feast seems based more on a western notion of a "nuclear" family.  Jesus did not grow up in that kind of family!  Middle Eastern patterns of parent-child relationships are vastly different from our western ways.  What scripture does offer is the same thing for all relationships:  "Do unto others as you would have them do unto you." [The "Golden Rule"] Yes, the fourth of the Ten Commandments says, "Honor your father and mother."  That would fit in the Golden Rule as well!  

     On retreats, when I treat of the subject of "community" and "love," I ask retreatants, especially priests and deacons, to do a history of "love" in their lives.  I challenge them to begin as far back as their memory can take them.  What they discover can tell them a lot about how they treat their parishioners.  I could do the same with parents or, for that matter, with students.  I warn young couples who wish to marry that the way they were brought up will impact strongly the way they try to raise their own children - either by copying or by rejection!    I see over and over again in my work with annulments the terrible cost to future marriage that comes from unstable or violent family life.  I can only pray that grandparents, parents and children will all make first the effort to love one another and follow the "Golden Rule."  The Holy Spirit will have to take care of the rest!   AMEN