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Proverbs 23:22 · World English Bible

Proverbs 23:22 Meaning Listen to Your Father Who Gave You

Listen to your father who gave you life, and don’t despise your mother when she is old.

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What does Proverbs 23:22 mean?

The father who begets stands for the loving source from which the mind came, the Cause that never stopped being its origin however far the dream has wandered. To hearken is to remember that a mind is not self-made from fear but created by love, and to let that memory correct the frightened belief that it stands alone.

From the Christian Psychology reading below.

Proverbs 23:22 through 1 lens

The same verse, read by one tradition.

CHRISTIAN PSYCHOLOGY

Christian Psychology

The father who begets stands for the loving source from which the mind came, the Cause that never stopped being its origin however far the dream has wandered. To hearken is to remember that a mind is not self-made from fear but created by love, and to let that memory correct the frightened belief that it stands alone.

The mother grown old is the ancient tenderness the ego teaches a mind to scorn as weakness. To refuse that scorn is to honor the gentleness within, which does not age or fail but waits, patient and unchanged, to be welcomed home.

Father: the loving Source from which the mind proceeds, the origin that remains its cause no matter how far it seems to stray Mother: the enduring gentleness within the mind, the tenderness the ego calls weakness but love calls home

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Christian Psychology lens

Live Proverbs 23:22 today

  1. Call or text a parent or an older relative today with no agenda and nothing to report. Just ask how they are and stay for the answer.
  2. When someone older is slow with their phone or repeats a story, let it take the time it takes. Your patience is the whole of what is needed.
  3. Under pressure, when being gentle feels like losing ground, try it anyway for one exchange. See whether softness actually cost you anything.

Whose tenderness have you been quietly calling weakness?

The same truth in other traditions

Confucianism · Analects

Honoring the people who raised you is where every other decency learns to stand. The one who forgets that root will not hold up elsewhere.

Judaism · Talmud

Honoring father and mother is counted among the weightiest obligations, owed in their frailty as much as in their strength. Old age does not reduce the debt.

Taoism · Tao Te Ching

The soft and yielding outlasts the hard, so what looks like weakness is often the more durable strength. Gentleness is not a lesser thing.

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