How do you honor your mother and father? There is a hunger in the human soul that is unfed even by genuine affection. That hunger is for intimacy. Revealing our true selves to others is giving them the highest gift of all. Intimacy, by its nature, conveys trust, respect and caring.
We honor our parents and other relatives by living rich, growing, abundant lives, when we credit them with wanting that for us. When we are strong, when we work through conflicts, when we follow our own dreams with faith and resolve, we are honoring those who produced us. Our happiness, shared, becomes their happiness. Our success, shared, becomes theirs.
Part of honoring our parents is to help them be loving to us on whatever level they are functioning. We know that at their best, they would have given us the moon and the stars. It is up to us to guide the relationship during our final years together. We may be the only ones who can as our parent may no longer have the necessary range of behaviors.
We honor our father and mother by who we are. We cannot eat for them, smile for them, breathe for them or die for them. But at the end we can help give meaning to all that has gone before.
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