RELATIONSHIP WITH PARENTS

I feel happy when I see the emotional attachment some families have to their parents. This is seen more strong in the joint families that have become rare in these days.

Modern times have turned children to machines who manage their time efficiently to earn the maximum and spend the maximum, sometimes spending even more than what they earn, to 'unwind'.

"Parents" have ended up as a social visit obligation to be undertaken every year on their birthdays or anniversaries during a vacation of 10 days or a couple of weeks allowed to a working couple. Old parents are the strangers who get a hug and a kiss accompanied by a beautiful bouquet of flowers and the words "we love you" once a year in their old age homes where they are shut in to see through the rest of their lives 'in comfort' by their children.

It is sad, but, we feel, we have a responsibility to our children too; we have to earn to pay for their education, their marriage, make their future etc etc....

But in the process, those amongst us who are working away from their home town do have this conflict in mind when we meet our elderly parents, maybe even briefly, once in a while.....

Do we remember the old times.........?

When we were small, they took care of us, met all our needs whenever we wanted - whether they could afford or not - most times even what they could not afford, they scrimped and saved so that we were made happy, they were ready to do all they could to see that we were made comfortable.

Most of us had only one working parent which meant lot of balancing in the family budget to see some thing kept aside to bring home a 'special' for their kids.

Now we are grown up and strong and we have our families [nuclear families] and we move away from home with spouses and children .... due to varied reasons, we cannot have our parents with us, or they are not ready to come and stay with us. Maybe the reasons are understandable: difficult weather in a strange and far away place versus family ties and friends in their home town maybe some of the good reasons parents have not to move away from their home town. Small, compact apartments also limit the scope of their feeling welcome to occupy the second bedroom or spare room available for an extended period of time.

The only looser is our own children and the coming generations.

The grandchildren grow up without hearing the folk stories that our grandparents told us... they will never hear the rhymes that our grandmothers sang to make us sleep...they will never taste the "NADAN" [home-made] curries, the nadan cookies and the granny's recipes......we have eaten tones of these homemade stuff , made by our parents and we still look the same as ever, with normal weight for height ratios ......they will grow up fed by Macdonald and Pizza hut - all those yummy looking deadly dishes which transform their thin frames into obese overweight structures requiring constant medications even from early youth...

Our parents built our house years back- not so beautiful by modern standards, maybe - with one bedroom for each child when we grow up. But when the children grew up and left, the big houses for the most part, remain empty.

Do we see the pain in our parents as they waited, seemingly for ever, for the children to come home, with their grandchildren, once a year, or once in 2 years.

They come with small kids who cannot understand their mother tongue or whose conversations the parents could not follow......How can we blame the grandchildren? They did not really know these oldies well enough to talk with them or share their daily routines [ most of it would be eat, sleep, school, work, watch TV, eat, sleep.....]

I always thought how lucky I was to have my parents with me all along, my kids would run to Ammachi [ before she passed away of Multiple Myeloma in December 2004 ] than to my wife, Beena for anything they wanted...Joseph, my younger son, would eat only if Ammachi told him fancy tales and imaginary stories...Even when she was really sick, I have seen her standing patiently at one corner of house while he would pedal his bicycle around the house to take one mouthful.....Philipose, the elder, had special dishes cooked to his taste and ready on the table when he came home from school.

When she died, only my kids really cried and, once the funeral was over and everybody else had left, they talked endlessly about the times they had, the fun and care and love and affection that their Grandma had given them and how they missed all that - I have seen many grandchildren who come to the funeral of their grandparents , gawk at the dead body and go back to their own world with no real sense of loss....

Will that old world joint family system ever come back? Will WE, in our turn, get the same indifference and disregard from our generations?

Out of the Ten Commandments given by God [ Exodus 20: 1-17], the first 4 dealt with man's relationship with God. The rest of the Commandments dealt with mans' relations in the world.

The Fifth Commandment states, [ Exodus 20: verse 12 ] "Honor your father and your mother, so that you may live long in the land the Lord your God is giving you"

Moses, when he repeated this Commandment in Deuteronomy added [ Deut: 5: 16] " Honor your father and your mother, as the Lord your God has commanded you, so that you may live long and that it may go well with you in the land the Lord your God is giving you"

This 5th Commandment is the first Commandment WITH A PROMISE: to live long, to have things go well with us, - another version says "so that you may prosper in whatever you do", - the ONLY condition God has put is "HONOR" your father and your mother.

God did not say, "put money in the church drop-box, burn candles, organize or sponsor festivals, put offerings, do social service, climb mountains carrying a wooden cross, fast, do this, do that....so that I would bless you in the land."

The one and easy way for blessings that last, for prosperity that endures is and always will be : Honor your father and your mother.

Prosperity is not wealth alone. It is not money in the bank - for that matter, when God gave the Ten Commandments, there were no banks or savings accounts or business accounts.

Prosperity is a combination of peace, joy, love, good health, happiness and lack of want in essentials. This can only come from God Himself. Thus this commandment by itself, is a strong reminder from God about our responsibilities to our parents.

Jesus, when He condemned the Pharisees in Mathew 15: verses 4 -9, He said, " For God said, 'Honor your father and your mother' and 'Anyone who curses his father or mother must be put to death'[ Exodus 21:17 and Leviticus20:9] . But you say that if a man says to his father or mother 'Whatever help you might otherwise have received from me is Corban ' [or a gift devoted to God / an offering made to the temple ], he is not to 'honor his father' with it. Thus you nullify the Word of God for the sake of your tradition.

You hypocrites ! Isaiah was right about you when he prophesied about you: "These people honor Me with their lips, but their hearts are far from Me. They worship Me in vain; their teachings are but rules taught by men" [ Isaiah 29:13 ]

In Jesus' time, anyone who made a Corban vow was required to dedicate money to God's temple that would have otherwise gone to support his parents. Corban had thus become a religiously accepted way to neglect parents, circumventing the child's responsibility to them.

Although the action of giving money to God seemed worthy and no doubt conferred prestige on the giver, many people who made the Corban vow were disregarding Gods's command to care for their needy parents. The Pharisees who promoted this idea, knew about God, but they did not KNOW God.

May God help us do honor, to love and to cherish our elderly parents in their lifetimes and be blessed in return.

God bless you