Saint Andrew Church

           Saint Andrew Church phone number is 814-454-2486, our email is saintandrewerie@gmail.com

"PRAISE THE LORD EVERYDAY!"

Dear Brother and Sister's

Once upon a time there was a family in which the children did not realize that they were being raised by holy parents. The parents looked to the children to be like all other parents they knew including their friends’ parents, their neighbors, and their cousins’ parents. At times, the parents were surely among the kindest, gentlest people God ever created. Other times, however, the parents seemed cruel and very inconsiderate. They would make the kids do dishes after dinner and mow the lawn, sort and fold the clean laundry and take it upstairs to the appropriate rooms. To the children in this family, it was very hard, almost impossible, to understand the connection between the times the parents did everything for the children and the times that the children were expected to do the chores otherwise done by their parents.

As time went on, the children would try to negotiate with their parents about the chores and the parent’s expectations of the children. On rare occasions, one of the children would even blurt out orders to the parents and how the parent could demonstrate their love by assenting to that child’s wishes: and because it seemed to work sometimes, it was a strategy worth trying. When it did not work, the child usually was not much worse off for the attempt.

Indeed, it seemed to the kids that there was some equation that the parents operated on that was just beyond their understanding like a carrot dangling on a string. For the longest time, the existence of the equation was maddening to the kids and child-mutiny seemed like an option. How does one bail out of the family? The kids were stuck in a paradox: on the one hand they were unable to translate their parents’ reasoning into a righteous response involving defection from the family, and on the other hand, they were unwilling to relinquish the truth of their experience as being surrounded by a mysterious and loving presence incarnated by their parents.

Sound familiar? It is only after gaining enough life experience that we understand the logic of love: the duel discipline approach of parenting; confirming right, censuring wrong. Love does that. As a child grows in a loving environment, they eventually come to realize that, ideally, they cannot stop their parents’ love for them. They can determine whether their parent loves them with a happy heart or a sad heart, but not whether they are loved. That is the ineffable constant of love. “I love you” is a life-giving expression when said in action that exceeds words.

There is truth in the aphorism that the hand that rocks the cradle rules the world. Parenting is the art of revealing God to your children. God is, after all, Love itself. The supper table – your altar. The washing machine – your pulpit (use your imagination). Indeed, parenting is a vocation in which one loves another into eternity.

On this Mother’s Day, a final thought: my mother’s witness to her faith in God the Father enables me now to envision God with a woman’s face. I learned a lot about God from my mom and her paralleled parenting. Her love was adequate to make converts of me and my siblings from conceptions limited by the original brokenness of humanity to adults aspiring to sainthood. Like mom, we seem to get enough of the life project right that goodness is the predominant result.

Oh, happy day!

Fr. Dan

 CONFESSIONS on Sunday after the 11:00AM Mass at St. Andrew Chruch