Christian parents, we have traditionally been taught, must be both gentle and strong, without ever becoming brutish. They must try to encourage their children to make their faith in Christ real and to give to the poor and seek the Good always; but they must also become a wall of resistance against disrespect, illicit drugs, and imbecilic conformity to the times. This wall of resistance can cause big and lasting problems in the family in our anarchic culture and times in which disrespect for authority is ubiquitous. The offenders will not be amused. So Christian parents must show courage and not act like children or juveniles themselves because these are dangerous times, as the numbers of drug casualties, and our  disrespectful culture shows. Children owe ontological debts to their parents (Sirach 3) which parents do not owe to the children, even though parents must sincerely try never to arbitrarily provoke their children into contentions.

“Love in practice is a harsh and dreadful thing compared to love in dreams.”— Dorothy Day, quoting Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Brothers Karamazov

The Sacred Task of Grandparents

….is not only to play wholesome games, take walks and be all cuddly with the grandchildren, but most importantly to find ways to teach them how to avoid the hard mistakes and stupidities we made ourselves and how to avoid them.

To show them, besides the Maps which tell where goodness and beauty can be found, how we too got lost in fogs and (sometimes barely) recovered in the hard windswept storms which life invariably brings to all souls, and which they too must face.

And especially to show them the maps which point out where wolves hide and Con Men lurk in the most unsuspecting places, disguising their true interests; and all the kinds and locations of luring traps set off the narrow road …

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