Therefore, the abbot must never teach or decree or command anything that would deviate from the Lord’s instructions (RB 2.4).
Parents shouldn’t teach or demand anything that would deviate from Christ’s instructions either, but to hold yourself to this standard means regularly examining your own words and actions. If you catch yourself deviating, it also means making an effort to realign yourself according to Christ’s standard. Your children will not only imitate what you do: they will perceive what you are aiming for. This is good news for parents who are sincerely trying. Your children will grasp the concept and come up with strategies that you never would have thought of.
Then at last the sheep that have rebelled against his care will be punished by the overwhelming power of death (RB 2.10).
No! Not eternal death! As a parent, you’re responsible to turn away from the hot door with the smoke seeping around it. Don’t imagine that your children won’t follow you through it. You no longer have the option to ruin only your own life. Even if there’s not always an exit marked Fun, your job is to find one marked Possible. Sometimes it opens onto a deep stairwell with many steps, but in front of you are extraordinary people with far worse injuries than yours who still have the courage to go on: follow them.
He must point out to them all that is good and holy more by example than by words. . . . Again, if he teaches his disciples that something is not to be done, then neither must he do it (RB 2.11-13).
Human being copy each other, especially when they don’t know what to do in a given situation. Children especially copy their parents—maybe not today, but perhaps thirty years from now, when they find themselves facing what you face today, and they have no other model for how to react except for what they absorbed from your reactions. If there’s a contradiction between what you told them and what you actually did, they will have to untangle the truth. It will be easier for them if you do the work now of untangling whatever contradictions you inherited from your own parents.
How is it that you can see a splinter in your brother’s eye, and never notice the plank in your own? Matthew 7:3 (RB 2.15)
The most important model that parents offer their children is their relationship with each other. The hardest thing to do for that relationship is to hand over to God the defects of your spouse and to focus your energies on fixing your own flaws. Each of us must pry out the stake impaled in our own eye socket, so that when our spouse needs help with a speck, we’ll be half blind but hands free. If each of us has one functioning eye and a hygienic patch, together we’ll have the perspective to guide our children.
That’s not to say that we can’t ever ask our spouse to change. One tactic is to sit down for a swap talk, where each person picks one thing—only one thing—for the other person to work on changing. This is tricky, because the unhappiest person is going to ask for the more difficult change. The other spouse may feel hurt and may not have an equally painful request to make—not yet. Sooner or later the tables will turn. One day you will make the big request, and because you made that effort, back in the day, you will have sufficient influence.
It makes all the difference in how you feel about someone to see that the person is trying. What drives you to desperation is to feel that you’re stuck with someone whose habit is making your life miserable and who stubbornly refuses to do anything about it. That’s when it starts to look like the only solution is to escape from the marriage. But if you see your spouse attempting to work on the problem, you can feel sympathy instead of disgust. You can hope that life will get better.
It’s up to the two of you to decide whether the story of your family will be a comedy or a tragedy. Imperfect families that find ways to work things out are always comedies.
