Feast of The Holy Family of Jesus, Mary and Joseph, Year B
Preached at the Church of the Assumption in Bellingham, WA
Previous Years
Year B: 2020 || 2017
Year C: 2021 || 2018
Year A: 2022 || 2019
Recording
https://moorejesus.podbean.com/e/loving-our-parents/
Transcript
Thank you to J.Y. for editing.
During my senior year at my Catholic high school, I took a class called Public Policy and Social Justice, and as part of this class, I had to do three service projects. Well, not one to just do what I’m asked, my third service project was a little unorthodox. My third service project was to forgive my father. Now, the reason I needed to do that was complicated and multifaceted. Part of it was some of the things that came up and were a result of the divorce that happened when I was nine. Some of it was just the normal stuff between fathers and sons—where if you are both stubborn and hard-headed, you start to fight with each other and not really agree on what you’re going to do together. What I found was that by my senior year, I had a lot of bitterness and resentment built up toward my dad. I knew, because I was taking my faith seriously at the time, that the fourth commandment would have me act otherwise. If I noticed that bitterness and that resentment, the fourth commandment to honor my father and mother required that I do something about that. So, for this service project, I went and visited my dad on Easter break, as I always did, and I made a resolution to not fight with him this break. Whatever happened, whatever he asked me to do, whatever sort of hard-headed match we got into, I was just going to back off and I was going to just assent. I was still kind of bitter and angry in my heart, but I at least I didn’t fight back with my words; I just went along with things.
I can’t say that the service project was completed that Spring break, but I can say it began a process that continued through college and afterward that brought incredible fruit…because eventually the Lord was able to show me that I was only ever going to enjoy and love my father if I accepted him for who he was. Yes, there are things in his life that I disagreed with. There are personality traits that I struggled with. There are ways in which I wish he were different, and ways in which I’m sure he wishes that I were different. But I realized I’m not going to change any of those things. If I want to love my dad and to enjoy his presence, I need to accept him for who he is. Once I finally did that, I can tell you that the fruits have been fantastic. I still probably don’t call him as much as I should, but when I do, I enjoy asking him about the things that he’s passionate about. I enjoy hearing about the things that he wants to talk about when I visit him. It’s still a limited time. I don’t think he or I really want more than 3 or 4 days together, but I still enjoy those 3 or 4 days because it’s a time to appreciate and receive my father for who he is, not who I want him to be, not who I want to change him into, but for who he is. He is a gift.
Now, I give you all of this because the fourth commandment to honor our father and mother is a commandment of God. It is God’s will that we should have parents. As our first reading says brothers and sisters: God sets a father in honor over his children; a mother’s authority he confirms over her sons. It is God’s will that we should have parents, and it is God’s will that we should honor them. This is not an optional thing, and the reason it’s so important that God made a commandment out of it is because our temptation as human beings is to make sure that every relationship we have is voluntary. I choose my friends. I choose my tribe. I choose my spouse. But that is a huge temptation to selfishness. If I get to choose who I’m around, then I can always choose to walk away from them as well. Our parents—and on the flip side, also our children—are not chosen. These are people given to us by God, whether we want them or not. They are our parents, whether we like it or not. And when God tells us to love these people—to love our parents, and to love our children—He is forcing us through His commandment to love somebody that we did not choose.
That’s an important movement in the spiritual life to love somebody that you did not choose. It’s possible and it’s necessary, and it makes all of us holy. Now I’ll be the first one to tell you, parents are imperfect. I was very blessed even with my struggles with my father, which again are not particularly unique. My parents were excellent, and they raised me well. I never had to deal with things like abuse or manipulation or particularly toxic relationships. I understand that there are people in this Church who have parents such that they don’t feel safe or comfortable maintaining an active relationship with those parents. Okay, but the commandment of God still applies to all of us. Even if we can’t have an active relationship, we have to find some way to honor our parents. And one of the most important ways to do that is to forgive our parents, even if the relationship isn’t active. Trying as best as we can to name the parts of our parents that are good, the aspects of our parents that could be considered a gift, that is an important spiritual move. To forgive our parents, to have some empathy with their brokenness, with the things that they themselves struggle with—maybe with the fact that they didn’t themselves have good or loving parents—that’s an important spiritual move, because it helps us love the only people who are our parents.
If you struggle with your mom because maybe every time you talk to her, she nags you about something, or you struggle with your dad because he’s not emotionally available, okay, fine. It’s still your mom. That’s still your dad. You’re never going to have a different mom or a different dad. And so, when God says to honor our father and mother, He means those people. And we have to do our best to honor those people. It’s important. It’s important for our souls. It’s important for our society. It’s important for our Church. The readings tell us that if we find a way to honor our father and mother—and there is beautiful language, particularly in Sirach, about how to do that—then we will have many blessings in our life. It’s not because we have to earn God’s love, and once we’re perfect with our parents, He’ll finally love us. It’s because our relationship with our parents is so deep, and it’s so profound that unless we find peace in that relationship, we’re always going to have a burden and a struggle. But once we find peace, maybe actively—as I feel like I’ve done with my father and I’m very thankful for it—or maybe with distance, just through that forgiveness and prayer from afar. But once we find that peace, we are going to see our humanity open up. We’re going to see a huge burden laid down and given to the Lord, and we will receive the presence of God. Our prayers will be heard because we can pray with a more open heart. It is a beautiful gift to be able to bring peace to that relationship. Some of us may have lost our parents at this point. This homily applies to you as well. There still sometimes has to be forgiveness even after our parents die. And at minimum, in order to honor them, you can pray for them. Pray for the repose of their souls. If you struggled with them in this life, pray for their healing in the next life so that they can rejoice with you in the presence of God for all eternity. Because we have so rapidly disaffiliated from religion in this country, we have also rapidly run away from the fourth commandment. We see a lot of disrespect from younger generations toward older generations because we have failed to respect our parents. And again, parents are imperfect like everybody else, so there are a lot of justifications and excuses for doing so. My parent doesn’t get it. They don’t understand. They’re mean. They’re bigoted. They aren’t emotionally available. Okay, fine. 50% of kids today in the United States are born to unmarried parents. 50% of those kids are raised in family situations where they either don’t have a mom or they don’t have a dad, or they can’t guarantee that one of those parents is going to stick around. Parents are the will of God; He wants us to have a mother and a father. In order to heal our society, in order to show forth the joy and the power of parents, we first have to heal our own relationship with our own parents. We have to show that it is a beautiful and life-giving relationship, and then that beauty can propagate to the world. It is the will of God that it should propagate because He himself was born into a family with parents. Jesus didn’t just show up on the scene. Two gospels are very deliberate to tell us about the Holy Family and about His parents, because they want us to know that God himself subjected himself to His parents. He believed that parents were such a good, they were such an ideal, they were so important to humanity that in His humanity, He chose to have parents. My friends, families are complicated. God knows that His mother couldn’t sin, but His father certainly could. But He desires that the family should be our ideal, that we should work toward it as best as we can. We should try to heal our own relationships with our parents, to love them, to honor them, and then, in loving and honoring our children, to do the same for the next generation. We have God as our example, and we have our marching orders, and I hope that we can do it. It is a beautiful thing to do and it brings so much grace.
Fr. Moore 