Conversations with a Soul (18 page)

Forbes
identified a record 482 billionaires, while 47 million people live without health insurance, and 5 million have slipped below the poverty line.

In 1982 the highest paid CEO earned $108 million and the average full-time worker earned $34,199. In 2006,
14 years later
, the highest paid CEO’s earnings had climbed to $647 million and the average worker - $34,861
⁴⁸
,
and
they are faced with disappearing health coverage and pensions. Little wonder that many households now need two incomes to survive and little wonder that amongst many people a sense of despair has come to dominate their view of the future.

So once again we come up against questions of change and stability. Is anyone questioning the kind of society we are engaged in building, or has the acquisition of wealth become so important that money has become its own justification? Are we already living through a societal disintegration where stability for the middle classes is fast disappearing, condemned by changes designed to favour the wealthy?

Periodically I hear the comment;
they are very wealthy but you would never know it, they are just like the rest of us!
Does this mean that we carry around an assumption that people who have a lot of money don’t have to be like the rest of us? Does this mean that wealthy people have the option to be nice or not nice, considerate or inconsiderate, well-mannered or poorly mannered, caring or uncaring? Does this mean that having access to money somehow puts a person in a different category of being human?

Robert Bellah coined a provocative phrase,
The Poverty of Affluence.
Writing about critical choices faced by our country today, he suggests;

…
we have never before faced a situation that called our deepest assumptions so radically into question. Our problems today are not just political. They are moral and have to do with the meaning of life. We have assumed that as long as economic growth continued we could leave all else to the private sphere. Now that economic growth is faltering and the moral ecology on which we have tacitly depended is in disarray, we are beginning to understand that our common life requires more than an exclusive concern for material accumulation. Perhaps life is not a race whose only goal is being foremost…perhaps enduring commitment to those we love and civic friendship towards our fellow citizens are preferable to restless competition and anxious self-defence … we have imagined ourselves a special creation, set apart from other humans. In the late twentieth century we see that our poverty is as absolute as the poorest of nations. We have attempted to deny the human condition in our quest for power after power. It would be well for us to re-join the human race, to accept our essential poverty as a gift, and to share our material wealth with those in need.
⁴⁹

Patterns of change and stability weave their way through ancient times and no less so through modern ones. Distance sometimes lends clarity and affords us the luxury of reflection and judgment. Unfortunately, like Minerva’s owl, we are restricted to only see
the results
of our decisions,
after
we have implemented, or failed to implement them, a condition that calls for a great deal of wisdom. Ambiguity frequently replaces clarity when we try to hack our way through the undergrowth of rhetoric and focus on contemporary issues. Like an object held too close to our eyes, we can identify the shape, but not focus upon the details.

And, as we might expect, the same principles work their way through our tiny, intimate, nuclear family structures.

Sometimes consciously and sometimes not, we human beings weave the most intricate and complex patterns. Just think of the changing relational patterns woven by two people who work to stay in love and avoid the boredom that frequently haunts monogamy. To keep their relationship stable, fresh and vital, wise lovers have learned how to set new goals, employ novelty, engage in adventures, and tackle dangerous conversations that lead to ever deeper levels of intimacy.

Foolish, immature lovers don’t.

Therapists have long understood that many children, who have been sexually abused or forcibly exposed to domestic violence, tragically grow to accept these aberrations of behaviour as
the norm, the stable
. As adults these distorted patterns of “stability” return to haunt them, sometimes resulting in the victims becoming the perpetrators of abuse on others.

Even less dramatic and tragic, childhood experiences can lead to a distorted image of stability, and have the potential to condemn a child, and in later life, an adult, to a lifetime of despair and depression.

All of which serves to remind us that one of the most, if not
the most
difficult and complicated pattern anyone can face is really a complex of patterns implicit in the word
parenting
.

A child’s introduction to what constitutes desirable and healthy patterns of family life, as well as a healthy personal stability are two of the crucial,
fundamentally important
tasks of parenting.

Of course in the murky world of parenting, this responsibility seems to call for resources and wisdom way beyond what any reasonable human being can possibly be expected to summon. Every parent has sensed the terrible loneliness of having to make parenting decisions without parenting blueprints! If there be such a being as a parental guardian angel, he or she must work overtime during those formative years.

The invitation came at the worst possible time. The local company of “Weebelows,” a stage before being admitted to the Boy Scout troop, was planning a camp out. This was not just any camp, my son explained, for one of the most significant events of this Camp was the induction of a few boys into the prestigious “Order of the Arrow.” I knew how much he wanted to be one of the few inductees.

After circling about with a few broad hints and firing off several vague ideas, he came right out with it,

“
Dad, will you drive up for the day and be there?”

The thought of taking off a whole day and neglecting some urgent preparation for several significant engagements, not to mention having to traverse a track that promised immediate death to my car’s suspension, summoned a host of logical reasons for not going. All I had to do was cloth the reasons in words that a small boy could not refute.

Not a difficult assignment.

But the words were never spoken. Something, or someone said, “You need to go.”

I arrived at the camp a little late.

The lone figure standing waiting in the parking lot was my son.

Perhaps he used the time to prepare our day’s adventure, or maybe, he had long ago put it all together.

First on the list was archery. I, being an adult, naturally took the lead but I soon discovered that when it came to shooting arrows from a bow, and have them go in the general direction of the target, he was far better than I, and after a few disasters I gladly apprenticed myself to him and paid attention to his instructions. Then came poles and lashings and he taught me how to tie knots and how to safely rope poles together.

Then it was time for lunch and I joined what seemed like a barbarian horde of small boys, but he carefully guided me through the confusion and we took lunch together while a constant stream of boys came by to inspect “his Dad.”

After lunch it was a hike, and then fire safety, followed by supper, and suddenly it was time for the camp fire.

We sat in a circle, and waited through a speech or two and then waited some more as the drama unfolded.

Finally the decision was made.

He was one of three boys tapped out and accompanied by the cheers of fifty small boys, made a member of the order of the arrow.

I spent most of the time fighting an enormous lump in my throat and sniffing back tears that threatened to betray me in front of all the Weebelows.

On the way home the tears won.

I sniffed all the way down the mountain and gave thanks for one of the most wonderful days in my life. I didn’t care if the car’s suspension took a mortal blow it had all been worth every second.

I expressed gratitude, to whoever was listening, that I hadn’t missed it, any of it.

I am still grateful.

It’s so easy to miss the moment, and not see the sheer joy and magic, the mystery and wonder that make you want to sing and cry and treasure each second. It’s easy to obsesses about our parental inadequacies and shortcomings and lose sight of the fact that for the vast majority of well intentioned, blundering human beings the most difficult job in the world gets done, and out of all the uncertainty and confusion, every now and again it makes sense.

It makes sense when you watch that child, now all grown up, mount the stage to accept a diploma or a degree; or when you listen to them make their vows to another human being, or when you see them making wise choices for
their
children. At such times, it all comes together and, if you didn’t have to wipe your eyes and blow your nose, you would let loose with a thunderous “Hallelujah!”

Now as a graduate parent, I sometimes look back and wonder what happened to all the years? Was I really there when my children learned to speak, took off for school, brought home the first trophy and the first disillusionment? Did I really engage all those deep discussions about sex and alcohol and smoking and if I did, did I do a good job? If I could do it all over again I would want to slow everything down and somehow build forty-eight hours into every day.

But that’s a fantasy, and it’s rooted in another, namely, that children are ultimately the product of good or poor parenting. If only we could build in a bit more parenting, or a whole lot more parenting, if we could turn the clock back and do things differently, we could get the job successfully done.

This deep rooted idea of parental omnipotence has taken its place as a cornerstone in our mythology of family life. Unquestioned and unexamined we have been taught to think of children as putty to be shaped and moulded, for good or ill, by their all-powerful parents.
⁵⁰
Successful adults (whatever that means) are the result of dedicated and smart parenting, whereas those adults, who don’t succeed, are clearly the product of parents who failed in their duty.

Constantly promoted by shallow advice, which flows like a genetic disease from one generation to another, and supported by advocates of a quasi-religious-political movement who lay claim to what they call, 'family values,' parenting has, for many, degenerated into a controlling, guilt-ridden, destructive, manipulation of the human spirit. Family values are great things provided those values encourage children to discover and grow into their uniqueness, and celebrate the wonder of being who they are – even when the celebration contradicts many of their parent’s expectations.
⁵¹

But the issue of parenting goes much deeper, and soon invites a journey that leads far from simple, patterns of cause and effect, and beckons us on an excursion into the mystical language of the Soul.

Everyone in therapy, or affected by therapeutic reflection even as diluted by the tears of TV-talk is in search of an adequate biography. How do I put together into a coherent image the pieces of my life? How do I find the basic plot of my story? …we need to make clear that today’s main paradigm for understanding a human life, the interplay of genetics and environment, omits something essential – the particularity you feel to be you. By accepting the idea that I am the effect of a subtle buffeting between hereditary and societal forces, I reduce myself to a result. The more my life is accounted for by what already occurred in my chromosomes, by what my parents did or didn’t do, and by my early years now long past, the more my biography is the story of a victim. I am living a plot written by my genetic code, ancestral hereditary, traumatic occasions, parental unconsciousness, (and) societal accidents.
⁵²

The particularity you feel to be you!

More than any other, here is the quintessential language of parenting.

A particularity woven by forces and influences that go way beyond tragedy and trauma, our usual grim, overworked terms of Psychological explanation, and, instead bursts forth with a breathless excitement as I contemplate the wonder of being alive.

The particularity of being me is something to be celebrated and cherished for it is a particularity constantly in process of becoming – no matter what my parents did or didn’t do.

One of my favorite authors wrote of his father that,
he lived until he died.
His particularity was a thing of beauty to be celebrated every day. Unfortunately, many men and women live their lives as though they were the prime characters in an experiment on planned human obsolescence. Long before they breathe their last breathe something deep within yields up the wonder of being alive to the dark gods of despair. Spirit sacrificed to mediocrity.