God Squad: Must we honor abusive parents?
Something's been troubling me for years. I'm in my 60s now, and growing up I suffered every kind of abuse at the hands of my father. I do not honor him; he's worthy of no honor. In cases like mine, how grievous is not keeping the commandment to honor your parents?
- C., via e-mail
There's something very deep, understandable, but still tragically disturbing in us that wants the love of a parent even when all that parent offers is cruelty.
The problem comes from two sources. First, we have the natural tendency of children to want to love their parents no matter how the parents behave. I call this our "doggie nature" because we've all seen examples of dogs who, despite abuse, continue to love a master who beats them.
The second source of your conflict is in the Ten Commandments. This is the commandment we read in Exodus 20:12: "Honor thy father and thy mother, that thy days may be long upon the land which the Lord thy God giveth thee."
These two inclinations, one from our human nature, and one from sacred scripture, conflict with the litany of abuse you suffered. You ask how can a loving God command us to honor a parent who is "worthy of no honor"? The first key to understanding the commandment is to read it carefully. We're not commanded by God to love our parents; we're only commanded to honor them. Love is a gift we freely give to those who have loved us.
Honor is a different thing entirely. Honor doesn't mean "honorable." It means "minimal respect." In this case, honor is a recognition of a simple biological fact. Without your father, you wouldn't exist, which means you owe your life to him. Honor is the way you acknowledge that basic biological debt. What is the content of that biological honoring? Not much more than simply fulfilling the minimal duties of a son, like, for example, providing a decent burial for your father.
Beyond the most basic filial responsibilities, you're not obligated to make a mentor out of a monster.
Honoring your father by simply admitting that you owe him your life also can help you let go of him and the effects of his cruelty. The alternative is for you to spend every day of your life reliving his abuse. You need to come to a place where you can see him for what he was. Try saying to yourself: "My father was a terrible man, but somehow I survived him. I'm alive because of him, but I'm not at peace because of him. I have to find peace myself."
Your life depends upon finding some small place to put your gratitude for being born, and then becoming free to live a long life untortured by your father's malevolence.
The obligation to honor your father also extends to living a life that's the spiritual opposite of his life. When you're loving toward your children, you honor him in reverse. You honor the fact that he taught you how not to behave. Parents can teach us by example both ways.
You may have noticed that I haven't urged you to take the course recommended by some counselors and theologians, which is to try to understand why your father was abusive, to find compassion for him because perhaps he learned his abusive ways from his father, or to forgive his abuse as a form of mental illness. My job is not to find ways to forgive monsters; that's God's job.
As I advise battered women, "You need to save yourself and get away from him now." You need to get away from the pain your father caused you, and I can't see how forgiving him will help in that.
However, everyone's different, and forgiveness of an unrepentant abusive father may work for you. I know people who've forgiven the murderers of their children. I don't even know what that means. Either it represents a level of spiritual compassion I don't possess or a deep distortion of what true forgiveness involves. As I see it, this begins with repentance and only then is followed by compassionate forgiveness. The main thing is that you don't have to love your father to honor him. You owe him your life, but not your love. You honor him now by letting him go.
