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Orthodox Christian Parenting, hosted by Faithtree Resources Executive Director (and mom of four!) Michelle Moujaes, is a weekly podcast for parents and grandparents navigating the holy struggle of raising kids in the Orthodox Faith. Each episode offers honesty, encouragement, and practical wisdom from the Church—creating space to exhale, freedom from the pressure to be perfect, and openness to grow as you raise children who are deepening their knowledge and love of Christ.
Welcome to Orthodox Christian Parenting, where we bring the church's timeless wisdom into the everyday chaos of raising kids. I'm Michelle Mujaias, and today we are talking about parenting not as performance, but as repentance, a lifelong return to love. And that shift changes everything because parenting was never meant to be about getting it right all the time. It's about being formed right and right alongside our children. It's about humility, healing, and learning how to turn our hearts back toward God and toward one another again and again and again.
Michelle Moujaes:To help us explore this, I'm joined by Father Stephen Muse, Orthodox priest, pastoral counselor, and author of Parenting in Repentance. Father Stephen brings a rare blend of deep theology and lived experience, reminding us that our failures are not the end of the story, but rather they're often the very place where grace begins. Be sure to download this week's free digital discussion guide linked in the show notes below, or you can go to faithtree.org/parenting so you can continue the conversation at home with your spouse or a friend or people in your community at church. Welcome, Father Stephen.
Fr. Stephen Muse:Thank you, Michelle.
Michelle Moujaes:So today we're talking about parenting in repentance. And I know this wonderful book that you, have written has a subtitle, Parenting in Repentance, Growing Together in Love, Gratefulness, and Joy. But for those parents in our audience who may not really know what to make of a phrase like parenting in repentance, can you kind of in introduce the concept to us?
Fr. Stephen Muse:Well, in your introduction, I think you did a pretty good job of that.
Michelle Moujaes:I love it.
Fr. Stephen Muse:Yeah. I never intended to write that book. I just was writing journal entries of my encounters with the children. And so I was really pondering those through my relationship with Christ. And it occurred to me that what was really happening was that I was being confronted in a good way by the communion between us, me and the children.
Fr. Stephen Muse:And it was exposing the degree of narcissism, power, and a kind of worldly approach to fixing and forming people that wasn't congruent with the life in Christ. And so I kept discovering that the children were really closer to, what I would be hoping for them than I was. And, they were little messengers of God if I was willing to listen. But when I thought I was right and I was sure that I could just make my use, the power of my position and my emotion to kind of, I would say, overwhelm them, then really I wasn't leaving them room to become who they are. And I wasn't aesthetically bearing the voluntarily, the willing suffering to make that possible.
Fr. Stephen Muse:When Christ says love our enemies, I think we could look at that and say, aesthetically bear the difference between you and all other people, especially, you could say, your children and your spouse, because they're the closest to you in all sorts of ways. And if you're not willing to make room for their uniqueness, you're failing.
Michelle Moujaes:Wow. Okay. So I wanna drill in on a couple of things you just said. So can you tell us that don't know what it means aesthetically? What do you mean by that phrase?
Fr. Stephen Muse:You know how Saint Paul speaks of the athletic context, and he says, spiritual struggle. Aestheticism is that word. It comes from the struggle to be in relationship with Christ. It's always a synergy. Christ, Christ does the best job of making room for us out of his extreme humility, which is love.
Fr. Stephen Muse:He gets entirely out of the way while totally self offering himself, giving us everything. And then he waits for our response. That place where we respond to his offering is is our ascetical struggle. And he departs, so to speak, to allow us to be questioned by what we encounter, to to bear the cross of our existence. And in this way, we are formed in the womb of the Church to be prepared for our birth when we die.
Fr. Stephen Muse:As Saint Ignatius said, when the lions chew me like wheat in their teeth, I will be born a human being. We need to understand this because it's very interesting. Some of the fathers speak about how in the womb, the baby develops ears, eyes, nose, lungs. None of it's useful in the womb. Everything that's happening is being prepared for when they die to the womb.
Fr. Stephen Muse:Then all this becomes valuable. Once we die to the womb, now instead of a deterministic process in which all this is formed without us having to do anything, now it's a synergistic process. And our formation is what it is we do with the with the life that's given to us on loan to choose with our freedom, whether we want to respond to Christ as a living anaphora or whether we go our own way into the unreality of our isolation and long and aloneness.
Michelle Moujaes:That is so good. So, it's I'm thinking a thousand thoughts for the first time, but the the one that's coming to mind is what does that look like in our parenting struggle? How do you how I mean, how do we even apply kind of that pursuit of the next life through our relationship with our children?
Fr. Stephen Muse:By allowing ourselves to be humbled, by not have not understanding everything, by being able to, be interested in what we don't know. Saint Isaac the Syrian says we should go to God in prayer as a child knowing nothing. When you look at a deer in the forest, you don't already know everything. You're tuned in, wide awake, interested, and this is the direction of making space for the other to surprise us with what we don't already know. If I already know everything, I don't have to listen to you.
Fr. Stephen Muse:I already know what you need. I'll tell you and direct you like a robot. This is terrible.
Michelle Moujaes:I think as parents, though okay. I'm gonna push a little bit here. It feels like that's almost what we have grown to believe success as a parent is. They don't know. We do know, and we keep them safe, and we help guide them, and we lead them almost as I would say that's the duty of a parent or or so we're told.
Michelle Moujaes:So what I'm hearing from you is not necessarily. So how do we reconcile kind of the parenting models of the world and this humility that you're speaking of and what are we supposed to do as parents?
Fr. Stephen Muse:It's close to what Saint Seraphim said when he said, acquire the holy spirit, and then thousands around you will achieve their salvation. It's the same for our children. In the first, little chapter there in the book, I talk about Saint Porphyrios and his recognition that you know, remember those two two women who came to him, the sisters, and he kept saying, it's your parents' fault. And they one sister would say, no. No.
Fr. Stephen Muse:Our parents took us to church. We they took us to confession. They prayed with us all the time. He said, nope. It's your parents' fault.
Fr. Stephen Muse:And finally, one of the sisters said, the father's right. Our parents told us all these things to do, and they did it. But there was no joy in the family, and they argued all the time. And so the differences between the content that we hold up, or let's call that our confessed faith, and the operational faith that we operate out of, which typically is power, control, saving ourselves, that sort of thing. So here's a here's an important parallel.
Fr. Stephen Muse:If you read when we read the gospels, we see that the disciples did not want anything to do with the cross, and they never comprehended what Christ was saying about it. The Pharisees rejected the humility of God. It would have nothing to do with the possibility that God would condescend to become a man person. So what we see is they were telling us through their confessions, we had it all wrong, and you're gonna do the same thing. You're going to try to turn God into what you have without him and use power and control to bring about Christianity.
Fr. Stephen Muse:And it'll be exactly what kills him again and again and again.
Michelle Moujaes:So help me as a parent. I mean, that's a whole new thought for me. Tell me what that means then in the day to day. How do I, as a parent, work towards a different way? Is is it in repentance, confession?
Michelle Moujaes:And
Fr. Stephen Muse:Well, don't think about these words as a sort of automatic theological understanding removed from from reality. Repentance is is whenever we turn from our egotistical self sureness to wonder, kindness, interest in the world and and the others around us. So as a parent, if I have a real relationship with my children, I will be leading with, presence, and love will be there rather than if I'm managing them only. And this means my prayer life and my inner sense of presence is something I've got to become responsible for. Because if I think I can parent the way I do everything else in my life, which I can succeed in the world with power and control and willfulness.
Fr. Stephen Muse:But I can't succeed in love that way. And so a crushed and humbled heart, God will not spurn. And that's where I see in all those stories in the book, they're all examples of ways I was ready to miss actually being present with my children in a real relationship. There were ways of managing them, or I might be tired and I didn't want to play with them. And each time, God said, guess what?
Fr. Stephen Muse:If you'll get over yourself, I'll show up between you and your child, and you'll both gain.
Michelle Moujaes:I actually think this book is the book of pivots. It seems like in each chapter, there's a story that's going one way. And then through the humbling of yourself, you pivoted and came around to a more engaged way of relationship. I think for many parents, that can be a challenge because we've set lives up for ourselves that don't have a lot of margin or don't have a lot of room for error. So do you have any wisdom that if we are in that situation, which I think so many in our audience are, what do we do now?
Michelle Moujaes:How do we pivot?
Fr. Stephen Muse:Well, I love your word pivot because that's it's exactly right. That's a turning, and that turning point is is key. I hope I don't have anything new to say because, really, if we are truly praying and we're making that time to return to stillness and to be vulnerable intimately with God, this is going to be the best foundation to go forward. Because if I'm neglecting God, I'm gonna neglect everybody else too. We think, well, I can skip my prayers.
Fr. Stephen Muse:I got lots to do. But no, we can't. We can't do that. I have to be intentionally vulnerable before God, and I sometimes I have to more often than not, maybe I have to say, Lord, I don't wanna be with you right now. I'm tired.
Fr. Stephen Muse:There are other things I'd rather be doing, and I don't really even like myself. I don't like what I'm like right now. And I don't say a lot of words, but it's just the attitude because this is exactly what the essential problem of of our life is, is that we cannot bear the nakedness of our createdness. We follow our father, the devil, who tells us you've got to be perfect. Your children have got to be perfect.
Fr. Stephen Muse:The church has got to be perfect. Well, that's so close to the truth. The problem is it's like the rich young ruler. Only God's perfect. And God said, I didn't call I didn't come here waiting for you to be perfect, to love you.
Fr. Stephen Muse:I came here to offer you my entire life as much as you can receive, knowing you're going to grow up forever. Don't run away from me and from yourself because you have tasted that which invites you to be Christian and religious for the wrong reason. Don't turn me into what the devil tells you to be and think you're following me. This is a this is so central, and we miss it so easily if all that I'm saying becomes a simple thing of just be still and be there, it will happen. And this is simply the theological and the, you know, pastoral way of saying, Okay, if you want to be a good parent, be a real Christian.
Fr. Stephen Muse:If you want to be a real Christian, discover the difference between going it alone and entering into communion. Communion is relationship of presence with everything and everyone around us and with God in the silence of our prayer. And there's a huge difference between communion and trying to do something or make something happen. Try praying and make something happen. You can't.
Fr. Stephen Muse:Mm-mm. Try being in a love relationship and only try to do something to your spouse. You can't. And the children don't want that either. They don't wanna be controlled without knowing they're loved.
Fr. Stephen Muse:And we would never trust a god who did something to us before we realized he undergoes everything with us.
Michelle Moujaes:I wanna get granular, father, because what you just said, especially about when you try to make something happen, like, that's one of my giftings is trying to muscle through and power through, and I'm gonna control it. So if that's not the way and that's not really following the path that the church lays out for us, what does it look like? And let me get just even a bit more granular. Does that mean sitting in silence? Because one of the things I think so many of us, who are in the midst of raising our children struggle with is pacing, frenzy, distractedness, which is built in all around us.
Michelle Moujaes:So can you just speak to what it might look like to trend toward what you've described, but that is so different than the reality?
Fr. Stephen Muse:Well, keep in mind, I'm 72 now, and I grandchildren rather than children. And, I work out more now with, really in my marriage. If I come home and I'm tired from expending myself all day and offering myself to people, then if I try to force a conversation, it's not a good thing. So I have to recognize I'm very tired, and I don't have anything to say. And so I'm sitting at dinner, and I accept that.
Fr. Stephen Muse:And I don't let my mind go to criticisms and things of me and creating imagination. I just wait. And so after about ten or fifteen minutes, all of a sudden, in a gentle way, something wakes up from underneath all this. I noticed, for example, it's silent outside. It's a real observation.
Fr. Stephen Muse:Now in my tiredness, I wouldn't notice that. But when I when I was able to show up, it came to me. And I noticed the quality of noticing the silence. And I realized at that point, had something to say, not because I needed to make conversation, but because I existed and the world was real, and my wife was there. So I said, it's really quiet out there.
Fr. Stephen Muse:And she responded, and this took us into a thirty minute conversation of memories of her early childhood and all sorts of things. Now the difference between that and coming home and knowing I was tired and then saying, oh gosh, I've got to have conversation with my wife. You know? Okay. Well, you know, that is mechanical.
Fr. Stephen Muse:The music that you play with your voice comes from where you come from. So if you're alive inside and present to the world, you will bring out something natural and joyful. If you're not, you'll bring out the tiredness, the push. So, you know, I have a lot of examples of that in the book. Just that time when my son wanted to play when I came home.
Fr. Stephen Muse:And I was tired, I didn't want to play with him. But I love him, so I felt guilty. So we had a little discussion. Well, I'll play chess with you because I like chess. You know?
Fr. Stephen Muse:He liked chess too, but he didn't, not as much as he wanted to play marbles. You know? And and so finally, we ended up agreeing to read a book together, we enjoyed it. And then he started asking me questions about my life when I was like him, when I was his age. It was a wonderful conversation, intimate, joyful.
Fr. Stephen Muse:And we entered into that by me getting through the tiredness that would reject him and feel guilty for doing so or force myself to play with him, but not be able to actually encounter him.
Michelle Moujaes:It seems to me first of all, it seems like nothing I've done as a parent. Sorry, kids. Secondly, it seems like it's intentional, but it's also completely opposite of almost everything that especially young families face right now. Like, there is a hustle, there is tech, there is the checklist of things that we need to accomplish so that our kids are Yeah. Okay.
Michelle Moujaes:And I just wonder how we could I mean, because it sounds to me like exhale. What you've just described with your son is exhale. But I wonder for parents listening how we can take small steps towards that kind of exhale while still living in, you know Yeah. A world that requires traveling sports teams? Is it that we reject all the things of the world?
Michelle Moujaes:Does it what does that look like?
Fr. Stephen Muse:Well, moderation's a is a keyword for us, you know, in every generation, and, that does require a little intentionality and some structuring. We raised our kids without TV. That was back in the covered wagon days. We didn't have any computers. So we would watch a movie or something on the weekend, but we kept them away from that so that they could have the outdoors, play games, do plays, art.
Fr. Stephen Muse:They would that they'd be interested in all sorts of things. Now they played soccer too, but it wasn't as competitive and stuff as it is now where it's constant. They're doing things. One thing I think is that, first of all, nothing good happens by hurrying.
Michelle Moujaes:Right.
Fr. Stephen Muse:So the speed at which we live, dissipates presence and communion. It helps block it to some extent.
Michelle Moujaes:So good. Nothing good happens by hurrying. Great.
Fr. Stephen Muse:It's a and you can sense your body. You know, nepses or watchfulness is not just thoughts. It's the sensation of the body and the inner movement of the energetic part of us that is already in motion, taking us towards something before we even realize it and forming our thoughts. So we have to have a a psychosomatic awareness. The noose has to be inside the body.
Michelle Moujaes:Tell me what what is a noose, Father Stephen?
Fr. Stephen Muse:The noose is the, the apprehending part of the mind. You have the thinking part, the logical part that usually we operate out of that and will. We drive ourselves according to an architectural plan of how we think things ought to be. But the apprehending mind is the foundation of everything and notices sensation, feeling, thinking. And it has a quality of discerning.
Fr. Stephen Muse:If so this happens a lot in therapy. I'll say to somebody, just, bring your mind inside your body for a minute and tell me what's letting you know to keep that tension in your foot or that look in your eyes or whatever. And they get an entirely different experience of themselves. And they're surprised again and again because they're not aware of any of this. It's happening to them.
Fr. Stephen Muse:Mhmm. If you're not aware of it, you can't do anything about it. You're acting it out. As soon as you become aware, you have a freedom to choose something. And it and it talks to you so that so much of our life is other to us, and we're not actually listening.
Fr. Stephen Muse:So if I don't listen to my own otherness, how can I listen to yours? Because I need my own otherness in order to educate me about what yours is like. So if I see the way the child moves, what their face is like so here's my so my grandson. My grandson has some genetic, pretty serious genetic issues. He has to have calcium and things every day because his parathyroid doesn't work and he could have seizures or heart attacks.
Fr. Stephen Muse:So and his parents are in a divorce, just finished a divorce. And so he's had to go through all the child goes through both from moving between their parents, the discombobulation of their world, to, being in the hospital, endoscoped, and transported, you know, to Washington and and Atlanta. And he's an amazing little kid, but he's got his feelings bottled up some. And he doesn't wanna make a mistake, because I'm sure he must believe that not only a mistake might lead to his death or it might lead to losing his mother or his father. Who knows?
Fr. Stephen Muse:So as he has to go back, you know, and the weekend's over and he's got to go back, I see him get antsy. I tell myself, okay. He doesn't know how to express that he's sad because he's got to leave. So I say, Daniel, come here. I put my arms around him, and I say, are you sad because you've got to leave?
Fr. Stephen Muse:And then he bursts into tears. He breaks through the anxiety. Or like the one time he so we live in one end of the house. And when he comes there on another end, and we try to keep a little space that's free. My office is one of those.
Fr. Stephen Muse:And he knows if I'm in there, I'm working. But he likes to come down and ask me something. You know? And nine out of 10 times, you know, I'm fine. But then here's what happened.
Fr. Stephen Muse:So he comes down the hall, and the part of me that's like a gestapo and a rule, something has to be kept or else a person will become an infidel or whatever. You know? Alright. Alright. So he comes down, and I'm thinking, he can't find anything to do.
Fr. Stephen Muse:He's got to have entertainment. And so that put a negative passion in me. So when he came in, I was a little abrupt. And I said, I'm busy now. He said, you want to be alone?
Fr. Stephen Muse:I said, yes. So it was very sweet, very nice how he said that. And then he left. And I finished working. And then when I went out, he was playing with with the yaya.
Fr. Stephen Muse:He had his back to me. And normally, he's really happy to see me and everything. So I knew, okay, he's hurt. And I heard him. So I sat there for a few minutes, and he didn't turn around or anything.
Fr. Stephen Muse:And I said, Daniel, come here a second. I said, I said, when you came down to get me in my office, I was harsh with you. That hurt you, didn't it? He start he bawled and just held on to me. I said, I'm so sorry.
Fr. Stephen Muse:You didn't deserve that, and I apologize. Will you please forgive me? Of course, he says yes. What's he going to say? But then he did a little hide and seek game.
Fr. Stephen Muse:And after that, after he recovered, he went into another room and looked at me from there. And he was acting out the residue of the disturbance that's created in him. Someone with that's gone through all that he has. One harsh word from me in a moment where I'm in a passion and not wanting to be bothered by him and casting him in my mind as a child who can't be still or something, I hurt him. So that's my repentance, my confession before God.
Michelle Moujaes:I mean, that's a beautiful example of how parents can repair their relationship with their children through repentance. Is it fair for us to think that that's just naturally part of what happens in our fallen state, in our fallen humanness, and we're just trying to have less of those moments, or is that kind of the deal? Like, that's what it looks like over and over and over.
Fr. Stephen Muse:I wouldn't make a technique or a practice out of what we're talking about. It's the organic unity between a real intimate relationship with God that's not based on achievement or my own egotism and getting free of competing with anyone or other parents or having my kid be a superstar or any of that stuff. All that stuff is, really false motivations. They're they're they're types of idolatry.
Michelle Moujaes:They're so prevalent, though, father.
Fr. Stephen Muse:I know. I know they are. And I know that at 72, now I see the degree of my own narcissism and egotism, self love, the ways that have polluted the best intentions of my life so that what God reveals is the link between his extreme humility and what love is. Our task is to unburden ourselves from idolatries, to really pray not because we want to be good boys and girls, not to make a list of things to confess so that I've done my duty, but to go and weep before God, to open our heart in love. It's doxology to enjoy our children and our grandchildren and our spouses and the bird on the branch outside on the tree.
Fr. Stephen Muse:The difference between seeing a bird or a tree and passing it by and it doesn't matter, But seeing that it has a little heart that beats, and it's trembling, and it has a song, and it exists independent of me, and it's a gift of God, that is a heart that is actually interested in life and grateful. A priest asked one time we were at dinner with some others and he said, how come we're not more grateful? And I said, because we don't know we exist. That's what I mean. Yeah.
Fr. Stephen Muse:We live, but we don't know that we exist right now as a miracle from God. We might know about it, but we don't taste it. And when we don't taste it, we're not present. And so this is why some of the fathers like Saint Simeon, the new theologian, says, we're dead. Leave the dead to bury their dead.
Fr. Stephen Muse:We don't know that we exist. There's a little story about the big fish and the two little fish. And the big fish is swimming up the stream, and the two little fish are coming down. And they say, hello, big fish. And big fish says, hi, little fish.
Fr. Stephen Muse:How's the water today? And the little fish go on down. And a little while later, they look at each other and say, what's water? This is the problem there. So all that we're talking about comes out of something very simple.
Fr. Stephen Muse:Gratefulness to God, again and again waking up. God's God, I'm not. I'm alive. He loves me completely. There's so many blessings.
Fr. Stephen Muse:How shall I go forward? It's very simple.
Michelle Moujaes:I wonder, father, when we think about kind of the passions that we face in this world, like one that comes to mind that we hear from our audience all the time is fear. How does fear impact that inner life that I know you've taught me so much about? What what does that look like, and and what can we do about it to kind of keep it in its place?
Fr. Stephen Muse:Well, if the fear is coming from, like, the people that wanna shoot the TV because of how crazy it's making them to look at all the stuff that's going on, they need to quit chasing ambulances and concentrate on their repentance because the best thing we have to give the world is aligning with the Holy Spirit. Our martyrdom may come at some point, but, the church and even Saint John Christosom taught, don't look for it, but be manly when it comes. So the best thing we have to offer is to trust the providence of God, who has created us in love and done all things necessary for our eternal life. So we don't have to fear what's going on. We should soberly understand that politically and, in our situation, we're in some real dire times because ideological warfare is happening all over the place, not just for our country, but about anthropology.
Fr. Stephen Muse:We have an anthropological crisis, theological anthropological crisis that's happening in our time. And so if you are on the surface of all this, there is fear and a disastrous attempt to try to fix something. But it just will exhaust you. And like Thomas Merton said to Jim Forrest in the Vietnam War, if you're not a contemplative, you'll be destroyed by your activism. We can't do anything if we're not rooted in that which is at the heart of Christ's connection between heaven and earth.
Fr. Stephen Muse:So this must be our aim. We must put the kingdom of God first, but not as a virtue of good boys and girls, but for real.
Michelle Moujaes:I wanna go back. It's it's an important point, and I wanna make sure that I got it right. You said the best thing that we can offer the world is our cooperation with the holy spirit?
Fr. Stephen Muse:A repentance that opens us to that. Repentance is not I'm a bad boy. Repentance is turning to the reality of Christ. It's it's accepting and responding to the truth of who Christ is and of Christ's presence. So, really, repentance is doxology.
Fr. Stephen Muse:But for a long time, in in a sense, it's kind of the joyful sorrow, as we say, because I see that I've every day, I'm I'm a sin addict. I can't stop. So, Lord, I have to say, love you, but I'm not gonna be faithful to you. Every day, I'm gonna break something. I'm always going to fail.
Fr. Stephen Muse:I know this now. I'm not gonna go to confession and say, hot dog. Now I'm clean. I'm not gonna fail again. No.
Fr. Stephen Muse:I will. I'm an addict. I'm a sin addict. I have to know this. So my only hope is communion.
Fr. Stephen Muse:If an addict ever thinks they're gonna get over things by themselves, they're in big trouble. Yet this is what we keep doing. We don't realize that sin or imperfection and the inability to walk the narrow way of Christ is not possible for any of us on our own.
Michelle Moujaes:I wonder for parents out there who feel like it's too late in some way. Or Never. Especially those who have older children. That's something we hear a lot, which is my parenting days are kinda done.
Fr. Stephen Muse:This happens a lot. So let's say we really made some bad mistakes, and now our kids have grown and maybe they didn't wanna talk to us for a while or whatever. Well, a point comes where they let them get into therapy, and then they they want to come home and say, dad, mom, you know, you did such and such and such and such, and it really hurt me. Well, the worst thing a parent can do is either deny that or not be interested in what they're saying or be unwilling to bear their pain of their experience to realize they did hurt their child. If they can make room for the child to say that and they say something like, this is so painful me for me to hear, but I'm so glad you're telling me.
Fr. Stephen Muse:Thank you so much, and I am so sorry. I wish I could do it over. Okay. Then they've witnessed to the truth of the child's experience. It's never about sort of being a victim and blaming your parents.
Fr. Stephen Muse:That's that's an unright cliche. It's about having a witness to what actually happened to you. And if the parents' behavior created that, then by telling them this, you're trying to have a relationship with them.
Michelle Moujaes:So
Fr. Stephen Muse:this can go a long ways. Sometimes the pain our children go through that we caused when they come back to us and tell us that later is the possibility of an even better relationship that actually proves quite useful because pain we go through teaches us. And we learn a lot of things through that. And so just like when the children are young, you make a space. You bear the you know, like, if I had listened to Christy when I when we were playing Jenga, and I said, the losers have to pick it up, which was already something I should wish I hadn't done.
Fr. Stephen Muse:Losers have to pay. You know? She didn't wanna do that. And I ended up trying forcing her to to the point till she wept. But later, in her joyful, loving beauty, she came to me, and, she told me why she didn't wanna do it.
Fr. Stephen Muse:Because she her brother had been injured, and she had picked him up when it wasn't her turn many, many times, and she didn't think it was fair to have to do it this time. So she was actually exhibiting chutzpah. She had strength, understanding, and I was an idiot who just drove over it and crushed her. And she then had the wherewithal, far better than me, to come to me without rank or without disgust and say to me how it really is, which was a tremendous gift. And we embraced each other, and I said, because I was wrong.
Fr. Stephen Muse:And I'm so glad you came to tell me this. And so what this did was create again and again in our lives a deep, rich, dialogical relationship that proved to be extremely valuable to my children because that's so missing in the world. And they have a powerful deep capacity for that, which gives them a lot of, ability to endure things. That if you don't have that, you're just superficial. You're kowtowing to people's opinion of you or to what the social crowd thinks or whatever, but you you're not rooted in yourself.
Fr. Stephen Muse:And what roots us in ourself is communion, real dialogue, real interest, real sharing, real availability. The other's a type of idolatry, and we're shallow as a result of it. We're actually paying the price to form one another in an in an idolatry.
Michelle Moujaes:Father, when we talk about kind of the current age that we are living in and all of the idolatries that you know, and ideological warfare and things that face parents. Is there anything that gives you great hope? What's going really well?
Fr. Stephen Muse:One thing is that the fish are jumping in the boat now. You don't even need a net. Mhmm. I mean, the churches have 50, a 100 inquirers and catechumens, all over the country. I've never seen anything like this in 30 So something's occurring because people are ruthless, lonely, isolated, and don't know how to talk to each other.
Fr. Stephen Muse:And they are hungry.
Michelle Moujaes:That's true.
Fr. Stephen Muse:And so this is what I see as very, encouraging. And we can see that all of nature tries to right itself, tries to live in harmony. Our bodies do the same thing. This is what God does. Life is always trying to blossom out of whatever.
Fr. Stephen Muse:You can cut a tree to pieces, and it will grow wherever you've left it. So that's what's encouraging is that Christ has conquered the world, meaning he gave his life to prepare the other part of creation to be able to be eternal. We have no need for anything greater to hope in than Christ, and so there's no need to fear. There's no need to worry. Even if the world were to come to end tomorrow, Christ is conquered.
Fr. Stephen Muse:And this is, rejoice, as Saint Paul said. Don't be go don't go around gloomy and trying to be critical of everything and of your children and of yourself and all. You don't need to be. Just be sober and see what's right in front of you and let it teach you. You know, it's much better for me for my daughter to express herself, and I see my own error, than it is for me to beat myself with a stick 20 or 30 times.
Fr. Stephen Muse:Mhmm. That doesn't help anybody very much. And a criticism doesn't help very much. Pointing out something doesn't help much. But if you share how I hurt you and you're visible to me, it's transformative.
Fr. Stephen Muse:Can I bear my children doing that? That's the question.
Michelle Moujaes:Well, because you feel like maybe you're being permissive or you're not, you know, strengthening them to be manly when it gets tough? Or, how do you reconcile that kind of posture?
Fr. Stephen Muse:I can tell the difference between, you know, their voice and and whatever if they're being genuine or if they're trying to con me. You know, we had the parable of the prodigal son, and I took the position that the son was making a speech for the father because he just wanted to be able to get out of hunger and get home. So he was using the father. He didn't really come home because he loved the father. He said the father's got things, and I can get it.
Fr. Stephen Muse:I'll tell him this. Okay? Father's not even interested in what he had to say. He went out because he loved him so much and just threw love all over him, kissed him, and gave him the ring and all that. Now from the standpoint that you're asking, you could say, well, that was the dumbest thing he could possibly done.
Fr. Stephen Muse:He just spent third a third of your wealth. Okay. But what this is teaching us is the love of God, extravagant offering of God, is the greatest change agent in the world. Saint Ambrose of Optina Monastery was he heard the confession of an archbishop, and the archbishop had a sin that was fairly serious. And he he said to the the saint, elder, why didn't you give me an Epidemia, a penance?
Fr. Stephen Muse:And Saint Ambrose said, because I've, realized that a kind word is much more powerful. Wow. Now contrast that with a father who heard the confession of a woman who'd had an abortion twenty years earlier, and she had her on her own, refrained from communion for twenty years. And then she went and confessed it. And he said to her, okay.
Fr. Stephen Muse:Your penance is no communion for twenty years. She went to a canon law professor who she said, I'll die before I can take communion. He went to the father because this was horrible. He said, well, what have you done? You you've you know?
Fr. Stephen Muse:And the man said to him, the book says twenty years from the moment of confession, I will not change it. So this was a person who wrote a chapter in our in a book we did on confession. And so he became a bishop, the the the canon law professor. So we asked him about this, and he found the woman and relieved the penance so that, because this was terrible. Well, it's an example of what happens sometimes, unfortunately, in the church and in parenting and where we have the correct thing, the correct medicine, and we apply it in the wrong way at the wrong time to the wrong patient, and the medicine can kill them.
Michelle Moujaes:I think that's so true for parents. We think we're doing the right thing. We haven't stopped long enough to get ourselves in the right heart posture to, you know, even connect with God about it. We just wanna solve the issue.
Fr. Stephen Muse:We're tired, and we're moving fast, and we don't feel good about ourselves. And and in those kind of anxieties and franticnesses, our inner state is so, stressed out that we it's very difficult to have communion. So we can examine our life and see that I'm not in balance. I'm rushing, and I'm self medicating with all kinds of things at a superficial level, activities, know, social events, awards, whatever. Writing books, you can do that.
Fr. Stephen Muse:I mean, you know, if you what am I writing it for? Yeah. Am I writing for communion? I writing to be seen, to validate my existence? We have to be honest with ourselves.
Fr. Stephen Muse:So repentance is goes beyond just the examples we're talking about with the children. They aren't gonna happen if they're not happening in the rest of my life. I'm not gonna be able to parent with repentance if I'm not in repentance. From my viewpoint, the reason 50% of it used to be. I don't know if it still is.
Fr. Stephen Muse:50% of the Greek Orthodox children leave the church after they go to college. I would say it's because they failed to they failed to taste the grace of God in these ways, and what they got was baklava, Greek dancing, ethnic unity, and all. And this is social. This is political, cultural. It is not, the uncreated grace of God that is moving our lives.
Fr. Stephen Muse:And so it's back to what Saint Porphyria said. If the parents are doing orthodoxy without joy, without real communion, without presence, it's hurting the children and destroying people's desire to be in the church because it becomes something that is not life giving.
Michelle Moujaes:Mhmm.
Fr. Stephen Muse:It's the form without its power. And the power is love and humility.
Michelle Moujaes:I love it. Alright, father. Before I bless and release you, can I ask you a few questions that came in from our audience for you? You you do best. Okay.
Michelle Moujaes:The first one comes from Lebanon, the country, from Myrna, and she says, I am the mother of three teenagers. I love them deeply, but I lose my patience with them more than I would ever want to admit. I apologize, but it keeps happening. At what point does repentance stop feeling like an excuse and start becoming real change in me?
Fr. Stephen Muse:When she lets herself be loved by God and stops trying to be perfect. So be still, accept your failures. By that, I mean, allow them to be there while you're loved by God because he sees all this, and he's doing with you out of his extreme humility what you'll do with your children, but only if you're allowed to be loved. Our biggest problem is that I won't let myself be loved. I'm an addict.
Fr. Stephen Muse:I have to do it myself. I can't show up to God until I'm perfect. So I I my children become proxies of my own self hatred, And I try to go after them and get them fixed because I'm not fixed, and then we're both I'm driven to despair. So please so, Myrna, allow yourself to be still and be loved by God. I had a friend who we went to Mount Athos.
Fr. Stephen Muse:He's a very he's a world famous nephrologist. Very generous, wonderful man, but he couldn't cry. And he didn't like saying the Jesus prayer. So we went to the elder, he told the elder, I I don't like to say, Lord Jesus Christ, have mercy on me, the sinner. It just makes me feel bad.
Fr. Stephen Muse:So the elder said to him something wonderful. He said, look. Sometimes just say, Lord Jesus Christ, thank you for loving me. He said, I can? And he did.
Fr. Stephen Muse:And he found his tears, and, he ended up dying of cancer. And he called everybody he knew and apologized for anything in his life he'd ever done to hurt them. It was so beautiful. It just brought me, to my knees out of his humility and his love. But the transition here is when we say, Lord Jesus Christ, have mercy on me, the sinner, we don't want to hear it as if it's from the devil who keeps pummeling us for how bad we are.
Fr. Stephen Muse:No. We want to hear, pour the oil of your mercy and your loving kindness out of your humility onto me so I can begin to become a response to that. Wow. If this happens, the children will gain because Myrna will not be so hard on herself. And she'll show up and then have a little communion with the children.
Fr. Stephen Muse:And they will pick up on this. And they won't come back in a mechanical way, which is passions. Whenever you have a marital argument or a parent child argument that's mechanical, reactive, and the volume keeps going up until you blow up and all that, that's a passion. It's autonomic nervous system stuff. It will never bring about what you're wanting, and we wanna disrupt that as quickly as possible.
Michelle Moujaes:Oh, that's so good. Okay. This one comes from George from Michigan. He asks, I was raised with a lot of fear and a lot of control, and I don't wanna repeat that. But under stress, I hear my parents' voices coming out of my mouth.
Michelle Moujaes:How do I repent of patterns that I didn't choose but still carry with me into my parenting?
Fr. Stephen Muse:That's great. That's good. Yeah. He's one that needs a witness for what happened to him. So that means he's got, at one level, turn around and accept the pain that he got from that and realize that as the children are at the age that he lived at a time and was undergoing that, it's going to awaken in him the part of him that went through that.
Fr. Stephen Muse:So this is an opportunity. At every age our children are, we have an opportunity to experience a connection with an exiled part of our own being that our parents we felt our parents couldn't tolerate or were disapproving of or whatever. So we it was driven into the wilderness like the scapegoat. Then we tried to live without part of our own vitality. And as the children grow up, we are in touch with that.
Fr. Stephen Muse:So that's an opportunity to really pay attention and see, what the defenses were that we acquired to survive that and watch out for how, as he's already noticed, the tendency may either be to turn it toward himself or to do the same thing. This is a great opportunity. The first chance we get is when we marry, because we're going to go through everything with our spouse that we did. It's going to awaken all kind of stuff because it's at the deepest level of our interior world. And then the second chance is with our children.
Fr. Stephen Muse:At every age, they awaken stuff in us. So a lot of our early life, first couple of years, may be really unconscious. No awareness at all of it. When the child is one and a half and screaming their lungs out because of their diaper needs to be changed or whatever it is, and it's pure rage. And that rage is without any sentimentality.
Fr. Stephen Muse:It is a lightning bolt that goes right into our capacity to experience rage. And so it's gonna trigger where whatever we've got there. Now let's say I've got the Gestapo, one of my inner theaters. You know that if I got too rambunctious, it would send my mother into terrible pain with her illness. And I had a father who had paranoid schizophrenia the first four years.
Fr. Stephen Muse:So I learned I better be good. Okay? Well, that also has side effects. And so, when that lightning bolt comes into you, when that child's screaming, something in you that crushes your own inner vitality may be triggered to crush that, and you don't respond properly. So you've got to come to terms with how you yourself are already, in many ways, over controlled, not allowed to breathe.
Fr. Stephen Muse:You can't some people can't experience anger. Some are not allowed to have a need. They would be terribly shamed if they ask for anything. Now you get a child, and they go into the store. Now, mommy, I want this.
Fr. Stephen Muse:I want this. Well, the little part of you that was told that learned you can't have anything, Do you think you're gonna either let your child have anything, or you're gonna give them everything? Two ends of the same stick, both wrong. And it'll be because you haven't come to terms with the own your own wanting and the shame you have that shut you down there. So all of these are part of the unfolding of a parental relationship is coming to terms with the child in me that was not allowed to live in some way.
Fr. Stephen Muse:And so Jesus says, look. Stop being so high and mighty and bring those children to me. Because if you don't come to the kingdom of heaven except as a child, you can't get in. I don't care about your resume. I want to know you.
Fr. Stephen Muse:Wow. I want communion with you. I don't care that you made a's and b's. It's wonderful if you did. But if you don't have communion, what good is it?
Fr. Stephen Muse:So we've we've opened up a whole new dimension here with this man's question because the confrontation with the child outside of us is a confrontation with the child inside us. Wow. And both othernesses, our child and the inner child, deserve our attention. And if we're gonna give it attention, we can't be dismissive, punishing. We have to be open to hear what it is you wanna tell me.
Fr. Stephen Muse:Sometimes it may be rage. Sometimes it's tears that make me hurt so much when I see you that I wanna make that go away, but I wanna trust your capacity to feel the tears. So I wanna be with you. My my granddaughter is extremely bright, brilliant, and also extremely sensitive, very gifted. This showed up as a real I I I wondered if she was gonna have an anxiety disorder when she was born in in first year or so.
Fr. Stephen Muse:And now I've seen what that was. It was a super sensitivity of the world around her she was trying to get related to. So a yellow jacket bit her, and she was probably I don't know. She wasn't maybe five or so. And so I knew that this would be would send her into orbit.
Fr. Stephen Muse:So I went over to her, and I put my arms around her. She didn't say anything because it was just, like, in shock. I put my arms around her, and I said, oh, I know that has got to hurt like crazy. I said, but I'm so happy that you got bit by this yellow jacket because now you know that you can hurt like this and be bit by a yellow jacket, and it's gonna be okay. So I sat with her for a couple of minutes.
Fr. Stephen Muse:She got through it, and that was the end of that. No problem. Wow. Now this is somebody who would go wild at the thought there might be a a a dust mite in her bed. You know?
Fr. Stephen Muse:So it's a sort of a contrary thing. You would think, oh oh, no. Like, what can we do? You know? If you run around like a chicken with your head cut off, you're teaching the child that it's it's a disaster.
Fr. Stephen Muse:But if you're calm, you're present, you're with them, you acknowledge what they're experiencing. In that case, it was pain. Sometimes it may be rage. You know? If I immediately shut you up because you're raging and you're impudent, like my grandfather would say, don't you be impudent with me, boy.
Fr. Stephen Muse:You know? And he'd be ready to smack me in the face. Well, that's not the way to do it. Yeah. And the and I've learned.
Fr. Stephen Muse:So when I was, 45 and he was 90, we were sitting down having a conversation. And I said, I want to ask you something. I said, so here's that parent child conversation. I said, how come when I was growing up, you bragged about me to your friends about how smart I am? And then you'd tell me, you got your nose stuck in a book all the time.
Fr. Stephen Muse:Getting that PhD was one of the stupidest things you ever did. Okay. And so he let the question touch him. He was quiet. He said, I was jealous.
Fr. Stephen Muse:Wow. He said, you just shot through school like this, and I only got through eighth grade. So that helped me tremendously because, first of all, he let me know the difference between the man he was used me as a narcissistic object to get his friend's admiration for his grandson. But at the level of the boy in him who was confronted with my chutzpah and my creativity and all that, it challenged him. It shamed him, and he competed with me.
Fr. Stephen Muse:This is going on in us all the time with the kids, and we don't see it.
Michelle Moujaes:For sure.
Fr. Stephen Muse:And we justify it as I'm I'm helping you behave. I'm teaching you the way you ought to be. No. You're not. You're using that as a justification to compete with me and shut me down because you're ashamed.
Michelle Moujaes:That's so good. Alright. I've got one last question, and then I will, thank you for your generosity of time. I know that your schedule is is a full one, so thank you. This comes from Cassie in California, and she writes, my adult child is pulling away from the church, and I'm terrified that I did something wrong.
Michelle Moujaes:How do I practice repentance without drowning in guilt or without trying to control the outcome?
Fr. Stephen Muse:Yeah. Well, first of all, I'm sure you did do something wrong. We all did. Okay.
Michelle Moujaes:That's right. That's right.
Fr. Stephen Muse:God's not rejecting you because of that. God loves you. And so now there's an opportunity to make space to have a relationship with your daughter as she goes in this direction, which, you know, one thing God does is protect our freedom, you know, no matter what. He doesn't stop us. He lets us sin, and then he stays present in ways that when we're ready to return, he's ready to embrace us.
Fr. Stephen Muse:So you might have to do what we've been talking about when your daughter goes away rather than say, oh, no. The church is right. You need to come back to the church. Don't do all that. If she's going away, she's not gonna listen to that.
Fr. Stephen Muse:Say, honey, let's have let's let's go have a coffee. And then I wanna hear about your journey. What's letting you know to leave the church and what kind of questions you're asking and what you're, inspired by these days and those kind of things. In other words, have the conversation with her that honors her freedom and her life. And when you draw that out and you're not trying to corral her, first of all, you kinda probably will surprise the heck out of her.
Michelle Moujaes:Mhmm.
Fr. Stephen Muse:And then she may talk herself into something where she sees her own contradictions. Or, maybe you'll see something that you did you weren't aware of, and then maybe you'll go home and pray for her. Like Saint Porphyria says, you know, mother's prayers are extremely powerful. And it's better to pray for her and then, you know, offer her to God. And then let God do the work.
Fr. Stephen Muse:And you keep the relationship and let her know you love her and you you honor her freedom to take her journey. Sometimes we have to go away before we can come back. That's the whole point of of Genesis. God said, I have to let them be tempted by evil so they can say yes freely. And since they're gonna be tempted by evil, I will do the ascetical struggle.
Fr. Stephen Muse:I will pay the price of suffering what they're gonna do when they do that to protect their freedom. That's why we have the incarnation and the crucifixion. And you can't get any more loving than to say, I'll let you kill me and forgive you.
Michelle Moujaes:That is so good and so true. Father Stephen, you are a gift, and this time with you was a gift. I'm grateful. I'm glad you can make something of it. Thank you so much,
Fr. Stephen Muse:Michelle. It's wonderful to see you again. You too. And, God bless.
Michelle Moujaes:And thanks to you for being with us today. This episode is such an important reminder for us as parents that no matter how old our children are, parenting flows from the parents inner life and repentance is relationship driven and that God's patience reshapes how we actually love our children if we let it. Don't forget to download your free discussion guide and listen. If you ever feel like you're failing as a parent, take heart. We all are, but God is good and repentance means that we are still in the game.
Michelle Moujaes:I'll see you next time.