Midweek Faith Lift
March 7, 2018
Honor Your Father and Mother
Rev. Deb Hill-Davis
Exodus 20:12
12 Honor your father and your mother, so that your days may be long in the land that the Lord your God is giving you. (NRSV)
Here we are at the 5th commandment, and I find it interesting that the instruction is to honor, not to love. AND the writer of this commandment offered an incentive….so your days may be long in the land that God is giving to you. There is always so much said in what is NOT said, isn’t there? Is there a hint that you might be cut out of the inheritance if you don’t? It is worth noting that there is not a commandment about how to treat your children or your siblings or other family members. No, it is this parent business that presents the most complex energy and complicated feelings in the messy business of human relationships.
It is also very interesting that the Hebrew word for “honor” that shows up in the original scroll of Exodus 20:12 is cahheid, which has a two-sided meaning. On the one hand, cahheid means heaviness, weightiness, difficulty or burden. On the other hand cahheid also means to give importance or weight to someone, to recognize their significance or importance. So we begin with the recognition that this parent/child relationship is complicated and weighty. And it can weigh you down and become a terrific burden to how free you are to live your own life as an adult. In first century Palestine, maintaining the family and the tribe was a weighty matter to ensure survival, so that “your days may be long in the land the Lord your God is giving you.”
The question we face is how to understand these relationships when we move beyond just the question of survival. It is interesting that Jesus had a lot to say about that and it was quite revolutionary. The first passage is:
Matthew 23:9-10 (NRSV)
9 And call no one your father on earth, for you have one Father—the one in heaven.
Luke 14:26 (NRSV)
26 “Whoever comes to me and does not hate father and mother, wife and children, brothers and sisters, yes, and even life itself, cannot be my disciple.
This seems the exact opposite of honoring all relationships, even our relationship to life itself. What does this mean? Butterworth notes that the word “hate” has been mistranslated according to George Lamsa, a Biblical scholar, and it should read “put aside” not hate. Whether we are in the role of parent or the role of child or sibling or spouse, none of those “roles” should get in the way of our relationship to our “God-ness” or our Christ-self. Our earthly relationships are important and essential, but not in the ultimate sense. They do not hold the key to understanding and expressing our essence- our true Christ nature. And our task is to not get so entangled in these relationships that we lose our connection to our higher Self.
In Breaking the Ten Commandments, Butterworth puts it this way: “Jesus was saying that if you are so attached to your parents or to your own offspring that you let them stand in the way of your soul unfoldment, then you are not worthy of the creative flow. Honor your mother and father and your whole family relationship by freeing each person to his own experience, and accept that freedom for yourself.” (p.73) That is a very strong stand for developing a differentiated, healthy self that is free to express all the creative energy that we are. It is easier said than done!
Because here’s the deal, until we work things out, we tend to seek the emotional and behavioral patterns of our mother or father when we get into relationships including marriage. And why is that? Because it is a familiar energy pattern and we resonate with it when we are 20 something, 30 something etc. By the second time around, we are usually wiser and a bit more differentiated from our parents. At least that is how it was for me, but I still repeated a family pattern. The age difference between my dad and his second wife is exactly the same as the age difference in my marriage to Todd. The first time I married my mom’s patterns and the second time, I repeated a family pattern of my dad. And I can also see how my children did that as well. Take a look at your family patterns….it is spooky how they repeat, until we become aware of them!
That is the great challenge of the 5th commandment! Become aware of how you are bearing the BURDENS of your relationship to your parents and to your children, your siblings, both past and present relationships. Psychology has taught us that we tend to project onto all our relationships what we learned as children in our relationships with our parents. No wonder our relationships can feel so burdensome! Until we understand what we have done, we keep repeating the same patterns again and again! That works if they are healthy patterns, but then again…..
Our need is to explore how we will transform that burden so that we also honor our own spiritual journey. For some of us, that may have meant saying no, leaving home and making our own way at an early age. It may have meant getting significant therapy so that you no longer carry the “committee” of parents and teachers etc. in your head, criticizing your every decision and action, plaguing you with self-doubt and inhibiting your access to the freedom that Butterworth is talking about. As he noted, Jesus is saying to us that we are invited to experience that freedom. It is not an uncaring freedom, but it does not require us to sell our soul for the sake of our parents or our children. It may be learning to say “NO!” as a complete sentence.
For some of us, that might require a conscious intention to forgive our parents. It might also require a conscious intention and decision to make amends to our children for the ways in which we have “burdened” them with the unhealed wounds from our childhood. Forgiveness is a process, and it does not say that what our parents did was ok; nor does it require us to forget what was done. What it does allow us to do is recognize, create and maintain healthy boundaries with everyone so that we can experience that freedom that Jesus is offering us. What forgiveness does is bring us back into alignment with our God-self, allowing us to have authentic relationships with one another unburdened by guilt or resentment.
What we are really being invited to do as we explore this family Burden is to grow into emotional, spiritual and psychological maturity. Jesus wants us to grow into maturity so that we can accept personal responsibility for our own lives. The sooner we can do that, the sooner we will be free of the burdens of the past. The message of Jesus and the life of Jesus was to “love your enemies” and get past the burden of hating them so that you can live in your own creative flow of life.
Today we have Co-Dependents Anonymous, or ACA which are self-help groups to assist people in recognizing the unhealthy patterns and changing them. These groups are organized around a spiritual focus to provide support and community as people get healthy. AA did not exist until 1935, so when Charles and Myrtle were developing Unity teachings, the only path was spiritual. Myrtle’s healing story was to recognize and release the unhealthy patterns of illness that she had inherited from her parents. And she did this with spiritual tools: denials and affirmations which transformed her life.
We now have therapy, 12-step programs, and all manner of creative ways to open our consciousness to something new, something greater than the patterns of the past. In the ACA program, one of the readings was called The Problem and one was called The Solution. In The Problem, we identified and labeled our dysfunctional patterns and prepared the way to let them go. The Solution was to see your parents as the “biological instruments of your existence and to learn to re-parent yourself with gentleness, humor, love and respect.” When you can lean into that process with the help of a Higher Power, then you are on your way to being free of your relationships being a burden and they can become a source of joy.
When we allow our relationships to be our teachers, to allow us to see how we show up in conflict, in tension, in a creative process, then we are leaning into honoring the burdensomeness of our parents. When we refuse to see it, clinging to patterns of controlling others with disapproval, anger, dismissiveness, cutting them off, we are stuck in the burden. When we can allow ourselves to really see what we are doing, how we are stuck, we can begin to move into the freedom that Jesus is offering us.
We can’t change the past, and we can’t control how it impacts us in the present. All we can do is recognize when that happens and make different choices about how we respond in our relationships with others. I have learned how to say, “_________, that isn’t working for me. Can we work together to find another way? Tell me about how it works or doesn’t work for you?” It calls us to be generous in how we see the intentions of others and our own intentions. When we can see the hurt little girl in our mother and the hurt little boy in our dad, then we can cultivate compassion. No matter how badly they behaved, they didn’t set out with the intention of being awful.
Once I could see that, the truth that my parents did the best they could with what they had, I could make a space for my own children to share with me the ways they thought I had screwed up as a mom. And I could say, honestly, yes I did. And knowing what I know now, I would do it differently, but back then, it really was all I knew how to do this parenting thing. I am truly sorry for the ways my behaviors and lack of skills hurt you, and I respect your needs and feelings in our relationship. And that is truly honoring this burdensome business of family and parents.
Blessings on the Path,
Rev. Deb