Published: May 06, 2008 09:53 pm            

JOHN CANNON: Honor thy mother and thy father

As a child in Sunday school, the importance of the Fifth Commandment — “Honor thy father and thy mother” — was drilled into the minds of the little children.

The message was clear: What Mom and Dad said was final. There was to be no backtalk. If Mom or Dad said to do it, our job was to heed, not question.

If Mom or Dad said don’t do it, then we risked the wrath of Mom or Dad if we ignored their instructions and did it anyway. And for a 6-year-old boy, the wrath of Mom was a lot more immediate — and, therefore, more fearsome — than the wrath of God.

But that was decades ago. However, as I near the start of my sixth decade on this planet, heeding that same Fifth Commandment is just as important as it has ever been, maybe even more important now than it was when I was a child.

I don’t think the Fifth Commandment was primarily written for small children. After all, God gave Moses the Ten Commandments while the Hebrews were wandering around in the wilderness for 40 years. During those years, the elderly and the infirm must have been a particular burden on the wandering nomads. How much easier it would have been for the young and the healthy to leave the elderly behind to fend for themselves — or to die in the desert.

But the Fifth Commandment clearly forbids that. The nomads were to treat their elderly parents with the honor and respect they deserve.

There are some among us who seem to have forgotten that commandment. My oldest sister is a hospital administrator who has been president and CEO at a number of different hospitals in the South. When she was president of a small hospital in Gafney, S.C., she asked me if “parent dumping” was a problem in eastern Kentucky.

“What’s that?” I asked.

“It’s when an elderly parent is dumped off at a hospital by a son or daughter and abandoned,” she explained. At the time, the hospital in Gafney had five parents who had been brought to the emergency room by a son and daughter who left them there and never returned.

“It’s a really big problem in rural areas of the South, and I’ll bet it’s a problem in your area,” my sister said. “It really places a burden on the hospitals.”

I would not want to be standing before God on judgment day as the son or daughter who abandoned a mother or father in such a way. Such people are going to be held accountable for their cold and selfish attitude toward those who gave them life.

As we approach another Mother’s Day, I think about how blessed both my wife and I are to have our mothers, both 90, not only still with us but healthy enough to live alone and be reasonably independent.

I also am convinced more and more each day that we need to honor our mothers not just on one day of the year but each day of our lives together. With 900 miles separating my wife from her mother and with soaring gasoline prices making it more difficult to visit my mother as often as I would like, most of the communication between mother and son or daughter is done on the telephone or, in the case of my wife’s mother, by e-mail.

I have not always been the obedient son my mother hoped I would be, but I will say that there have been many times when — after it was too late — I wish I had heeded her advice. But I do hope I have honored my mother by being the son who has tried to live by the high principles she taught me.

JOHN CANNON can be reached at jcannon@dailyindependent.com or at (606) 326-2649.

        

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