…Actually, I will not say anything to the mother, because her excuse may be old age, weakness or loneliness. But I tell you, O daughter: Is your mother’s home too small to accommodate you?! She is the one whose womb wasn’t too small to carry you!
If you could live for nine months in her womb, can you not live one more day in her home? Or is it that you cannot tolerate her?!…
Your response might be: my mother’s behavior is wicked! She seeks earthly things! She despises fasting! Sin is her make-up! She walks about in obscene clothes! That’s why I cannot live with her!
Before anything else, even if she was as you described her, you will be rewarded for declining to search for her mistakes.
She carried you in her womb, nurtured you, and kindly put up with your childhood with noble affection. She washed your clothes and nursed you in illness… She sustained you till you became a young woman and taught you the love of Christ. Therefore, you should not be annoyed by the behavior of your mother who dedicated you as a virgin to serve your Groom “Lord Jesus.”
—St. Jerome
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Whoever is chaste before marriage is the same after marriage. Those who learned adultery before marriage, do the same afterwards. It is written in the Divine Scriptures “All bread is sweet to the adulterer” (Sirach 23:17). For this reason, a crown is placed on the head (in the altar), as a sign of victory. They are entering the wedding not conquered or oppressed by lust. There is no reason to put a crown on the head of whoever gets into the love of pleasures and surrenders his soul to adultery, because he has been defeated.Instill this in them, teach and pressure them by all means.
—St. John Chrysostom
via Family Love by Fr. Tadros Y. Malaty -
For some there is salvation by fear: we contemplate the threat of punishment in hell and so avoid evil. But the person who is hastening to spiritual perfection rejects fear. Such a disposition is servile, and the person with this disposition does not remain with the master out of love. He stays put out of fear of being scourged.
Then, there are those who conduct themselves virtuously out of the hope of a reward for a life piously lived. They do not possess the good out of love but out of the expectation of recompense.
But the person seeking perfection disdains even rewards: he does not prefer the gift to the one who bestows it. He loves, “with his whole heart and soul and strength, ” him who is the source of all good things. This, then, is the attitude which he commands to the souls of all who listen to him, for he summons us to share his own life.
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Every man who delights in a multitude of words, even though he says admirable things, is empty within. If you love truth, be a lover of silence. Silence like the sunlight will illuminate you in God and will deliver you from the phantoms of ignorance. Silence will unite you to God himself. …More than all things love silence: it brings you a fruit that tongue cannot describe. In the beginning we have to force ourselves to be silent. But then there is born something that draws us to silence. May God give you an experience of this ‘something’ that is born of silence. If you only practice this, untold light will dawn on you in consequence…after a while a certain sweetness is born in the heart of this exercise and the body is drawn almost by force to remain in silence.
—St. Isaac the Syrian
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Working things through with our parents therefore has the potential to affect all our relationships profoundly, even our relationship with ourselves. Because the internalized image of our parents is so formative of our own sense of self, we are mistaken if we think we can rid ourselves of our parents simply by putting the distance of time or space between them and us. Decades, indeed a whole lifetime, can go by without seeing them, but our relationship with them will not cease to live on inside our own minds. Even if we have consciously “forgotten” them, they are nevertheless operative and present to us unconsciously, that is, outside of our awareness. Insofar as we successfully dissociate ourselves from them inwardly, all that we actually accomplish is to split them off from our ego awareness; unfortunately, in doing so we also cut off any possibility for growth, change, or healing to take place in relation to them.
Bearing the Unbearable: Trauma, Gospel, and Pastoral Care
Deborah van Deusen Hunsinger -
If parents fail to do this [embrace their own unconscious wounds], they unwittingly pass on the weight of unhealed suffering to their children. It is not the psychic wounds of the parents which are, themselves, toxic to the children, but the lack of conscious encounter with those wounds that pervades the family unconscious and gets transferred to the next generation. If the previous generation hasn’t consciously suffered, the pain will be handed on, often unconsciously, to the next generation.
Bearing the Unbearable: Trauma, Gospel, and Pastoral Care
Deborah van Deusen Hunsinger -
If they are distant or detached from their family of origin, for example, they would likely become overly invested in and emotionally enmeshed with their own children, making it difficult for the children to grow normally. They would likely feel engulfed by the overcloseness of their parent, and would typically react by disconnecting and pulling away, thus perpetuating the cycle for yet another generation. Cutting off parents apparently does not resolve the relational impasse; it merely displaces it.
Bearing the Unbearable: Trauma, Gospel, and Pastoral Care
Deborah van Deusen Hunsinger -
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
SO GOOD QUOTES 