Exodus 20:12
During the past year and a half of the COVID pandemic, there has been a particularly intense effort on the part of Native Americans to protect the elders among them. That is because of the immense respect and honor that Native Americans give to their elders. One woman said, “It is of utmost importance that Elders be treated with respect and reverence.” And Monica Harvey, a Navajo woman who lives near Flagstaff, Arizona, helped to deliver food, household staples, protective gear, and vaccines to elders in order to save their lives. She said, “When you lose an elder, you lose a part of yourself. You lose a connection to history, our stories, our culture, our traditions.”
An AP article last December stated, “Tribal elders possess unique knowledge of language and history that is all the more valuable because tribes commonly pass down their traditions orally. That means losing elders to the coronavirus could wipe our irreplaceable pieces of culture.” Loren Racine, a member of the Blackfeet tribe in Montana, said, “Elders are like libraries. Losing one is like a library burning down.”
In Oklahoma, members of the Cherokee Nation provided food distribution to their elders, offered financial assistance to those who were struggling to pay their rent or utilities, and put elders first in line to receive a vaccine along with hospital workers and first responders. Karen Ketcher was one of 28 Cherokee Nation elders who died from COVID in 2020. She had decades of experience working for her tribe and the U.S. Bureau of Indian Affairs. She was known at work as “Granny.” One of her co-workers said, “Losing an elder like Granny is like losing a piece of your identity. It dies with them, and you can never get it back.”
Roy Boney, Jr., manages a Cherokee language program, and said that the majority of Cherokee speakers are elders. “For decades our language has been taken from us through forced assimilation. Elders hold our history and culture but also our language… Our elders are precious.” Almost half the Cherokee who received care from the tribe’s health services but died from COVID were fluent Cherokee speakers. Losing even a handful of speakers can be devastating for language preservation and other cultural practices. Boney said, “With them goes so much information in terms of language knowledge, dialect, specialized knowledge of medicine and traditional practices. All these things we’re trying to revitalize and save, they’re the heart of it all.”
Mitakuye Oyasin, a student at Colorado College, did an independent study of indigenous religious traditions and particularly Native American elders. She compared the way Native Americans view elders and the way we view our elders in American culture. In our profit-oriented society, she said, it is hard to see value in our elders; we see them as incapable of working and so therefore useless. Our elders are set aside and don’t hold important positions in society. People tend to believe that as we age we become senile, our cognitive abilities diminish, and our memory diminishes. But the truth is, that only happens to a small percentage of the older population. Americans tend to put our elders away in nursing homes or other facilities and view them as senile and fragile.
On the other hand, Native Americans place great value in their elders. They treat them with respect and pay attention to them when they speak. They are held in high regard for their wisdom, and they teach the younger generations about the tribe’s culture and history and traditional ways of life. The elders are consulted by tribal leaders before decisions are made. And they hold central positions in ceremonies and healing practices. A Lakota woman commented, “When one of the elders spoke, you listened – it didn’t matter if the person was directly related to you or not. You listened.” And another woman stated, “When an Elder speaks, an informed individual knows to listen … God often speaks through Elders.”
Clearly, we could learn a lot about how to observe the fifth commandment from the Native Americans! It seems like such a simple thing on first reading it: Honor your father and your mother. Six words. And yet it can get so complicated. Anne Robertson writes in her book, God’s Top 10, “I don’t know of any words in the English language that come to us more emotionally laden than ‘father’ and ‘mother.’ There are different emotions attached to each one, and those emotions are flattened or intensified, joyous, resentful, or sad according to our own experiences. Before I’ve finished reading the verse, I’ve sifted through my father’s sudden death at age forty-seven and … wanting to have conversations that never happened … I’ve remembered the hymns my mother taught me to sing and that now – as she suffers from Alzheimer’s – that’s about all she remembers of anything … and how difficult it was to leave her that first night in a nursing home. All that and I’ve only read five words! That is, I think, what makes this commandment so difficult … Our efforts are overcome by our emotions related to how we experienced our own parents, how we have or have not accepted an identity as parents ourselves, and how we view our own march toward aging and death.”
Yes, obeying this commandment is complicated. For one thing, what does it mean to honor our father and mother? And for another thing, what if they are not honorable?
Well, let’s start with a definition of “honor.” When we hear “father and mother,” we misinterpret this commandment as a command to children to obey their parents. But that’s not it. This commandment isn’t about submitting to the authority of a parent. “Honor” does not mean “obey.” The Hebrew word for “honor” is “kavad,” which means “heavy,” or “weighty.” Adam Hamilton writes, “We treat our parents as weighty when we take seriously their values and needs and experiences.” John Killinger, in his book, To My People with Love, says, “It has to do with duty, respect, care, thoughtfulness, … and all sorts of human values directed towards one’s parents.” And he gives some examples of what it means to honor your father and mother:
A man is flying across the country on a business trip. On the way home, he deplanes at a city in the Midwest, rents a car, and drives two hundred miles to visit his father in a nursing home.
A child buys a Christmas present for his parents and wraps it himself. The wrapping is inexperienced and haphazard, but he is honoring his father and his mother.
A surgeon completes a difficult operation and looks at her watch. She knows her father will be having a difficult day on the anniversary of her mother’s death. She slips around the corner to a phone and calls him to tell him she is thinking about him.
It doesn’t have to be a huge thing to show respect and honor to your elders. It can be a small thing done with a respectful or loving attitude.
But what if your parents were not honorable people? What if they were neglectful or even abusive? In that case, I believe that they are the exception to the rule. I don’t believe that God intends for us to show honor to anyone who harms us. Adam Hamilton writes in his book, Words of Life, “The command to honor our parents is not a requirement to continue to be abused by someone who acts in ways that are inconsistent with a legitimate and loving parent.” The best thing to do is to remove yourself as much as possible from the abuse and the abuser.
The best scholars today tell us that this commandment is primarily intended to make sure that people took care of the elderly. It was a command for adults to take care of their aging parents. Throughout most of human history, there were no programs in existence to care for the elderly: there was no Social Security; there was no Medicare; there were no pension plans; there were no assisted living homes. Instead, the younger generations took care of the older generations. And the way that usually happened was through the family living together in multigenerational homes, or living next door to each other. Until the 1900s, most people worked until their bodies gave out. Then they lived with their children or grandchildren, who helped provide for them.
The Great Depression changed all that. When the economy crashed, all of a sudden there was a tremendous number of senior adults who could not provide for themselves out of their own means. And their families and communities did not have the means to support them. So Congress passed the Social Security Act of 1935 to take care of the most vulnerable Americans; it provided a source of income for the disabled and for those “in old age.” And it has been a true lifesaver for millions of people since then.
But today most people will not be able to retire on their Social Security benefits alone. The average payout in 2019 was $17,640 a year. It is obvious that retirees will need other sources of income, whether it is from savings, pensions, or investments, in order to make ends meet. But there are fewer and fewer companies that offer pension plans. And many people have not saved very much for retirement; in fact, 45% of Baby Boomers have less than $25,000 in retirement savings. They will, therefore, be depending on their children to help them financially. That may mean a return to generations living together in one home and sharing household expenses, or finding other ways of offering assistance.
In addition to taking care of one’s own parents, we need to consider what are sometimes referred to as “elder orphans,” people who have no children of their own, or at least none nearby, and who have no spouse or who are widowed. Of those, 70% have no designated caregiver in case they become disabled or ill. Some of them have friends who might help or are members of a church where people might offer some assistance. But we could think about ways we might help older adults not only in our own church, but in our community at large, neighbors, or people living in senior housing.
And it’s not just about offering financial assistance, to our parents or to other elders. Older adults need other things, maybe even more than they need our money. They need our time. They need someone to talk to who will really listen to them. They need our touch, a hand to hold. They need our friendship. As Adam Hamilton puts it, “They will need you to help them feel valued, respected, worthy – in other words, to help them feel honored.”
Honor your father and your mother. Respect your elders. It is one of the foundations of a healthy society. And without it, we would be missing out on one of the greatest gifts of life.
