Category: PARENTS

Learning to forgive our parents has enormous implications for our emotional and spiritual growth, perhaps more than any other relationship we have, for the simple reason that our parents are internalized parts of our own personality in a unique sense. Achieving a more harmonious relationship with our parents in the outer world simultaneously affects our inner world as well, that is, our relationship to ourselves. If we experience forgiving our actual mother and father for the hurt they caused us, the internalized representations of our parents would also change, allowing for less need to split off or repress painful aspects of the self. Our “inner” parents would become far less persecuting and more supportive as a consequence.

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

People who are so full of pride that they become overly dependent upon their parents are bound to resent their parents, because leaning on one’s family keeps increasing the feeling of failure—a feeling everybody just naturally hates. The only reason so many younger people are full of resentment and anger against their parents—or institutions or the establishment or whatever—is that they are so filled with pride, so mixed up about what God is and what human beings are, that they were expecting the older generation to be gods. A lot of the older generation had just as much pride and really tried to play God. But that’s their problem. Your problem is only to get rid of the pride in yourself, so you don’t play God and pass the game on to your children. Anyone who expects his parents to be gods, and wants to lean on them as if they were, will end up disliking them intensely. If you put your parents first, above God, you’ll hate them and also hate God because of the way things will turn out. But if you always put God first and lean completely on Him, you will end up truly loving both God and your (merely human) parents.

Who is God? Who Am I? Who Are You?
Dee Pennock

on monasticism

He was his mother’s little boy; although he was a grown man, the umbilical cord was still intact. He was tied to his mother, tied to the family, tied to the neighborhood, tied to the friends, tied to the country, tied to his life. This is one of the most troublesome personality types when it comes to obeying the call. Its possessor is extremely weak. His eyes are riveted on the past. The smallest hardship or the slightest rebuke makes him shudder. He constantly thinks of forsaking the call and going back. To put it bluntly, he is not a man.

—Matthew the Poor, Words For Our Time: The Spiritual Words of Matthew the Poor

on monasticism

Woe to the man who offers those last goodbyes to his father and mother! They will remain stuck like an odor to his clothes and to his mind at all times. He who returns to say goodbye to his family does not actually say goodbye to them but to the Kingdom. He can no longer enter the Kingdom with the same intensity of zeal and power. And if he goes out to serve while still conscious of an attachment to his family, it becomes a hundred times harder to sever them than if he had done so while he was in the world. It requires a heavy knife to cut the emotional ties that bind a person if already on the road; but if he cuts them while still near his family, the issue is sealed.

—Matthew the Poor, Words For Our Time: The Spiritual Words of Matthew the Poor

Fear of Your Parents’ Old Age

“There is a break in the family history, where the ages accumulate and overlap, and the natural order makes no sense: it’s when the child becomes the parent of their parent.”

It’s when the father grows older and begins to move as if he were walking through fog. Slowly, slowly, imprecisely.

It’s when one of the parents who once held your hand firmly when you were little no longer wants to be alone.

It’s when the father, once strong and unbeatable, weakens and takes two breaths before rising from his seat.
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Our last lesson. An opportunity to return the care and love they gave us for decades.
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We cannot leave them for even a moment.
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Happy is the child who becomes the parent of their parent before their death, and unfortunate is the child who only appears at the funeral and doesn’t say goodbye a little each day.

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Rocking his father back and forth. Caressing his father. Calming his father. And he said softly:

I’m here, I’m here, Dad! “What a father wants to hear at the end of his life is that his child is there.”

“A mother’s love for her children, even her inability to let them be, is because she is under a painful law that the life that passed through her must be brought to fruition. Even when she swallows it whole she is only acting like any frightened mother cat eating its young to keep it safe. It is not easy to give closeness and freedom, safety plus danger.

The House by the Sea: A Journal
May Sarton

When you live your life witnessing as an icon of the resurrection, even your parents can be inspired and their lives transformed. Kids will sometimes come and say, I don’t know what to do with my parents—I don’t know what to do. I’ll tell you what to do. If your parents are difficult or if they’re hard people or if they are mean to you sometimes, I’m telling you, live by the power of the spirit in your home, in humility and in love, and let the resurrection in your life transform your entire household. It can have a huge impact. I’ve witnessed it with my own eyes.

—Fr. Michael Sorial