The Commandment That Should Be Marked PG-13

Katie Funk Wiebe

Honor your father and your mother, so that you may live long in the land the Lord your God is giving you. —Exodus 20:12

I am haunted by memories of my father. I can’t let him go although he died more than two decades ago. Sue Miller wrote The Story of My Father to explain her parent’s last difficult years to herself as he descended into Alzheimer’s Disease and became lost to her.

I have started a book about my father, Jacob Funk, several times over the last decades and always hit a dead end. Why record the life of a simple man who left no legacy of money and lands, built no institutions, voiced no exceptional social vision or grasped unusual theological concepts? He only carried within himself a persistent hope for freedom of spirit, which hope eluded him as he became more and more depressed in his later years.

Like Miller, I struggle with voice in writing about my father. I am used to using the first person point of view and placing myself front and center: "This is my life, my gift to you. Take what you want." How much of myself should or could I reveal in a story about another person intimately involved in mine? But this is his story, not mine.
In fiction writing, the main character always faces a hill to climb, a foe to vanquish. However, my writing about him would not be fiction but an attempt at truth. Few people escape struggles in life. Life is not always kind. What was my father’s main conflict? What dragons did he try to slay with his limited education and limited English language skills? 

What happened at the end when the frail old man, smiling weakly when visitors saw him, and the person Mother lived with were two different persons? In old age he had become bitter and irritable. His clothes hung loosely on his once erect stalwart frame as he slumped in an easy chair in silence for hours at a time. 

There had been sense and meaning in his life for decades, even direction, until he drowned in the meaningless of undiagnosed depression. Or was it post-traumatic stress disorder? Without meaning, joy fades. In his lifetime, loss of joy was defined as "spiritual weakness." Yet I am to honor him, states the fifth commandment.

As he lay dying in the hospital, a nurse had combed his naturally wavy hair straight back to keep it out of his eyes. When I entered his room, my eyes always immediately looked at his face in the bed. I wanted to shout, "No. That’s wrong! You’ve made my father into a different person." I wanted to find a comb and change it to his usual style, over his brow. But I resisted the impulse. The nurse had remade my father with a few sweeps of a comb, yet now I am revising my father also as I think about his life through selected memory.

Mother carried the weight of responsibility for Dad in his later years. She became his faithful companion and ready servant. All their married life, more than 66 years, he had carried the weight of economic responsibility; now that he was declining, physically and emotionally, it was her turn to carry a different burden.

Looking after him gave her purpose. She knew she could not die before him, for the only place he felt safe toward the end was in their tiny apartment—with her. Did they have a happy marriage? Open affection was not the norm in that transposed culture from Russia. I know they clung to one another in their old age.

Many images of my father come from photographs. I see him and Mother frozen in this pose or that expression. In one picture he, a young man of about twenty, is standing assured in front of several dozen medical workers also in white garb at a meal break during World War I near a Russian field hospital That’s the way I recall him best. Front and center, a few inches taller than his coworkers, looking steadfastly forward. 

I have no candid shots of either Mother or Dad. To have a photo taken in those days, you stood still, very still, sometimes for a few minutes, face solemn, not moving a muscle.

Yet when I think of my storekeeper father in real life I see him in deliberate actions, quickly flourishing a feather duster over a display, checking the door, pulling the clock chain in the evening before bedtime, blowing out lamps. Always quickly, quickly. Nothing hesitantly. Now everything was hesitantly.

As my sister Anne and I sat beside him one morning during his final illness, a stroke, he roused from a coma briefly to attempt to tell us something about money in his pants pocket—to be sure to check them. His mumbled words came out distorted and weak. We understood only "pants" and "money." We plied him gently with questions, but he became agitated when his drug-defogged mind sensed he wasn’t getting through. We comforted him that we would find the money.

Later we went through pants and sweater pockets, but found nothing. What ancient memory of the Russian revolution prompted this concern?

He lacked an understanding of the self in the post-Freudian sense or what one could do to maintain good mental health. In the last, wearisome years with few stimulating experiences, memories of failures were crowding out memories of decisive forward action. In letters to me (I lived about 1500 miles away) he admitted to being lonely and wishing he had made better decisions in life. Now it was too late. 

Yet he had made many good decisions once but had now lost sight of them. I easily recall times when he moved decisively, but was he afraid at the time, like I am sometimes afraid when I face something new?

As a young man of 18, a Mennonite conscientious objector to war, he enlisted in the Russian Red Cross as a medical orderly to be in the same unit with his older brother John instead of waiting for the government to conscript him. He told me how alone he felt in Moscow away from his home community for the first time. It took years of difficult duty before he was released from active duty.

During the war he separated himself from the church of his childhood, the Mennonite (Kirchliche) church, and found salvation and peace of mind in the Mennonite Brethren, a more evangelical body. This move meant a widening gulf between himself and the rest of his family, who remained with the traditional church. They couldn’t understand his desperate hunger for inner peace. 

He knew that the "Brethren" were looked down upon by members of the traditional church. He was baptized by immersion in the Dnieper River. His mother recorded it in her genealogy. How had his siblings and parents actually received this bold move? How difficult had that passage to spiritual freedom been?

He made a major life change when he and Mother and my two older sisters migrated to Canada from the Ukraine in 1923 with only 25 cents in his pocket to begin anew. Women never carried money.
Place determines your understanding of yourself, but what if that place changes radically? What changes take place in your being alongside change in domicile? He had "Russian blood" flowing in his Mennonite veins. He resonated with Russian music, language, folkways. Russia was his home.

Moving from one place to another in the same country brings upheavals, but to pick up a few possessions, like a samovar, a tin cradle, and some small photos, to migrate to a new land where everything is new—language, customs, weather, people—is a violent change. My parents were leaving behind the country that had nurtured them from birth but deserted them with the entrance of a new Bolshevist political regime.

Sometime during the gut-wrenching upheaval of the Russian revolution, which threw social, political, and religious life into indescribable turmoil, his father, grandparents, and an uncle died within two weeks due to widespread famine and typhus. As the oldest son at home, he buried them single-handedly during a time of extreme dearth of lumber, tools to dig a grave, even a religious leader to pray over the dead.

Somehow during this time he forgave a younger brother for having nearly caused his death by joining the White Army, incurring the wrath of the Red Bolshevist army. Dad’s account of near-death by firing squad was difficult to share with us children. This and other gruesome war stories were pushed deep down into his consciousness, only a few escaping occasionally in an unexpected moment. 

When he finally told my brother Jack the story of being crowded with other prisoners in a small cellar room, he alluded only briefly to the reason for his imprisonment. How much more difficult was that process of forgiving?

In Canada, at some point, though he had been an itinerant ordained deacon-evangelist in Russia, he sidestepped that calling to become a lay minister alongside his work as a storekeeper to keep his family warm and fed. How much did he agonize over that decision? Now I wish I had asked him more questions when he was alive.

Somehow my father conveyed to me the importance of raging against injustice, even if silently, but without rancor. I recognize he divided the world into black and white with few shades of gray and couldn’t see that though he rebelled against tradition, he also fought for it, but his heart was always forgiving toward all.

At what point did he turn from a man living in hope to a man living in the bitter memories of the past? But why did he see his long eventful life as failure and not as growth? Was it physical illness? Spiritual weakness?

We can neither destroy nor escape the past, cultural or personal. Today I look back on a Funk family history because he and Mother made decisions, stumbled, and moved on, sometimes forward. The fifth commandment admonishes us to "Honor your father and your mother, so that you may live long in the land the Lord your God is giving you."

The generation gap of the 1960s spawned college students who denied they had parents, so deans couldn’t check back with them. They marked their parents as deceased on application forms. They said, "We want nothing to do with our parents. We don’t want their lifestyle or goals—because they are phony, hypocritical. We don’t like their love of affluence and security." They declared boldly that parents weren’t worth honoring or obeying. 

Some parents are admittedly no models of love, courage, zest for living and a spirit of forgiveness. Children are deserted, abused, and neglected—considered a pollutant in carefree, child-free adult living. So, for some offspring, this commandment is a cruel joke, hardly something to uphold. That’s one side of the picture.

I maintain this commandment was not directed primarily to children, especially young children. When we push it onto children, we miss its real meaning.

I remember intoning the Ten Commandments to earn a wall motto or New Testament in vacation Bible school. Parents hoped children would recall these words at the appropriate time and change behavior.

Bu the commandment should have PG-13 boldly written before it. Although Jewish children memorized it before the other nine, it was intended for adults. The other nine commandments are clearly directed to adults: Don’t covet your neighbor’s wife—hardly child activity. Don’t work on the Sabbath. Don’t murder, steal, or give false testimony. When the rich young ruler, an adult, came to Jesus for advice on gaining eternal life, he was told to honor his father and mother.

This does not mean that children should not obey and honor their parents, but there is more here, much more. The commandment selects parents out of different relational groups to be honored. A parent-child relationship is one that can never be altered. A father or mother is always a parent, even if the child is given away at birth, abused, abducted, lost during a divorce, murdered or dies a natural death. Once you have given birth to children, you can’t undo this. Modern DNA evidence proves heredity.

Parents are not to be honored for biological reasons. Decades ago on Mother’s Day, a bouquet was given to the producer of the most offspring. I shuddered when the recipient went to the front to claim her bouquet to the sound of applause, thinking we honor cows for regular production, surely not mothers.

Yet childbearing, frequent or infrequent, should not be dismissed lightly. It is not always a choice. Mothers who accept the task of motherhood gladly, whether natural or adoptive, are to be praised.
As I study family histories, I find that some women had 12 to 15 or more pregnancies in times of revolution, famine, migration, and drought. Childbirth often brought a mother to brink of death. Even in good times bearing and raising few or many children is not a trivial pursuit. Let’s recognize parents for their courage and love, not ability to reproduce.

We do not honor parents for their reputation for righteousness, wealth, success, beauty, or the sacrifices they made in parenting. We don’t honor parents by adopting their value system or because they left us a huge legacy of houses and lands. Some parents have big reputations and estates, some none.

Some children blame parents for their own hardships and failures in life at marriage, child-rearing, career-building, but take credit for their own successes. I believe we are each responsible for our own decisions and how we have taken advantage of opportunities.

Rabbi Abram Heschel states that the real bond between two generations is not a blood relationship but the "insights they share, the appreciation they have in common, the moment of inner experience in which they meet." We honor parents, biological or adoptive, by recognizing this special bond lost when families break up for whatever reason. 

Madeleine L’Engle in The Year of the Great Grandmother writes about her mother, suffering from dementia. She is able to care lovingly for her mother—irritable, cross, demanding—because she remembers the high moments they shared together when her parent was well. Illness broke the bond but she continued to honor her ailing parent.

Here’s the gist of the issue: We honor parents because the family, regardless of the way it is structured, is a special bond in God’s economy. It is not just an economic unit for income tax purposes or to make life easier: One parent does the laundry and cooking, the other makes the money or vice versa. God is telling us in this commandment that there is something special in the family, something we have lost sight of in our furor for self-realization.

In Hebrew, "honor" means more than simple respect. It means more than offering a little sentiment with a birthday card, "I love you, Mother and Dad" and a phone call at Christmas. The commandment asks children to acknowledge the burden of their parents seriously.
Do not confuse them with God. Do not obey them as one would a god. Give God his rightful place as Lord over all. Honor parents as human beings, but not as little gods. We do not call God "father" because he resembles an earthly father. The Greeks fashioned gods in their image, turning them into capricious beings. To honor means to recognize that parents are one way that the glory and mystery of God is conveyed to the next generation.

That is the burden of parents.

The key to understanding this commandment is in the phrase often omitted: "so shall you live long in the land the Lord your God has given you." I have seldom heard preachers explain it. This commandment was the first one with a promise. In early biblical times God promised Abraham a land which his descendents would own and live in for centuries. If they honored their parents, this land would always be theirs.

Abraham had lived in that promised land and raised a son there, Jacob, who had twelve sons of his own. Then one day ten brothers in this family sold the eleventh brother, Joseph, to the Egyptians. They put a selfish concern ahead of their love for their brother—and the result was they eventually lost the land. They broke the family bond.

As slaves in Egypt they lost their sense of identity and self-worth.
When Moses received the Ten Commandments at Mount Sinai on the way back to the Promised land, God was warning the Israelites: Honor your father and mother or you will lose the land again. Respect for family members and love for land is closely related. If you love the land too much, people lose their value, and you lose both land and people. If you love and respect your family, you will retain land and life.

A Hebrew father at the Passover feast, established at this time, pointed his children not to himself but to the fathers—Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, and beyond that to the Father of all fathers, God of all. When this happens all generations are pointed in the same direction—toward God. We honor parents when we recognize that they have been intrusted with a burden—to point the next generation toward God, the father-mother of us all. They stand in God’s place before their children.

Does this commandment mean that children who honor parents will always own houses and fields? Hardly. 

Walter Brueggeman has done a masterful study of the relationship of the Israelites and the land in The Land. He points out that "land" in the Old Testament has both a literal and symbolic meaning. It may mean actual turf that can be tilled, but it also means having a place, of being rooted, of not being homeless wanderers, exiles, sojourners.

Brueggeman defines land as space where important words are spoken that establish identity, define vocation and envision destiny. In this space, vows are exchanged, promises made, and demands issued. When the person with power forgets brothers and sisters, not only do they suffer as does the one who "lifted his heart over them" like the brothers of Joseph. In a home where the members value the family bond, the child, young or old, will have a sense of rootedness, of place, of firmness in life, of a place to speak important words, to form an identity, and to learn to care and share.

Family, however it is configured, is God’s arrangement for human beings, God’s method of continuing the relationship with our creator and with one another—a place where we learn about interdependence, sharing, and caring. Compassion and caring have their roots in the family and are learned when family burdens get heavy.

A family does not begin with a marriage certificate, range, frig, a mattress on the floor, or even just the decision to live together. Family begins with the parents, grandparents, and great-grandparents. Family is part of a deeply flowing river.

A "placed," not necessarily "landed" family, brings with it the strength of stability of relationships and satisfies a human hunger for identity. Homeless refugees, illegal aliens, wandering from place to place, do not make history.

My parents gave me a history I can share with the next generation: the windmill on the hill in the Ukraine and the events that took place there, how my father found my mother’s family lost during the Russian revolution, and their longing to be restored to a place in the family and community. That history has high moments and low ones.

So I keep writing my father’s story of his life with Mother to honor them. They met, married, had children, experienced good and bad events, struggled onward, stumbled backward.

I recognize them in myself, their patterns of dealing with life, gestures, and physical traits. I honor them when I release them of all my grudges, hostilities, criticisms, about mistakes made in raising me. "We honor our parents for what they are and forgive them for what they are not," someone has said. Amen. I honor my parents for what they were and forgive them for what they were not as I hope my children will do the same for me.

So here I lay a wreath of honor at the base of the tree where your ashes are buried, Dad and Mother. Through your life you gave me a rootedness, a strength, a place to stand. I will keep writing about your lives.

—Katie Funk Wiebe, Wichita, Kansas, author of many books and articles, continues to examine her life. Among her most recent books is You Never Gave Me a Name (DreamSeeker Books, 2009).