Author Archives: Fred Yi

Andrew Finstuen: Words Matter and Guns Kill

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The national media and national leaders continue to refer to the terrible event in Newtown, Connecticut as tragic. Tragedies consist of humans who play a role in their suffering. The Greeks taught us that. Suffering by the innocent is pathetic. Theologian Reinhold Niebuhr opens The Irony of American History (1952) with this distinction, writing “Pathos arises from…confusions in history for which no reason can be given, or guilt ascribed.” With this in mind, the deaths of 20 children and six adults at Sandy Hook Elementary School are pathetic, not tragic.

The actual tragedy of Newtown, like all of our pathetic school, movie theater, and workplace shootings of recent decades, is that it reflects America’s careless gun laws and the careless words that surround them. The outrageous notion that “guns don’t kill people; people kill people” exemplifies this carelessness. Of course, guns kill—what else are they designed for?—and they kill people. If James Holmes in Colorado, Jacob Roberts in Oregon, and Adam Lanza in Connecticut had no gun in hand, they would not have been able to kill with such ease.

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Such a careless attitude receives support from the National Rifle Association. Ironically, however, the NRA’s executive vice president and CEO Wayne LaPierre tacitly admits the inherent danger of guns in a November 27 blog post.  He cites a study correlating the decrease in violent gun crime to increased gun ownership in Virginia. For LaPierre, the mere presence of guns owned by lawful citizens poses a threat to gun-toting criminals. Ultimately, the question of how guns and people interact to kill masks a deeper absurdity of the pro-gun lobby. LaPierre and the NRA offer only a tragic choice. Guns solve the problem of guns.

Newtown has momentarily silenced this argument. The NRA’s defense of guns at all costs is, oh, so costly. Yet their silence speaks loudly. Throughout history, those unwilling to speak against heart-wrenching, pathetic violence bear a tragic moral culpability.

Andrew Finstuen is director of the Honors College and associate professor of history at Boise State University, where he teaches courses in modern American history, the history of American Christianity, and the history of genocide and mass killing.

Haiti Priest Doctor

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FRED DE SAM LAZARO, correspondent: Early each morning in the chapel of St. Damien’s Children’s Hospital, the shrouded bodies of infants—and one adult on this day—are counted, the names written down for prayers that follow at daily Mass.

REV. RICHARD FRECHETTE: Anybody that dies in our arms, as they say in Creole, in our place, then their body is first brought to the chapel so that the very next Mass we have the prayers for the dead and for their peace and for the transformation of their life to eternity and for the strength and courage of their family.

DE SAM LAZARO: Father Rick Frechette spends much of his day attacking the infant mortality he sees so literally each morning. He’s the founder of one of the largest medical care facilities for children and many adults in Haiti. It’s grown by necessity, often out of tragedy. Frechette is a member of the Community of Passionists, a global Catholic order, and he began 25 years ago with what seemed a more straightforward mission: a shelter and school for orphans. Today, 800 children are housed at several centers. This one, taking in the overflow, functions out of converted shipping containers. The shelter’s young managers themselves grew up here. Billy Jean is one. He was brought at age three to NPH, the orphanage’s local acronym. Today, he works to master English and is in law school.

post01-haiti-priest-doctorBILLY JEAN: My mother became pregnant very early, about 16 years old, and my father took off, and then my mother couldn’t take care of me. She heard about NPH and she decided to put me there…

DE SAM LAZARO: His mother visits occasionally, he says, but the orphanage is very much his family.

REV. FRECHETTE: That’s our goal, to restore the family over one generation, to raise the children together so they have memories of their own childhood, restored childhood, and that later in life they become aunts and uncles to each other’s children and their family regenerates after a generation. That’s our goal, so we have community of families that have been broken by tragedy.

DE SAM LAZARO: The tragedy of Haiti’s AIDS epidemic, beginning in the nineties, brought big change for the organization and Frechette himself. HIV was bringing in very ill children that the orphanages were ill-equipped to care for.

REV. FRECHETTE: That really engraved itself hard on my memory. Seeing such terrible things and honestly not having a clue, not having a clue as to what to do.

DE SAM LAZARO: Frechette received permission from his order to go to medical school, a multiyear commitment which he completed in his mid 40s. Back in Haiti, his newly-acquired expertise, combined with astute fundraising, resulted in a modern pediatric hospital. It expanded with a new building in 2006, the largest of its kind in the country, with a 22-bed center for neonatology.

DR. JACQUELINE GAUTIER (Medical Director): Neonatology is a luxury for Haiti.

DE SAM LAZARO: Dr. Jacqueline Gautier is the medical director.

DR. GAUTIER: We have central oxygen. We can offer CPAP, which is external ventilation.

DE SAM LAZARO: (to Dr. Gautier) So on any given day, you have 22 kids in here who would not have lived were it not for this facility?

Dr. Jacqueline GautierDR. GAUTIER: Correct. All the 22s are not very intensive. Half of it. Half of them.

DE SAM LAZARO: Many of these premature births result from conditions like hypertension or diabetes in the mothers. For them, a maternity unit was added in 2010 after the capital’s major hospital for high risk pregnancies was destroyed.

DR. GAUTIER: Fortunately, 2010 we were not really damaged by the earthquake. It was a few cracks. A few cracks only.

DE SAM LAZARO: The quake did not damage this hospital, but it quickly overwhelmed it.

DR. GAUTIER: The yard was transformed into a trauma center. We had patients everywhere.

DE SAM LAZARO: In a few weeks, Frechette says the decision was made to use donations that were pouring in to start a new adult hospital. Ten months later, a cholera ward had to be added after the deadly outbreak that killed nearly 5,000 people in its first year.

REV. FRECHETTE: So we kind of mushroomed out in response to all of these problems. I think the surprise to everybody, including to us, is that we could do it all pretty much without batting an eyelash. And the real wonder of it, to tell you the truth, this is a country of no infrastructures practically, and it’s a country of failed NGOs.

DE SAM LAZARO: He says three years after the quake, despite billions of dollars given to thousands of NGOs—non-government organizations—the rebuilding has been painfully slow.

post06-haiti-priest-doctorREV. FRECHETTE: There’s too much disjointedness. It’s goodwill, and it should be recognized fully as that and appreciated, but it doesn’t get channeled in a way that makes sense, and in fact it’s a way that gets disruptive.

DE SAM LAZARO: Many smaller NGOs, often church-based, have come and gone as their funding allowed. Bureaucracy has slowed larger agencies as they’ve planned major projects in housing, clean water and sanitation. Some 360,000 earthquake victims remain displaced in tent camps. For it’s part, Frechette’s organization took in $9 million in earthquake-related donations. Its approach now is focused on community.

RAPHAEL LOUIGENE (Project Manager): (translation) Organizations come in with their own ideas and do things their own way. The way that Fr. Rick works is we don’t come into a community and give our idea of what to do and how to do it. We listen to the community, listen to their needs because they know them the best, and then we work together to accomplish it.

DE SAM LAZARO: In the sprawling Port au Prince slum called Cite Soleil, the group is partnering with the community to build homes to replace the sea of shacks and squalor. They’re simple two room structures built on the principle that if you wait to do things right, nothing will get done for years, prolonging the suffering.

post07-haiti-priest-doctorREV. FRECHETTE: The way that we look at it and explain it to our donors, we’re investing in the purchase of time. You know, they’re simple block structures, we make most of the blocks ourselves. They’re simple aluminum roofs. It’s more towards normal than anything that they have known, but we’re just buying time while the people with big money and big plans, an interwoven network of organizations can do a proper urban development. That’s what we’re doing.

DE SAM LAZARO: They’re also doing health care here. A new facility is being built in Cite Soleil. All told, about 1,800 Haitians work for the mission begun by Frechette. Hundred of thousands have been served in orphanages, schools and hospitals. Funding comes from private individuals, foundations, and government grants. This year, Frechette was awarded the one million dollar Opus Prize, given to a faith-based social entrepreneur by the Minnesota-based Opus Foundation.

Frechette himself does not see his work in charitable or heroic terms.

REV. FRECHETTE: Rather than saying, I gave you this chance, I say, I was fortunate. I had that chance. It came to me. I didn’t make it. And we want that same chance to come to you so that we have the same chance. We’re people who care by being the bridge between resources that have benefited us in our life for our education and well-being, and we just want to be the bridge for letting that happen by people who have their own capacity and dreams.

DE SAM LAZARO: A long road, he admits, where success is built one small stretch at a time.

For Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly, this is Fred de Sam Lazaro in Cite Soleil, Haiti.

Richard Land on Religion and Society

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BOB ABERNETHY, host: We have a profile today of one of the most prominent leaders of the evangelical Christian right. He is Richard Land, president of the Southern Baptist Convention’s Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission. Land plans to retire next October after 25 years as a leader of the culture wars.

Many observers have seen in recent polls and in last month’s election returns evidence of a decline in the influence of evangelical conservatives, a setback for the causes Land has led. But he concedes no such thing.

RICHARD LAND (President, Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission): I think it’s not a fair reading. For instance, on the pro-life issue a majority of Americans now say that they are pro-life.

ABERNETHY: I thought that legal abortion in almost all cases is favored.

LAND: The question about whether it should be legal in most cases is a different question, and the percentage who would make it illegal in most cases is actually going up. And when you begin to peel the onion, you discover that the reason that a majority now say that it is pro-life is that for the last 39 years pro-life people have been having their babies, and pro-choice people have not been having their babies with near as much frequency, and so there’s a huge shift. The younger you are, the more likely you are to be pro-life.

post01-richard-landABERNETHY: But what about the votes in support of gay marriage, which Land opposes vigorously? Was that a setback for him?

LAND: These four state elections where the same-sex marriage folks won are four of the most liberal states in the country. They won with a high of 52 percent of the vote, having outspent their opposition 9-to-1. We still have won 33 elections, they’ve won four now, and I think the country is still deeply divided on the issue of same-sex marriage.

ABERNETHY: I asked Land whether he was concerned about poll data such as we’ve reported on this program that show almost 20 percent of the country say they have no religious affiliation at all.

LAND: That implies they don’t have any religion, and most of them do. What you’ve got is a disaffection with organized faith, and I can understand reasons for that. I’ve had reasons for being tempted to be disillusioned with organized faith myself.

ABERNETHY: Land has called the culture wars “a titanic struggle for the nation’s soul.”

LAND: It’s still a titanic struggle, and…

ABERNETHY: But who’s winning?

LAND: Oh, I don’t think either side is winning. I think both sides are winning in different places. We have a gigantic rift running through our culture, and it’s a rift that doesn’t run between denominations and between institutions. It runs through them. It makes less difference whether you are a Catholic or a Baptist than whether you believe in traditional values and traditional morality or whether you are a post-modernist. If you had the same America that you had in 1972, when 75 percent of Americans lived in homes where they were married, Romney would have won in a landslide. But we live in 2012 America, where only 48 percent of Americans are married and living in homes. When 53 percent of our babies that are now born to women under 30 are born out of wedlock, we’re in deep trouble.

ABERNETHY: For Land, the antidote to social problems is a return to religion.

LAND: Spiritual revival. I do not see us, the traditional values folks, winning this struggle without a spiritual revival that ripens into an awakening and culminates in a reformation. The single greatest advantage, Bob, that an American can have today, and it trumps all others, is to be born into a home with a mother and a father who stay married to each other. If you are born into such a home, it trumps religion, it trumps ethnicity, it trumps economic rank, it trumps IQ, it trumps everything, and yet over half of our children have lost that home by the time they are seven. As far as I am concerned, that is collective societal child abuse.

ABERNETHY: Land was very close to President George W. Bush, and he publicly endorsed Mitt Romney. He is scathing about President Obama, as he indicated when I asked him whether he thinks Republicans and Democrats can find a compromise to avoid going over the “fiscal cliff.”

LAND: It’s there, but the president has to want it. I don’t think he wants it. I don’t think the Democratic leadership wants it. I think they’ve come to the conclusion that it’s to their political advantage to let us go over the cliff.

ABERNETHY: You really think that the president of the United States wants to do damage to the country?

LAND: No, I don’t think he thinks it will. I think he’s wrong, but I don’t think he thinks it will. For all of his brilliance, this man has never mastered Economics 101.

ABERNETHY: Before we finished, I wanted to ask Land about Christian evangelizing—trying to convert people of other faiths.

Do Christians have an obligation to try to evangelize Muslims?

LAND: Absolutely. Just as they have an obligation to try to evangelize Jews and Mormons and anyone else who is outside the Christian faith. And Mormonism is at the very least another religion. It’s not the Christian faith.

ABERNETHY: What do you say to a Muslim or a Jew or anybody else who says, “Well, Christianity is okay for you, that’s fine, but for you to try to tell me I must convert is to disrespect my religion”?

LAND: Well, if the price of respecting your religion is to disrespect mine, the price is too high.

ABERNETHY: You would be comfortable telling Mitt Romney that you think that he’s not a Christian?

LAND: Sure. That would be my duty as a Christian.

ABERNETHY: Dr. Land says he is resigning his job next fall, not retiring. He says, of the social issues, I’ll probably continue to talk about them.”

Hanukkah Lamps

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The Jewish festival of lights has dispelled the winter darkness for ages. “The rabbis going back to Maimonides and earlier felt that the lights of the
Hanukkah lamp were sacred,” says Susan Braunstein, curator of Judaica at the Jewish Museum in New York. But if you couldn’t afford a gold or silver lamp “you could use an egg shell, or a nut shell, or a potato carved out.”

Video Player Photo: Leo Baeck Institute, Center for Jewish History

Churches and the Disabled

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LUCKY SEVERSON, correspondent: Among traveling evangelists Nick Vujicic is a rock star. He’s packed them in in churches around the globe. This is his second visit to the Northland megachurch in Orlando—a preacher with no arms and no legs who wants no sympathy.

NICK VUJICIC: Why does a man without arms and legs have a smile like this? It surpasses the understanding of the world, because I should be depressed. I was, until Christ came in.

SEVERSON: He travels with another message: that churches need to be more inclusive of people with disabilities.

VUJICIC: To me, in my mind everyone has a disability. Everyone needs God. But definitely it is said again and again and again, we need to go out and reach out to those people who are in need.

SEVERSON: It’s not surprising that Nick Vujicic would be invited to Northland. This is a church with about 15,000 members that goes out of its way to welcome and accommodate people in need, including the disabled. One program the church offers is a class for physically and mentally disabled children.

Teacher to class: We’re going to read the Bible story that we just heard.

SEVERSON: Laura Lee Wright has cerebral palsy. She runs the program.

LAURA LEE WRIGHT: They could go into regular class, but they might not really get the message of Jesus and the message of hope, because our volunteers are trained to accommodate their special need and their conditions.

Teacher to class: Can you all show me how you pray?

SEVERSON: Unfortunately, Northland’s attitude toward the disabled may be the exception rather than the rule. Over the years, America’s millions of physically, mentally, and emotionally disabled have made great strides in the workplace, but places of worship have lagged behind.

Jim Hukill was diagnosed with muscular dystrophy when he was only two. He has made it his life’s mission to open more churches to the disabled.

JIM HUKILL: We are still very much in an infantile state with the faith and disability movement. I think that we have seen over the last decade a significant advancement, but we are nowhere near what has to happen.

Mark PinksySEVERSON: Places of worship and the disabled is the subject of a new book called Amazing Gifts by author Mark Pinsky. He says one stumbling block for people, whatever their faith, is that at first they feel awkward around people with disabilities.

MARK PINSKY: They say, “I don’t know what to say. I don’t know what to do. Should I tell my kids not to stare?” All these things are okay, and people in the disability community recognize that there’s going to be some unease, some initial discomfort. That’s okay. That shouldn’t discourage you from plunging ahead.

SEVERSON: He says it’s not that churches, synagogues, and mosques deliberately ignore people with disabilities.

PINSKY: We have a sort of “Zen of the normal” in most of America. Most of us worship with people who are like us racially, economically, and physically, and so if we don’t see people with disabilities we just don’t think about them. It’s not that we actively excluded them, because I don’t think we did. It’s just the fact that they weren’t there. If they weren’t seen, they weren’t considered, and because they weren’t there, people thought they didn’t exist.

Linda StarnesSEVERSON: One of the 64 stories in Pinsky’s book is about Linda Starnes. She and her husband have two children, both with disabilities. Her daughter, Emily, has Asperger Syndrome, a form of autism. Her younger son, Mac, was born without a lower jaw and has lived his life connected to breathing and feeding tubes. When he was a baby the doctors recommended that the parents sign a “do not resuscitate” order.

LINDA STARNES: And so we said you know we need to talk about this. We’re not going to place that order right now. We need to pray about this, and we need to talk to our pastor, and decided that we would allow the course that God had for Mac to take place, and so we said we will not make that decision. You do everything you can for our son, and so they said this means a life on a ventilator, and we said that’s okay. We’re going to be up for that challenge.

SEVERSON: Her daughter, Emily, is now a freshman at the University of Tennessee. Mac plays the xylophone in the school band and has dreams of becoming a motivational speaker and/or a preacher.

Stanley Hauerwas, a professor of theological ethics at Duke Divinity School who has lived and worked with the disabled, says the stories in Pinsky’s book help them and those who care for them overcome feelings of isolation.

Professor Stanley HauerwasPROFESSOR STANLEY HAUERWAS: One of the aspects of disability is the kind of loneliness that it creates that you’re not sure is shareable with other people. One of the things Mark’s book does is help you share stories in a way that you recognize you’re not alone.

HUKILL: I think for people with disabilities their hunger and their desire is for someone to look past the hardware and to be able to embrace them as individuals—for someone just to share cheeseburger together with them.

PINSKY: And most of these things don’t cost money. That’s the thing that was kind of a surprise for me. It’s not just about ramps. It’s not just about elevators. It’s about attitudes and programs. It can just be asking people with Down Syndrome in your congregation if they’d like to be greeters. It says this congregation values people with disabilities and the contributions they can make. They are not just people who need help, but they are people who can help.

SEVERSON: Professor Hauerwas says caring for the disabled is fundamental to the message of Christianity.

HAUERWAS: People that you could think might have been disabled in terms of how they were depicted in the gospel, but they are seen as mad or possessed by demons and so on, and Jesus cured them. He drove the demons out.

PINSKY: There’s this wave coming demographically of people with disabilities who will be looking for spiritual homes. We’ll find people returning from the wars with PTSD, with limbs missing, and finally there’s the aging cohort of which I am a part, which is the boomers who are in large numbers aging into infirmity more or less, and the churches that are ready for that wave demographically are going to be the ones who help fill pews.

SEVERSON: Over the years, Linda Starnes has become a major force behind the welcoming nature of Northland Church. She says the bigger payoff for inclusive congregations can’t be measured in numbers.

STARNES: I think you become actually a congregation that’s more blessed, in all honesty, because you grow a heart towards being responsive to people you feel like may have needs and that you are there to perhaps serve. In the end, I believe many people realize not only am I serving, but I am receiving.

SEVERSON: And her son Mac, who can’t speak, has become a church favorite. Here he is on YouTube with Northland pastor Joel Hunter.

YOUTUBE: I look at Mac, if you had an afternoon with him you’d be totally mesmerized. You would, you would, you would because he’s like that, see? Yeah.

PINSKY: If kids see this, if kids see people with disabilities integrated and involved in the congregation, that sends a message that’s imprinted on their brains, and that’s something that’s incredible in terms of its value to the congregation.

SEVERSON: Pinsky says making a congregation inclusive for people with disabilities is more a matter of what’s in your heart than what’s in your budget.

For Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly, I’m Lucky Severson in Orlando.

Caring for an Aging Parent

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KIM LAWTON, correspondent: Three years ago, Anne Stine was a busy mother with three young children and a husband who was on the road a lot. Then her 87-year-old father, a very independent World War II veteran who lived about an hour away, suffered a stroke.

ANNE STINE: And what I found was a man who was no longer independent. He was confused and worried and starting to bark orders. So it was a very emotional time for him, and it was a scary time for both of us.

LAWTON: Her dad, who lived alone, needed a lot of care, and the issues surrounding his care were overwhelming.

STINE: The doctors came in and the social workers come in, and they start all these questions: Where do you want your dad to go in rehab? Are you set up in Medicare and Medicaid? The list went on, and I was just a mom with three little kids and not prepared to take on that responsibility, and yet I had to.

LAWTON: According to a recent study, 36 percent of all caregivers are adult children taking care of an aging parent, and that’s expected to rise dramatically. People 85 and older are the fastest growing group in America, and census projections say their numbers will more than double—to 11.5 million—by the year 2035.

Jane Gross, author of A Bittersweet Season: Caring for Our Aging Parents and OurselvesAuthor Jane Gross says it’s a situation our entire society is unprepared to deal with. Her own education began about a decade ago, when she and her brother needed to care for their ailing elderly mother. As a journalist for the New York Times, Gross was used to getting information easily, but with this she says she felt clueless on multiple fronts.

JANE GROSS: (Author, A Bittersweet Season: Caring for Our Aging Parents and Ourselves): Medical. Various entitlement programs like Medicare and Medicaid and how they work. Residential. Where was she going to live? Legal. Financial. Those are the most obvious ones, but they don’t overlap and, you know, you can’t make three phone calls and figure them all out.

LAWTON: Based on her experiences, Gross started the New Old Age blog and wrote a book called A Bittersweet Season: Caring for our Aging Parents and Ourselves. With so many people living longer, Gross believes one of the biggest social questions is how to pay for their care during the period of long, slow decline.

GROSS: My mother was as well-prepared as a person can possibly be for the end game, if you will. I mean, she had every document known to man in perfect order, and she had a decent amount of money. She spent $500,000, bare minimum, out of pocket, her own money, and then wound up on Medicaid.

LAWTON: Gross says health care benefits don’t include provisions for home health care or assisted living.

GROSS: You can get a new heart, but you can’t get somebody to take you to the supermarket. The assumption is that families will do that for themselves, and families will pay for it themselves until they’re impoverished, and then the government will pay for them if there’s any Medicaid.

LAWTON: Complicating the situation even further, as is often the case, Gross and her brother had to work through longstanding tensions in their own relationship as well as what she calls “old family baggage” with their mother.

GROSS: If there were some way for people in the moment to understand which of it is real and which of it is baggage and leave the baggage at the door, they would come out of it much better.

LAWTON: The many difficult problems can take a severe emotional toll, especially for women, who are the majority of parental caregivers. Gross says she never realized how many exhausted, stressed-out caregivers were out there until she became one of them.

GROSS: You would see them all the time in the parking lot of either the assisted living community or the nursing home, invariably slumped over the steering wheel and crying, and then suddenly you realized it’s very hard.

STINE (on phone to her father): Do you need me to stop and bring you lunch?

Anne StineLAWTON: Anne Stine says she felt torn between managing the care of her father and still meeting the needs of her children.

STINE: You have the little ones who demand so much time, and then if you’re in a situation where your parent is also demanding a lot of time you do become sandwiched, and you’re also pulled in both directions, and what is the right thing to do, and priorities.

LAWTON: A committed Episcopalian, she says for her it was a spiritual issue.

STINE: I needed support from my church and my faith community right off the bat. I knew that I had to rely on God’s strength and not my own. Leaning on God’s strength, leaning on my faith community, I turned to my church and said, “I don’t know how to do this. I don’t know how I’m going to get through this.”

REVEREND KATE BRYANT (St. James Episcopal Church, Leesburg, Virginia): If we’re caring for other people, we’re no good unless we take care of ourselves, and believe me, I have to remind myself of that quite regularly.

LAWTON: Reverend Kate Bryant is rector of Stine’s church, St. James Episcopal Church in Leesburg, Virginia. She went through a similar experience with her own mother and says the spiritual aspects can often be overlooked.

Rev. Kate BryantREV. BRYANT: As in any care giving situation, that care can be so demanding emotionally, physically, and it’s also demanding spiritually. I think a lot of people who are in care giving situations ask, “Why is God doing this to me? Where is God in the midst of all this?” and they really struggle with spiritual matters as they pertain to aging parents.

LAWTON: Bryant says many people in her congregation were dealing with aging parents, so she and Stine began searching for faith-based resources and support groups. But there didn’t seem to be any.

STINE: In my frustration I said something like, “Well, there should be.” I mean, when you become a parent there’s all these support groups and information. You’re bombarded with it. But nothing when you have to take care of a parent?

LAWTON: They started the Caregivers for Aging Parents ministry at St. James. The ministry provides practical resources for parental caregivers and pairs those who have gone through it with those who are just beginning.

REV. BRYANT: Know where your parents’ finances are kept, what that situation is. Do you have a living will? Do you have a health care proxy? Some of that information you can get at any local council on aging. It’s laying over the spiritual component that’s so important in the context of a church community.

LAWTON: In the end, Gross says the most important lesson she learned was not letting the logistics completely overwhelm what was truly important.

GROSS: The decisions that seem like they matter so much when you’re making them by and large don’t, but the quality of the time does. And you know, since time is finite I would worry less about fixing stuff that ultimately can’t be fixed and worry more about gathering memories and feeling good about the experience.

LAWTON: For Bryant, caring for an aging parent led to a new understanding of the biblical commandant to honor your father and your mother.

BRYANT: When we are children, we interpret that word honor as meaning being obedient. As parents age and become elderly or are aging that honor takes the form of kindness, thoughtfulness, care giving.

STINE (speaking to her father): How old were you in this picture?

PHILLIP WESTON: Twenty-one.

STINE: Twenty-one.

LAWTON: And despite the demands, or perhaps because of them, Stine says she has found that caring for an aging parent can indeed be a spiritual blessing.

STINE: And this experience has actually given me so much in return, and it’s really caring, really serving. The depth that goes into your soul when you don’t know how you’re going to do it, you really seek God and see God firsthand in the midst.

LAWTON: I’m Kim Lawton reporting.