What faith looks like for parents whose adult children have left the church

A Reflection for Friday of the First Week in Ordinary Time

Find today’s readings here.

Today’s readings offer us two very different stories of God giving people what they ask for. In the first, the people of Israel beg Samuel for a king like those that other nations have. When he outlines how this king would behave like other kings—sending their sons to war, taking ordinary people as slaves, stealing their servants as his own, and giving the best of their harvests to his friends, seemingly in return for nothing—the people say, “Not so!” and demand a king ever more forcefully. Samuel complies.

In the Gospel, we find the famous story of the paralyzed man whose friends are so determined to have Jesus cure him that they tear a hole in the roof of the house where Jesus is praying and lower him into the house. Jesus obliges, praising the man’s faith.

Reading these parallel stories, we might wonder why God would give the Israelites a king when he knows how badly it will go. As a parent of a 3-year-old, I think I can imagine where God’s coming from, even if the stakes are much lower: When my son wants something I know will be bad for him and I say no, I try to explain why in a way he can understand—like Samuel does to the people. (“Having three cookies will make your stomach hurt, and we’ll have to brush your teeth extra!”) But if he pushes back, sometimes it is wise to acquiesce and let him learn the consequences himself—get the tummy ache, and the extra teeth scrubbing.

Of course, monarchy and enslavement are much more consequential choices than whether or not to have a third cookie. But many parents, especially of adult children, will know that the logic applies no matter how consequential a child’s decision is: At some point, everyone will make their own decisions, and you have to hope that you’ve parented them in such a way that they will consider the consequences.

Recently, at a book event, a mother with adult children asked me how to get her children to come back to church. It seemed clear to me that—like other moms in similar situations I’d talked with—she didn’t want to impose religion on her children, but she was worried that, without faith, they wouldn’t have anything to fall back on in hard times. She wanted to give them that gift. I also knew from having many disaffiliated friends with religious parents that the message they hear is less often that positive hope and more often that their parents are disappointed in them for not having the faith they were raised with.

I’ve heard that there are three distinct phases to parenting, and that the first and last are the same. At the beginning, when your child is tiny, your role is to provide comfort: the bottle, the breast, the warm arms, the diaper changes. As they move into childhood, you move into a teaching role. You certainly still love and comfort and provide for them, but you also have to let them make mistakes. You have to discipline them sometimes. But in your children’s adulthood, your role as a parent reverts: Now that they have learned to be adults, your role is again to provide comfort and the reassurance of unconditional love when they come to you, trusting you’ve taught them well enough to make good choices.

Obviously, life gets a little more complicated than that sometimes, and parents of adult children may have to be in more of a teaching position at times, but I’ve found this structure to be generally characteristic of my relationship with my own parents and aspirational for my own parenting. I think it shows up in God’s parenting in the readings today, too: Jesus gives the paralyzed man the healing he is seeking—the comfort, the unconditional love, the reward for hard work.

I told the mom who asked me about getting her kids to come back to church that I got where she was coming from. I encouraged her to keep her invitations exactly that, invitational, and to be honest with her kids about how her faith had helped her in tough times. But above all, I said, if they are having a hard time, and you’re worried they don’t have a faith to lean on, let them lean on you—and they’ll know that what you lean on, what’s in turn supporting both of you, is your faith.

In the Gospel, the paralyzed man and his friends show extraordinary faith and determination, tearing open a roof to get to Jesus. But God is often easier to reach than that. For parents of adult children, faith may look less like instruction or insistence and more like availability: a door left open; a place where a child can come when they are tired or hurting to find comfort and healing—and perhaps glimpse something of the love of God.

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