Seven simple words

"Preach the Gospel; use words if necessary."

This is one of my favourite quotes, often attributed to St. Francis, though no one really knows from where it comes. Seven simple words that underline the importance of a life well lived. Our lives say more about what we believe than we can ever say. What we do carries more weight than who we pretend to be.

No one has taught me this more clearly than my own daughters. Children, especially when they reach the teen years, scrutinize their parents more carefully than they do themselves (and they definitely scrutinize themselves -- one of my daughters has been known to change her clothes four times before leaving home for the day). We parents can't get away with the slightest hypocrisy. And I guess that is just the way of things, and probably, the way things should be.

In Morning Sun on a White Piano: Simple Pleasures and the Sacramental Life (Doubleday 1998, ISBN 0-385-48954-4), Dr. Robin R. Meyers puts it this way:

If you have children, consider parenthood a high and holy art, until death parts you from their constant gaze. Remember that children crave limits and secretly thrive on a wholesome kind of discipline. They will learn to navigate time, to cherish tenderness, to temper judgment, to remember birthdays, to defend the weak, to notice beauty, to endure inequity, to preserve humility in success and integrity in failure, to care about ideas, to be generous, and to be faithful -- all by watching the sermon that is their parents' lives. (pp 42-43)

Even though I've known these seven simple words for my entire parenthood, I've never thought of my life as a sermon for my girls. But I think they're doing okay in the above categories, so I must be, too, mostly...

How's your life's sermon going?