Parents and Children

When I was leaving the parish at the end of June to spend July with my parents, my sister was incredulous: “I don’t know how you can live with Mom and Dad for a whole month.” You don’t have to feel badly for my parents. They share a good sense of humor.

My sister lives close to my parents, just on the other side of the town where we were raised. Both she and my parents have lived in their respective homes for the last 20 years, but Moriches Bay still “feels like home” to us.

And although my sister pokes fun at me for spending a whole month with Mom and Dad, the truth is that she speaks to them in conversation much more than I do, in person and on the phone, because she still receives something from them, just as I do.

But what is it that parents can offer to their middle-aged children? This is the question I’ve been asking in prayer all month, because I do think the Holy Spirit puts it on my heart to rest with my parents at length each year. But why? What is God trying to offer me?

It hasn’t been easy to answer this question for myself, but I think it is at least partly that He wants me to see just how much more work there is for Him to do in me, how much more loving I could be if I allow the conversion that began in my home to continue in my heart.

Of course, as with every family, we have our family-of-origin issues: my father is English and my mother is Italian. But I can listen to Brahms to help with that; he lived in Germany, a land like my heart, torn between England and Italy. His music comforts me.

But Brahms was also somewhat of a complicated and unreconciled man. There were in him whole tracts of land off limits to God’s grace. And I learn too, by living with my parents for a month, that there are also areas of my own heart that I deem private property, where not even God may enter, old inherited acreage, perhaps, unfamiliar even to myself, except that I bar the gates.

I know my parents are not perfect. That might be self-evident to others, but I need to admit that. I need to permit that, and even to love that. Because it seems to me that the perfect love of God can come to us when we allow ourselves to be loved imperfectly by others, and that the fear of being ashamed of the imperfection of our family is not from God.

I can see that it’s not easy for my parents to be growing more forgetful as they age; God, give me the grace to be more patient with them. And I can see that it’s painful and disheartening for them to see the world in such turmoil; God, give me the grace to be gentle and compassionate with them.

My parents deserve a love that is always forgiving, a love that begins each day anew. They deserve the love that they’ve shown to me and my sister over the years, and which they show us still, even to the point of physical exhaustion. Indeed, it is not my sister and I who have loved our parents; but they who have loved us.

Coming back to the parish, I am a little anxious; there is much work to be done here, much that love will demand of us. But there are also parents here, and children who love their parents - and what a great love that is! Perhaps it is that love that will give us life here. +