Category: PARENTS

  • Even if our mother or father or brother or sister or spouse or friend couldn’t love us in every way we might have liked, Père Thomas began to show me that each one did reflect an aspect of God’s love, and when taken together they reflected the fullness of God in a way I had often missed in focusing on what each one was not able to offer.

    —Henri Nouwen, Discernment: Reading the Signs of Daily Life

    However bad it may be at home, anyway they are your father and mother, and not enemies, strangers. Once a year at least, they’ll show their love of you.

    —Notes from the Underground, Fyodor Dostoyevsky

    Remember people’s love for you and their good past with you, whenever you are fought by doubts of their sincerity and whenever you see them erring against you, for then their past love will intercede for them and your anger will subside.

    —H.H. Pope Shenouda III

    I felt miserable because I had failed so many times in the past to respond to her help, to accept the warmth and love she tried to give me. Another wave of loneliness overcame me as I considered the times when I fought her, hated her, and pushed her away from me.

    …

    This was my mother; the word “mother” brings on a flow of feeling and past experiences and years of living together, loving together, and hating, too. The fighting and conflicts do not seem important anymore, the arguments and intense pains and emotions that clouded the relationship have evaporated. This was my mother, and I realize the uniqueness of our relationship.

    …

    In her dying, I was able to become open to myself and to my mother, to claim our relationship, to look back upon the past in quick moments while at her bedside and realize the times she did give me warmth and love, and the times when pain and emotional conflict blocked the giving and the receiving.

    —Clark E. Moustakas, Loneliness

    Even if some people are foul and have reached the extremes of evil, often they have done one or two or three good things…. We ought to suspect the same also in the case of good people. Just as the most worthless people often do something good, so those who are earnest and virtuous often fail completely in some other respect.

    —St. John Chrysostom, On Wealth and Poverty

  • It is very wrong that you do not love your mother, and harbor this feeling of suspicion against her. Pray for the strength, the courage, the goodness, to forgive. You must stop these endless recriminations, this reverting to this endless dwelling on-her mistaken attitude to you in the past. Accept that past as part of God’s pattern for your life, and forget your grudge. Forget it all. In keeping keen within you this hostility to your past and to the tools that shaped it, you are only waging war against the will of God. What folly!

    Besides, you cannot honestly consider your fate to be a hard one. There have been bitter moments, I know. But, surely, the right thing to do is to forget them and train yourself to think of no one as their author, of no one as the one person responsible for them. Seen from on high, men are nought but instruments in the hand of God.

    LETTERS OF ELDER MACARIUS OF OPTINA

  • There is no perfect family. We don’t have perfect parents, we are not perfect, we don’t get married with a perfect person nor do we have perfect kids. We have complaints of each other. We were disappointed in each other. Therefore, there is no healthy marriage or healthy family without the exercise of forgiveness. Forgiveness is vital to our emotional health and spiritual survival. Without forgiveness the family becomes a theatre of conflict and a bastion of grievances. Without forgiveness the family gets sick. Forgiveness is the sterilization of the soul, the cleaning of the mind and the liberation of the heart. Who does not forgive has no peace of soul nor communion with God. The pain is a poison that intoxicates and kills. Save a wound of the heart is a self-destructive gesture. It is autophagy. Who does not forgive sickens physically, emotionally, and spiritually. That’s why the family has to be a place of life and not of death; territory of healing and not of disease; stage of forgiveness and not of guilt. Forgiveness brings joy where sorrow produced pain; and healing, where pain caused disease.

    —Pope Francis

  • “The degree to which one blames one’s parents is the degree to which one is still stuck in the family of origin, is still a child.”

    —David Augsburger, Helping People Forgive

  • Because our parents live inside us as part of our own psychic constitution, cutting them off would be something like trying to excise a liver or heart, a part of our body essential for life. “Cutting off” parents as a way of managing anxiety and pain may provide temporary relief, but as an attempt at a permanent solution it is bound to have deleterious effects on everyone: on the perpetrator of the abuse, who never gets confronted with the effects of his sin; on the victim, who not only remains in a victimized position vis–à–vis her parents, but is also seriously split (i.e., cut off from herself) insofar as she avoids facing the internalized representations of her parents; and also on the whole extended family, who are adversely affected by the taboos and secrets related to the abuse, even if they themselves have no direct knowledge of it.

    Bearing the Unbearable: Trauma, Gospel, and Pastoral Care
    Deborah van Deusen Hunsinger

  • The only time you truly become an adult is when you finally forgive your parents for being just as flawed as everyone else.

    —Douglas Kennedy, The Pursuit of Happiness

  • When we do these tasks – to pray, to repent and confess faithfully, to read the scriptures, to read the fathers, to come to church and partake of the eucharist, to serve faithfully, to be faithful to our spouses, to be faithful to our children and our parents – these are the things that manifest God in our lives. They relieve my anxiety about discerning whether or not I’m fulfilling God’s will; I’m doing whatever He is telling me to do, whatever He is picking my conscience to do.

    —H.G. Bishop Basil