Where It All Begins

Exodus 20:12

If you ever wonder about St. John’s assertion that God is love, look no further than the most basic building block of human community—the family. Families come in all shapes and sizes. Currently, we are reevaluating our definitions of family (to the chagrin of some and the rejoicing of others), broadening the image of family. Families are also under duress in our time and place (something that is probably far more ubiquitous throughout human history than we might expect—the stress is constant even as the causes forever shift and change). Yet, at their deepest core, families, as God wired us to be in them, are built on love. The love found here is the love that God manifests in all God’s self-expression as God deals with us—the self-emptying, other-centered love revealed in the Gospel. 

Take that in—to understand the love Christ proclaimed, look no further than the ideal of family at its best. 

As parents care for children from birth to maturity (an age seemingly moving further out all the time), they embody the love of Christ, even if they outwardly have no affinity for Christ or his Church. Parents will sacrifice to provide for their children. Parents will move the earth to ensure their children’s security and safety. Parents will go to incredible lengths to ensure their children’s success. Parents will also embody the Waiting Father of Christ’s famous parable of prodigal children—allowing their children to fail (even spectacularly) in order that they might truly find themselves, find the presence of God with them, and gain the necessary wisdom to make sense of life itself. 

In sum, parenting is a job guaranteed to bring tears with laughter, sorrow with joy, and exaltation with despair. 

Take that in, too—as we experience the love that comes in families, we gain insight into what God must feel as God watches over all of us every day. 

God knows and understands every nuance of being a parent. God experiences the joy of our first birth, the wondrous miracle of coming into being. God experiences the wonder of seeing us grow and develop, achieving realization of the potential found in the simple reality of our birth. God experiences the heartache of our failure, watching us act with sublime stupidity, selfishness, and wanton disregard for most everything. God experiences the frustration of watching us knowingly take a road that goes nowhere, knowing full well the outcome, but letting us go just because there really is no other way. God endures the scathing denunciations of God’s presumed absence when said child blunders into catastrophe. God suffers our blame without responding with the reaction we probably deserve. 

As we experience each coloration of being a parent, we are also, knowingly or not, experiencing a reflection of God. What a profound and powerful possibility.

Now move into the focus of the Fifth Commandment—its target is the children, not the parents.

This centering may come as a surprise—if parenting is such a deep and profound experience of the being and presence of God, why does God not mandate parenting? Why focus on the children?

The answer is a bit paradoxical—God mandates that children honor their parents because that is actually a deeper understanding and comprehension of who we are as we are. Most parents need no coaxing to bond with their children, even in the worst of contexts. The exceptions are truly exceptional, requiring deep intervention. It is why child abuse requires such strident measures in response—it is a minority reaction that requires people stepping far beyond normal interaction and responses to cure. However, the inverse of children forgetting their parents and all that parents do is not only unexceptional, it is actually part of the growth process that every adolescent human being will pass through to grow up. As we grow into being whom God intends us to be, we break away from all outside authority until we can integrate the pieces necessary to be functional human beings. Hence, the battles between parents and teens that are inevitable and inescapable, so much so that Jesus could tell a story about two boys who wrestled their father, knowing everyone who heard it would smile in deep self-recognition. 

So, God mandates that children honor their parents. But what does that word honor actually mean? 

Relax—it’s actually pretty simple—love your parents the way they loved you. 

Or, in more spiritual terms, close the circle of love. 

In other words, if we parents do what we are supposed to do, we begin a circle of love—that love manifested in the presence of God—as we come together. We build the circle with each child. We continue the circle with each experience of mutual growth in the relationship—even those horrid days when the thirteen year old screams her hatred of her mother in her face—the circle continues. But there will come a time when the work of building the circle passes from parent to child. There is no fixed time, no set season, nor any way to predict the transition, but it comes. We awaken to the reality that the need to take responsibility is inescapable. Our parents now need us in ways that may at first be alarming, terrifying, or overwhelming (or all of the above).  Each act we undertake, each word we speak, and each move we make now continues the circle as the children take the construction on themselves. 

Through it all, a miracle unfolds all around us. As the circle closes, God appears in fullness, grace and mercy embodied, love and compassion unbound. 

So essential is this discovery to our well-being, God commands the circle be made.

And we find St. John never spoke a truer piece of revelation than that wonderful assertion—God is love.