Broken bonds

     "Cutting contact with parents won't heal children's wounds.

     "Idealization of the self will not heal emotional emptiness. Young people determined to forge their own identities forget (or don't know) that we are made and shaped by others as much as by individual personality traits.

     "It's only by seeing ourselves reflected in close, sometimes difficult, unions that we understand who we truly are. God, a relationship in himself, means to shape us in relationship, beginning with our mother's arms and father's voice. 

     "'Honor your father and mother' is a weighty command. To break that bond for self-centered reasons makes us weightless."  

Janie B. Cheaney, WORLD magazine