Honouring inheritance

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

Margaret Killingray (LICC) writes:

All the new discoveries in DNA and genetic inheritance* have given me some sense of the continuities from parents and grandparents right back to human origins, of genetic parameters within which we function as human beings. But our wider cultural and social inheritance comes from our wider social upbringing, and our parents whether linked to us genetically or not.

These thoughts have brought a new focus to the final clause of this command. The call to respect and esteem our parents is linked to long life, to land and place and therefore, by extension, to the inheritance of cultural and social patterns of behaviour and the handing down of these to children and children’s children. When the majority of sons and daughters in any society take the command seriously, then they are contributing to stable social structures that encourage human flourishing. Healthy relationships between the generations are a crucial source of stability, especially in a time of accelerating change.

My father and mother are long dead; the obligations have been discharged. Apart from still having a momentary flash on Mothering Sunday that I have forgotten to send her a card, I am at peace about them. I am grateful for a warm and easy-going pattern of upbringing, for security and affirmation, for support and for their letting go. It is only now that I have become fully conscious of that gratitude, realising that I have to some extent honoured them by incorporating what I learnt from them into my own patterns of parenting.

The word used is honour, not obey. Honouring doesn’t carry overtones of blind obedience. Honouring our inheritance involves assessing and reconsidering the patterns of living we have inherited before we pass them on. Sometimes it involves repudiating, and, indeed, seeking to redeem, destructive patterns of parenting and socialisation. We may honour our parents and yet act in different ways. We inherit a mixed bag – genes we can’t change (yet) – but we can seek the Spirit’s power to understand and transform, and, in the process, honour all that has been handed down to us.