On Family, Marriage and Children
It is better to speak often to God about your child than to your child about God. A young person’s soul thirsts for freedom, and so it finds it hard to put up with all kinds of instruction. Instead of wearying him with endless lectures and scolding him for every little thing, entrust this matter to Christ, the Theotokos and the saints, and ask them to set him right. Treat a child as one treats a colt: now you let the reins go, now you draw them in. When the colt kicks, do not hold the reins tight — let them out a little, or it will break the bridle. But when it has calmed down, draw in the reins and lead it where you wish. Parents should love their children as children, not as idols; that is, you must love a child as he is, and not as you want him to be: your double.
“Outward beauty,” writes Saint John Chrysostom, “becomes familiar, and in time interest in it is lost; but beauty of soul gives a person a strength that renews him every day, and makes his company attractive. Neither illness nor old age can wipe away this beauty.” The fear of God, humility, wisdom, good character… these are the qualities that form the necessary foundation for a good family. That is why from the very start special attention must be paid to whom a person chooses as a companion in life. The conditions that determine this union must also be taken into account. If the creation of a family is determined only by fleshly passion or by self-interest, it is in fact doomed to break up from the start, because it is founded on earthly, passing values. Ilia II, Catholicos-Patriarch of All Georgia
We want to have obedient children, but we ourselves do not want to be obedient to God. Abba Agathon
Neither the man nor, still less, the woman has absolute power over the other in marriage. The pressure of one will upon another, even in the name of love, leads to the death of love. And here the question arises: must I submit to the pressure of such violence when there is a danger of destroying all that is precious? A countless number of unhappy marriages come precisely from each side regarding itself as the owner of the one it loves. Almost all the difficulties of marriage come from this. The greatest wisdom in marriage is to give freedom to the one you love. Our earthly marriage is like the heavenly one, and there is complete freedom there.
The family must be a house of virtue and a house of love.
Where there is the desire for pleasure, there is no love; love is suffering; “suffering is the duty and the sacrifice of measureless love,” says one of our Georgian poets. And he is right!.. In love one must seek love itself; in love one must love love itself for love’s sake, and not for the sake of some desire. Where a person’s “I” gets mixed in, there, surely and without anyone willing it, the slavery of one to the other arises. The weaker has to give way to the stronger; there will be despotism and slavery there, and not the full harmony, of one voice, of two equal souls whose union makes up one lost single being; you must forget your “I” and be joined to his “I”; then the meaning of love will be fulfilled, then a whole sea of suffering will open out…
A child’s nature is the mystery of mysteries. A child is the same human being, and all the harder to know because he is written, if one may say so, in a hard-to-read shorthand, and not in the large, full letters of a finished man. We should not be surprised that what we find in a great river we see at its source too. The child is the source, the beginning of the grown man.
