Tag / Growth

by Michael

Relationships of Accountability

I believe that anyone who has a responsibility for the spiritual guidance of others should be in a relationship of accountability with another for the sake of the people he or she guides, teaches, or preaches to.  Otherwise we are going to grow, if we grow at all, in a deformed shape that will be passed down to others.  I see such distortions frequently.  It is a biblical concept to be accountable to someone else.  Timothy was mentored by Paul, Paul by the disciples in Antioch.  Friedrich von Hügel, author and spiritual director, once wrote: “Behind every saint stands another saint.  That is the great tradition.  I never learnt anything myself by my old nose.”

From John Ackerman’s Listening to God (pg. 67).

by Michael

Being in Love

Thurman said in one of books, probably The Inward Journey, that we don’t love in general.  We love in particular.  We love the particular.

We love people and things.  We love God.  We love hobbies, ourselves.  But we love specifically, adding discrimination to an otherwise grand concept.  Love is not a concept and it can’t be done without a grounding in reality.

When we first meet the loves in our lives, we try to shape them by our dreams.  All those things we thought living in love would be like crash into the unsuspecting object of our devotion.  They meet the way our families meet our first girlfriends, with eyes raised, everyone in the room wondering how long this phase will last.

Soon those two parties–the new love and the context of life–get together and ruffle each other until one begins to change.  They effect each other.  Sometimes we change our lives in submission because the object of love is better.  Sometimes we decide that the object of our affections and desires is unworthy, and we move on.  But when loved ones, their particular selves, stay with us, everyone changes.  Because we cannot be in love, live in love, stay in love (and here I don’t mean anything about the fanciful notions of being “in love” as much as I mean the straight and unstraight line that is a life of disciplined, passionate, contemplative, committed love)–we cannot stay in that love without changing.

I am no specialist on love, though I used to say that I fell in love everyone few months when I was growing up.  I started writing poetry in high school because I was in love.  And I did so many other things I’ll kept between me and special people in my life.  I am no specialist, no expert.  But I am trying to become a specialist.

I am trying to train myself in what loving well is.  I want to love well, love strongly, love hard.  And the implicit commitment it takes to want that, to desire that, and to pursue that desire is often unsettling.  I come to see what the desire means, along with what walking toward that desire requires.  It takes detailed effort to love.  Oh, we’d like to believe we love everybody.  I think the Savior said words that make us think we can do that.  But loving everybody is a perplexing impossibility.

Loving the people we know is hard enough and something we fail at so regularly that the Savior would blush at our insistent foolishness to misquote and misunderstand him when it came to behavior.  Thurman turned it correctly: Loving well is loving in particular.

It is loving the cracked skin and blemishes that won’t go away even though they may be covered.  Loving strongly is knowing the sheer vulnerability of your loved one and using that weakness to give them hope and inspiration and faith in humanity because you don’t do with your power what others untrained in such artistry would do.  Loving hard is the consistent exercise of staying with all those promises by the grace and help of every gift God gives.

I think doing this love, being in this love is one of life’s most consistent challenges.  And mostly because nothing really trains us toward it.  We are instructed and taught to dispense with things.  And that won’t help us become lovers.  Recycling and reusing are better words for love because love uses the raw materials of our particular lives, our real special selves, and does not force us to become something else, all while that love motivates (moves and pushes) us to become better.  Living that way is hard and usually so rewarding.

by Michael

Thurman on Stages to Maturity

The immediate reaction of the child is clear and precise: varying forms of protest from the sustained whisper to the roaring scream (these two words are used together quite advisedly).  Sometimes it is a battle of nerves between the baby and the mother.

At this point the baby is having his initial encounter with spiritual discipline.  A pattern of life has been interrupted.  In the presence of an expanding time interval between wish and fulfillment the child is forced to make adjustment, to make room in the tight circle of his life for something new, different, and therefore threatening.  The baby begins to learn how to wait, how to postpone fulfillment.  He thus finds his way into community within the family circle.

…If the response of the parents or others continues to be available on demand, the conscious or unconscious intent being to keep the time interval at zero between wish and fulfillment, the baby begins to get a false conditioning about the world and his place in it.  For if he grows up expecting and regarding as his due that to wish is to have his wish fulfilled, then he is apt to become a permanent cripple.  There are many adults who for various reasons have escaped this essential discipline of their spirit.  True, in terms of physical and intellectual development they have continued to grow.  Their bodies and minds have moved through all the intervening stages to maturity, but they have remained essentially babies in what they expect of life.  They have a distorted conception of their own lives in particular and of life in general.

by Michael

Parent-Teacher Conference

We went to Bryce’s parent-teacher conference the other day.  After I got over the fact that daycare centers require such things, I felt my chest swelling as his teacher said how well he was doing, how he, as their oldest child, was helping and getting special jobs and relishing them in his own way.  She asked what our concerns were, took notes as we (Dawn really) said what she wanted to them to focus on.  It was brief.  I almost wondered why we had set up the meeting in the first place.  It was short and short things get short-changed in my mind.  It took reflection time for me to appreciate that short meetings can be meaningful, that they can shape the way we approach the long marathon of fatherhood.

After the teacher left, we looked over his binder which captured in pictures and notes and forms his track record over the last year.  I’m not one of those parents—at least not yet—who says, “Time has moved so fast,” because I’ve taken this experiment as slowly as it’s come.  But that book was another reminder of my boy’s growth, of my wife’s growth as a mother, and of my own.  Maybe someone should require Parent-Teacher conferences where us parents are the subjects of discussion.

At Daycare

by Michael

Steps of Their New Life

Our children often grow away from us.  How painful it is to realize our children grow away from us, asserting independence from our wisdom and wishes.  However deep the wounds and anxieties of these experiences, our children’s growth and self-determination speak to our love, care, and concern we invested in them.  The end of this delicate dependence speaks to the setting of the course to which their lives must steer.  The greatest example of this is marriage.  In that union, our children become who they’re meant to be and step out on the foundation we have provided for them.  It is our continuing prayer that the voices of their past and the voice of the Eternal attend and order the steps of their new life.  There is perhaps no joy to match that of harmonious love in family where two generations are able to live not only in peace, but also in love.

From Gardner C. Taylor’s Faith in the Fire (pg. 110)