The Fifth Commandment
June 16, 2008
The Reverend Anne Felton Hines
About ten years ago, while both my parents were still living, I was talking one day to my daughter – I don’t remember the topic. All I remember is telling her that sometimes I worried that she and her brother talked about me behind my back, commiserating about how much I drove them nuts.
“Oh no, you don’t have to worry about that, Mom,” she assured me; “we just talk about you the way you and your siblings talk about Grandmommy and Granddaddy!”
Oh…My…God! That was the worst possible thing she could have said to me! My siblings and I used to say horrible things about our parents! We’d complain about Dad’s angry outbursts, his inappropriate comments to our daughters, his unreasonableness, his hoarding of books and old magazines; it went on and on.
And while Mom probably received less of our anger, she got no more respect from us than Dad. We’d role our eyes when she’d say, “I remember the times…” and then tell a story we’d heard a zillion times before. We’d laugh about her naiveté, and her tendency to sound like Edith Bunker; and we’d complain about her passivity around Dad, or of her lack of passivity when she’d argue with him and make things worse. The poor woman couldn’t win, no matter what she did.
My siblings and I spent so much time complaining about our parents, that I began wondering if we’d have anything to talk about when they finally passed away. I wondered if there was any basis for our relationships, other than commiserating about Mom and Dad.
I think that for me – and perhaps for my siblings as well, though I can’t speak for them, truly practicing the 5th Commandment did not really take hold until after my parents were gone. My relationship with each of them was just too ambivalent before that time. (And mind you, I was in my 50s and 60s when they died, which is a long time to hang on to ambivalence!)
It has been said that the 5th Commandment – “Honor your father and mother” – is the most difficult of all of them. And not just of all the 10 commandments with which we’re familiar, and on which I’m preaching this series. According to the Torah, the Israelites were given613 commandments in all; and honoring our parents was still considered the most challenging!
One Biblical scholar, Rabbi Joseph Telushkim, points out what he calls the “peculiar fact that while the Bible legislates love of neighbor and of the stranger and of God…(it) demands (only) the standard of honor and respect” for our parents, because “that can remain in force even in times of estrangement.” Though I’m not sure I’d agree that we continue to even honor our parents when we’re feeling most separate from them; but clearly, the Torah calls us to do that, as difficult as it may be.
Apparently, the word “honor” even has a double meaning. In Hebrew, the word is “cahbeid,” which can mean “heaviness, difficulty, or burden;” but it can also mean “honor, to give importance or weight to someone.”
So Yahweh seemed to know what he was doing when he handed this commandment to Moses, along with the other nine in the initial group: He knew that while loving our parents could sometimes feel impossible at times, “honoring” them could feel like a heavy weight that never lifts.
Last Father’s Day, I delivered a sermon here about my father, in which I talked about how difficult he could be, and how much anger I’d carried until the day he died – so much that I couldn’t even bring myself to tell him as he lay dying that I loved him – an action that haunts me still with remorse.
I also shared with you in that sermon my father’s many gifts that I’d finally come to appreciate, and the importance of being able to embrace our fathers in their totality – both their light and their shadows.
But probably what you’ve heard mostly from me about my mother over the years is all the good stuff: Her commitment to social justice and peace – how she taught us kids that to be a Christian meant standing up for the poor and the disenfranchised; how she co-founded the Orange County Interfaith Peace Ministry; and how at the age of 90, she would still gently argue with the other patients in the nursing home about why gay and lesbian couples should be allowed to marry. She is my model for compassion and courage, for social witness and advocacy.
But you wouldn’t have known that by the way I talked to her sometimes. When I was a rebellious and impatient teenager, I would often respond to anything she said with, “Oh Mom, how can you say that?! That’s ridiculous!” And when I was 60, I could be heard saying, “Oh Mom, how can you say that?” That’s ridiculous!” I did not always honor her well.
But I imagine that most of you – and, if truth be told, probably all of you – have similar stories to tell. The parent/child relationship is the most complicated and hardest to untangle. Psychologist Jeanne Safer, in her book Death Benefits, contends that our “parents never leave us. After death they simply move their residence from our outer world to our inner world, and accompany us for the rest of our lives.” It is what happened to them when their parents died, and it will happen to our children when we die.
And that’s why that fifth Commandment to “honor” our parents is so important – when they’re alive if possible, but if not, then especially after they’ve died. Because even in death, they are with us in just about everything we do.
Several years ago I saw a pillow that was embroidered with the words, “Mirror, mirror, on the wall, I have become my mother after all!” If the store had had three of these pillows, I would have bought one for me and both my sisters! I cannot tell you how often I catch a glimpse of myself in the mirror, and see my mother (which is not surprising, because since I was a young woman, people have said I was the “spitting image” of her!). And every once in a while I’ll say something, and realize it’s exactly the way my mother used to say it.
It’s equally true of my dad. The other night I was having dinner with my daughter and grandson, and as I began to give Josh a bit of advice, I had a sudden image of my father giving me similar advice when I was about Josh’s age. And it made me smile.
But I don’t always smile when I notice parts of my parents in myself. We inherit both their light and their shadow – both their gifts and their demons. And we can not honor them – or love them – if we do not acknowledge both.
In his book, Losing Moses on the Highway, Chris Hedges tells us that “to honor our parents is to honor our essence, the roots from which we sprung.”
“To honor our parents is to honor our essence…” That’s why this Commandment is so important: We cannot fully honor ourselves if we cannot claim our parents as an integral part of ourselves – and then learn to separate, but not disown.
Jeanne Safer wrote her book after her mother died; her father had died a number of years earlier. She said that just as she had taken an inventory of all of her mother’s belongings after her death, and determined what she wanted to keep and what to give away, at some point she began taking “inventory” of her mother’s personality traits as well. What traits should she keep? What should she discard? And how should she “integrate those selections into her own, now separate, mental household?”
Of course, those traits had already become part of Dr. Safer’s psyche. But “the relationship is just as real when it exists solely within our psyche,” she writes, “but then it belongs to us alone and is ours to alter. We can do more than merely return to what and where we were before our loss; we can now move forward.”
But my experience is that it’s not always as easy a process as simply “taking an inventory” of our parents’ traits, and deciding what we want to continue to incorporate into who we are, and what we want to “give away.” We need to first embark on the sometimes long and arduous road of compassion for our parents and forgiveness; because even the most perfect parent seems to engender something in their relationship with their child that needs pardoning.
The only way I know to move through our hurt or fear or anger into forgiveness, is to learn who our parents’ were, and why. What were their stories? What shaped them? What made them who they were? What were their fears and sorrows, their triumphs and joys?
I read recently about a novel by Michael Dorris, titled Yellow Raft in Blue Water. The book is apparently actually three stories – each told by a member of the same family. The first is that of a 15-year-old girl describing how her seemingly unloving mother had abandoned her. The second section is told by her mother, describing the painful life she’d had. And the third is told by an aunt who had refused to help the teenage girl and her mother when they were in desperate need; and we learn of the incidences in her life that had made her who she was.
What would it be like if someone wrote a story of our life, not only from our standpoint, but from the standpoint of our parents and their parents? What would we learn about them? And what would we learn about ourselves? Would that not lead us to deeper compassion for them? Would it not lead us to greater acceptance of ourselves?
Ever since my father died, I’ve wanted to write a book about him. At first I wanted to write it with my two sisters, each of us writing from our different – but similar – experiences of him. But now I’m more interested in having it be a compilation of all my siblings’ memories of him, but only after we’ve learned more about his life before he was our father, from the perspective of those who knew him, and from what little he’d written about his life.
For several years I thought I wanted to write this book as a way of helping others gain insights into their fathers, and maybe even their mothers – much like the purpose of my Father’s Day sermon last year.
But now I realize I need to write it for myself; whether it’s ever published is relatively unimportant. I need to write it as a way to gain a deeper understanding of my father – unravel his complexities, organize the pieces of the puzzle of why he was the way he was. I’d hope the creation of his story would be an affirming experience for my siblings; but I know it would be for me.
In my sermon last year, I said that I’d always wished my father would join a 12-step program so he’d learn the Serenity Prayer; and then I acknowledged that it was I who needed the prayer. I needed to accept who he was, because nothing was going to change that.
Perhaps we all need to recite the Prayer as we struggle to fulfill what the fifth Commandment calls us to do: to honor our parents by letting go of our anger, our hurt, even our guilt, and accept them for who they are – or were. Because it is ultimately the only way we can finally accept ourselves. We are them.
Chris Hedges writes: “I am my father’s son. This is my inheritance. I will not squander it.”
May we not squander the gifts we have inherited from our parents – both their triumphs and their struggles. May we honor them by seeking to understand and accept who they are or were; and in so doing, may we come to a deeper understanding and acceptance of ourselves, and a compassion for all beings on our earth.
This is the gift we hand on to those who follow us. This is how we will honor them.
May it be so.
© 2008-2010 Anne Felton Hines. All rights reserved.
