"In today's society, it is much easier to blame others for our failings, to count all the ways we have been wronged and use those wrongs as excuses for our current failings.
"In our own minds, if we are no longer responsible for our actions and our feelings, we need never seek forgiveness. Instead, we say, 'My past made me do this; the unfairness of the world has left me unable to take control of my life.' " (from Ensley's book "Prayer That Relieves Stress and Worry.")
By a certain age, children have discovered that their parents aren't perfect; if they are especially traumatized by bad parenting, they begin to see the cause and effect between the trauma inflicted on them and their emotional wounds. Yet, though all of us are wounded, all of us also have the Presence of God within us, the One Who helps us make free moral choices and decisions for our lives. But often it's easier to put the whole blame on our parents.
"A young man addicted to alcohol, instead of seeing his alcoholism as a disease and taking responsibility for his actions, might instead complain: 'I can't help myself, my father didn't pay enough attention to me when I was little. He rarely came to my Little League games.'
"It is so easy for adult children to blame sins and failings on their parents or on other factors rather than to seek forgiveness and admit their own failings."(from "Prayer That Relieves Stress and Worry.")
It is just as easy for parents to blame their own anger, resentment, and lack of forgiveness on their adult or young adult children who haven't lived up to their parents' expectations.
Sometimes parents want their children to follow in their footsteps. For example, parents can be angry at and resent a child who doesn't choose to attend college, or go into their field. Why hasn't their child chosen to emulate their success? Or, like their parents, married someone from their own race, ethnic background, religion, or social class? Parents' lack of forgiveness can cause them to shun or break ties with children who have made independent life decisons or gone "outside the tribe" to marry, instead of recognizing that their children have brought new variety and richness to family life.
Parents who suddenly discover that a son or daughter has a gay, lesbian, or bisexual orientation will often grieve the ending of dreams for that child, dreams of a "normal" life. Perhaps they've been told by certain clergy or writers that people choose their sexual orientation, and parental grief leads to anger and resentment that their child has chosen an "unnatural life." As a gay friend told me years ago "Why would anyone in their right mind choose a life that is so misunderstood and hated by society?" The Catholic Church teaches that sexual orientation is not chosen, but something one is possibly born with, and thus the orientation itself is not sinful. God loves each of us in our entirety, including our sexual orientation.
Children are always different from their parents. They're often filled with their own anger and resentment because they feel isolated, not understood, rejected by their parents. It's hard for them to accept that, as it took a long time for them to understand and accept their gifts, their life choices, or their sexual orientation, so it will take their parents time.
When parents and children want each other to be impossibly perfect, to fit into their own pre-conceived molds of "parent" and "child", two-way resentment, disappointment, anger, and grief can spill over and into parent-child discussions and actions, causing new, tragic rifts and even deeper wounds.
Unforgving resentment never stays at the simmer stage; if uncontrolled it proceeds to the boiling stage.
"When we don't forgive others, that failure to forgive can turn into resentment, and few things wound like resentment. When we hold onto resentment, we are the ones who hurt.
"Max Lucado calls resentment the 'cocaine of emotions.' It revs people up. It energizes them. It numbs them from pain, and addicts them as surely as cocaine.
"Persistent resentment can beome a false but all-consuming pleasure. People can come to enjoy their own resentment.
"Resentment is about power and control. It is a drug that inebriates, and few drugs deliver the mighty rush of power that hurting others can deliver. And yet, resentment also tears us apart." (Ensley)
How can we overcome resentment? How can we learn to forgive? Usually it's a process that takes time, commitment, and energy. People don't want to let go of negative feelings. They say they can forgive, but not forget. But -
"Forgiveness always involves at least some forgetting. We don't deny the hurt done to us, repress it, or minimize it. Instead, with God's help and the help of others, we grieve, let go, and move on. We no longer allow the hurt done to us or the person who did the hurting to control us."
We can begin the process by resolving to try to understand the other's point of view. Why does he or she feel that way? Have those particular values? Do their thoughts, values, and emotions reflect those of the generation they grew up in? Why did he or she make a particular life decision? Here is where we can ask God to "fire up" our imaginations so that we can step out of our own "shoes" and into the "shoes" of another. Adult children can think about their grand-parents who influenced their parents' lives, perhaps controlled them or hurt them, so that they feel righteous about behaving that way towards their own children. Parents can think about their adult childrens' lives, how their experiences and friendships are different from their own, what the influences on them might be.
Ensley suggests that it helps us to step into our alienated family member's shoes by praying specifically for that person:
"Begin to pray for that person. Hard as it may be, begin to see that person as a child of God, just as you are. Imagine what that person's world is like. Think of the pain that person endured that led them to hurt instead of help. Begin the process of seeing that person as a struggling child of God, like you. 'Know all and you will pardon all,' Thomas A Kempis wrote in 'The Imitation of Christ,' seven hundred years ago." (Ensley)
Dedicated prayer can lead to communication break-throughs, the airing of grievances from perhaps years back. Can we be humble enough to accept our child's or parent's understanding of present or past events, an understanding that might be very different from our own? Can we give them the freedom to differ from us - to agree to disagree perhaps? Where feelings have been hurt, can we strive to make amends? To do kind, generous actions to help rebuild the relationship? To accept much-loved people in our loved ones' lives whom we may wish with all our hearts weren't there? To allow others the freedom of conscience to make their own decisions?
Deacon Ensley repeats "Forgiveness is usually not instantaneous, it is a process, it takes time. Just wanting to start down the journey towards forgiveness is enough in God's eyes. God's forgiveness toward us is like a canceled banknote, burned and written off the books. That's what God's forgiveness is like. He forgets the wrong for all eternity."
Daily pray "Lord Jesus, give me a heart for love and forgiveness like your own." Then stand back and watch Him work miracles to soften and stretch and humble your heart, cleanse it of resentment, prepare it for forgiveness, set it on fire with His love. After all, Jesus' prayer to His Father for his disciples was "Make them one." May He, over time, make your family one again!