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Honor Your Father and Your Mother
Thursday, October 26th, 2006It surprises us a bit to realize that this commandment is for adults. Sometimes it’s easy to think that; upon turning twenty-one, the parent-child deal goes dormant, parents become peers, and relationships with parents are “voluntary.” Well, that is sort-of true from a legal standpoint, but not from God’s perspective. Honor your parents…the word in its Hebrew form means, “make heavy” or ” give weight to.” In the Leviticus version, a different word, meaning “fear” or “revere” replaces “honor.” (Leviticus 19:3) It is clear that the word honor gives us pause. Not all parents are honorable enough to deserve a reward for their behavior or character. My best wisdom, given other scripture in both testaments concerning parent-child relationships, is to suggest that “value” might give a clearer picture of what “honor” means in our context. We can value parents for their place in our lives as parents without celebrating behavior that is destructive. Below is a clip from Chris Hedges “Losing Moses on The Freeway” that speaks very eloquently to this issue: “All parents, for better or worse, shape our lives. They condition our responses years after they are gone. Children who were loved, or not loved, who yearned for approval that was never sufficient, who fled the harsh oppression of the home, who rejected all their parents had pressed down on them until they became, as if in a cruel reversal, simply what their parents were not, live out these yearnings as adults. Or maybe they can never leave the embrace of home at all, living years later under the protective and suffocation love of the parent. But the imprint is unavoidable. It marks us into old age.
We all honor our parents, even parents we reject, even parents whose cruelty did not make them fit to be called parents. For to honor our parents is to honor our essence, the roots from which we sprung, and even the best parents have an oppressive power that must be broken. We must free ourselves from our parents to become fully formed individuals, in the process taking with us that which they gave us, or did not give us, and trying to fashion a distinct and separate life. It is a life that must, in the end, replace the parent. And as our children grow we look into the face of our own decline, our eventual death.
None of the commandments were written for children. They were written for adults. The commandment to honor your parents is a commandment to honor yourself, honor the life force that created you, the good and the bad mingled within us, but not to honor abuse. Those who were abused, who wince at the name of father or mother, cannot be asked to honor the memory of the abuse or the abuser. But at the same time, however painful, we have to see in parents, even bad parents, reflections of ourselves, if only to guard against and keep at bay the demons within us. We cannot wish our parents away. They will always be a major, overpowering force in our life. We cannot undo abuse, but we can find a way to honor life, even their lives, by turning that abuse into compassion not only for ourselves, which is necessary for healing, but more important for all who suffer. Those who use personal pain to mitigate the pain of others, who take the experience of sorrow and the suffering and use it to lead a life of compassion, honor their parents, even as they rise above them. They honor life, which is what their parents gave them. They honor what is holy and good. They take out of tragedy a regenerative power. They fulfill the commandment. We all carry, imprinted on our faces, like the mark of Cain, our origins, our link with the past, wanted or unwanted. We cannot wash it away. It is rather a matter of what we do with it, how we honor it, how we redeem the experience to protect and create life. “
Losing Moses On The Freeway pages 90-91So what does it mean to you to honor your father and mother? A couple of responses follow. Please add your comments to the conversation.Jared Jones:
The passage Stan shared includes this: “We all honor our parents…. For to honor our parents is to honor our essence, the roots from which we sprung, and even the best parents have an oppressive power that must be broken.” Hedges describes an intriguing inevitability that I suspect mildly distorts the real meaning of the verb “honor.” He rightly points out that one can hardly help but emulate one’s parents; I’m not sure that’s the same as honor. But that’s just semantics.My folks were in town this last weekend; they visit us here two or three times a year and return to the house where I grew up in Merced, in California’s Central Valley, a place where I can hardly imagine living without experiencing chest constrictions. From my perspective, Merced is a profoundly ugly place–a deeply abused land in which a culturally impoverished conglomeration of some 70,000 people manage to make their livings. It seems to me that Merced Christians (that is, my extended family and the church in which I was reared) live hunkered down against the unholy influences of American popular culture, often unconsciously adapting to its individualism and materialism for lack of any attractive or livable alternative. Everyone else in town seems either to celebrate that very degeneracy or to strive for the means to indulge in it. I intentionally exaggerate the picture; it is the milieu in which my consciousness formed, and so its caricatured proportions persist in my mind. Most adolescents want to escape their hometowns; I just never got over that. I deliberately moved away from Merced both as I entered college and as Jody and I settled in Newberg after a stint in Guatemala. I’m still trying to figure out why, and how it relates to honoring my parents (or failing to).
That commandment has been rubbing against me for a few years now, and I’m both a bit raw and a bit callused there. I have a great relationship with my parents, who were about as good as parents can be, but Jody and I have chosen to live a long way from them.
That was a hard and intentional choice that we knew would haunt us forever. It’s doing that now. It haunts me every time I talk with Mom; she longs to see her grandkids on a weekly rather than a quarterly basis, and I would really like that too. It hurts to be so far from Jody’s dad in Wisconsin, who’s struggling to heal and desperate for sleep a year after he broke his back; he could sure use some support and more frequent time with his grandsons. I know that our distance from our parents hurts them more than it hurts us.
The longer we stay here, the harder it becomes to contemplate leaving. Ethan is close with several great kids at North Valley and around town, and Levi’s heading that direction too. Jody’s fully plugged in to an incredible network of stay-at-home moms and just good community. I enjoy all of this vicariously and, between working and sleeping hours, directly too. It’s hard to imagine fitting into a place more comfortably. It just feels like home.
Mostly.
Our moms and dads live too far away; when we married in 1995 we knew this would happen with at least one set of parents. Our choice has doubled the problem.
So are we ‘honoring’ our parents with this choice? I don’t know, and believe me, I’ve wondered plenty. The converse is easier to answer: I don’t think we’re dishonoring them. Our folks are proud of our family and selflessly support our lifestyle here.
Wendell Berry writes convincingly that community in its fullest sense involves being chosen as well as choosing to belong. While we were contemplating our return from Guatemala I puzzled almost obsessively over where to land and set down roots, hoping to enact the vision he described with other community-minded folks. We found more of them here in Newberg than in any other single place, and the generosity of people in Newberg who choose us and befriend us surprises us anew every week or two. We have here what we hoped for.
But I wonder if we’ve overlooked the profound ways that we have been chosen from birth by our families–if we’re failing to honor them by choosing this good and comfortable place instead of the more obviously uncomfortable places where Jody and I grew up. Worse, I wonder what precedent we’re setting for future generations of the Jones family. Until us, both of our families had been close to their respective current homes for many generations. We can’t very well take care of our aging parents from this distance; that erodes any right to hope our children will care for us in our dotage.
This sort of situation seems especially common in our generation, and I don’t think most people agonize over it as I do. I wonder how many of society’s ills might be mitigated if people stayed closer to where they were reared; I also wonder what would be lost. (I wouldn’t have met Jody.) I suppose there would just be other conflicts to work on. This is the one that occupies my mind by default.
There is an element of honor in our quandary, though. Jody’s family and mine both include generations of people who have left home specifically to serve the kingdom of God as ministers and missionaries. We returned from Guatemala hoping to do the same in lay jobs in the U.S. I’m sure we can do that here (we should); we could also do it in Rhinelander, Wisconsin, or in Merced, California. Why here? I’m not entirely sure. But maybe our willingness to “forsake” our parents finds some of its tangled roots in that missionary impulse that was inculcated on us in childhood. The irony aches, but may contain some truth. We “honor” our parents, in Chris Hedges’ sense, by carrying forward a pattern they set. Maybe we just can’t help it. Good excuse, anyway.
Rebekah Schneiter:
My mind keeps zipping from one thought to the next as I think about what it means to honor your/my parents. Earlier this summer I did a study on passing on a godly heritage. This certainly would be honoring to my parents as I do my best to pass on Christ to my children. Then I had the thought about not “defaming” my parents. I think in my early 20’s I did a good job of pointing out all of my parent’s faults to other 20’s year olds who also were complaining about their parents. I think this was the phase I was in, but it was not honoring, as I know my parents would never point out all of my faults to all of their friends.But when I really stop to think about what this commandments means for me personally, it is very clear. After my first, Bren, was born I heard God very clearly say to me that I would be the caretaker for my family. The idea of taking care of my parents as they aged struck me as an honor and blessing…and extremely hard and difficult too. I watched my father care for his mother for seven years; for seven years she was basically a vegetable after a debilitating stroke. I saw this act as complete selfless, unconditional love. He received nothing in return from her. I guess all he received was the knowledge that he was honoring her at her most vulnerable point in life. During the stoke years he followed his mother from hospital, to rehab, to nursing home, to foster home, back to hospital, and finally at the nursing home again. He read to her, drove her places, took her to family gatherings, brought her to our home for holidays and weekends away, bathed her, changed her, fed her, changed her hearing aides, and cried with her. (He even, lovingly, made her coffin.) He did all of this and we, his family, never knew that each time he drove away from time spent with her he would cry. I asked him if he was relieved when she died and he said yes. The answer yes was only out of love since her life in heaven would be so much better than her existence here. Never in all his caring for her did he ever verbalize this or wish this or complain etc. He just did. He honored her.This is why I hope that I do half as well to my parents, now and in their future needs. I’ve shared this with close friends, this calling I feel. I get mixed reactions. Most seem to wonder why. People don’t react this way when someone feels called to a career or mission etc. (I guess some probably do.) But maybe they miss the point that I feel my parents are my mission, my calling…my honoring.
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This entry was posted on Thursday, October 26th, 2006 at 10:24 pm and is filed under Ten Commandment Series.
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October 28th, 2006 at 10:37 pm
Cynthia Edwards :
The current subject of honoring one’s parents is one which I have been wrestling with for a couple years. It comes as a time when a daughter is very angry with me and has cut off contact. Of course, this is devastating to me. The commandment to honor ones father and mother has been greatly on my mind. I think it is important to note that it doesn’t say to Love them, rather to honor them. Honor can be an external attitude, if necessary. We honor firefighters who have died, even if we never knew them. What they did in going into dangerous conditions to make things safe is what we honor. I think that honor for ones parents can be the same thing. For the abusive parent, perhaps the best - and maybe the only - thing we can honor them for is that they gave you life. Period! In my lighter moments I somewhat jokingly say that 9 months of pregnancy and 24 hours of labor earn me honor and respect for the rest of my life. I hope that one day I may have a peaceful dialogue with my daughter. In the meantime I will attend with interest the discussion you are having on the subject.
Cynthia