Once again I bring the comments out onto a blog. You won't understand this one unless you start with a couple posts back ("Greetings!") and follow the conversation I'm having with my excellent friend, Graham. Who, by the way, is headed for BYU Law in the fall (congratulations, Graham), and as you can tell will do very well.
I wanted to clarify something I said earlier, so as not to leave the suggestion that I want in any way to denigrate the acquisition of skills, particularly in parenting or in any other interpersonal dimension. I have spent some time discovering, learning, and ... okay, I'll say "perfecting" ... skills that help me be a better parent. And during my brief career as a mediator and teacher of mediation techniques, I often heard people say that what they learned in mediation training had beneficial effects in their "daily life," especially in family relationships. The thing is, skills are morally neutral, which is why I suggested to Graham that we should try to discover why we are yelling at the kids. Am I a "naturally" irritable person with poor impulse control? Am I emotionally damaged from a lack of nurturing in my own childhood? Do I come from a culture where yelling is the norm in family life? And what do I think about this? Do I think yelling is a character flaw? Do I fail to see that I'm am "taking it out on the family" when something else is really the source of my anger? Are my children particularly annoying? Do I have more of them than a human being can possibly deal with?
I have known emotionally cold people who never yell at the their children but damage them nevertheless. I have known emotionally volatile people who yell all the time, and nobody seems the worse for wear. However, has anybody (maybe you, Mike, as I recall?) had an experience where a Church leader said something about certain tendencies or inculturated habits (such as emotional volatility or attitudes men might have towards women and children) being nevertheless inexcusable? Anyway, skills are skills and can be used for good or ill.
Say I develop awareness, learn all sorts of skills and techniques, practice impulse control. Learn to be kind, all that. That's good. Beneficial for me and my family. But such skills are also learned for unholy purposes. To advance oneself socially or politically. To build a strong downline (get gain). I know people who unabashedly teach that you should love your employees in order to increase productivity. We're not going to argue the result. But the motives seem to me cynical, manipulative, and therefore unholy. Even in the presence of a "good" result. An elementary school principal patiently explained to me when I complained that a tight system of rewards and punishments was depriving the children of the opportunity to understand and develop healthy internal motivations: "Well, Mrs. Thayer. Most of our patrons appreciate the improvement in behavior that our program has brought about." Yeah, well. I saw a goodly number of those kids after hours.
I Corinthians 13 doesn't say that almsgiving and prophesying don't have good results if the motives are improper. It just says that as far as the actor goes, there is no eternal benefit.
Anyway, these issues deserve attention, because they have to do with nothing less than this: Who is God? And how do we become as God is? Here's what I couldn't get quite right in all the years of my youthful striving: Be still, and know.
What do you DO, though, when you lift your head? You do as the Spirit directs. But you're not a robot, so being prepared, knowledgeable, skillful is good. Give the Spirit something to work with.
Are we getting closer, Graham?
Monday, May 4, 2009
Perfection
Graham and I are having a conversation under the "Greetings" blog that I'd like to bring into focus, because it's a topic that has for a long time been very important to me. Check Graham's last post about training. Here is my response:
Logically speaking (and in reality, I think), a product (training) orientation can never lead to wholeness, which is what "perfection" is. I'm happy that the "new" annotated LDS scriptures (the ones you all grew up with) contain in the footnote to Matthew 5:48 an explanation of "perfect" as it would have been understood in a 1611 translation of teleios into English: "complete, finished, fully developed." (Think teleology, that which something is fundamentally, in and of itself. Think whole number; the Latin equivalent is integer; think integrity.) And think about this in the context of D&C 67:13: "Ye are not able to abide the presence of God now, neither the ministering of angels; wherefore, continue in patience until ye are perfected." Made whole, made what you fundamentally are, without that which holds you from perfection, constrains, tempts, pollutes you, holds you back, draws you away. Made complete, increased in capacity and then filled with the knowledge, power, and will to goodness that makes you (like) God.
The problem with a checklist/training/product orientation is that you CANNOT be perfected (made whole) that way. It's an impatient, self-directed, finite, never-ending process looking outside itself, toward an end, a goal, a product. If you proceed in increments (think Zeno's arrow), there will always be another increment. Perfection can't be linear. Infinity isn't linear. That's Greek thinking, with the head. The Hebrew thinking, with the heart, is circular. All truth is circumscribed into one great whole. As a man thinketh in his heart, so IS he. It can happen in a moment for the person prepared, as that person completely submits to the will of God and becomes a new creature in Christ, whole. And it can be lost in an instant, as we turn from the center (Christ) and veer off on a tangent. This is a process, to be sure, but involving yielding not striving, one with which we must have patience, working out our salvation with fear (awe) and trembling, before the Lord. While we are in mortality, we'll never finish, it will never "hold" (unless we have our callings and elections "made sure" by the presence of the Lord Himself). But if we are experienced in the process, we are ready at the end of mortality to enter into the Rest of the Lord, to come into His presence and know His Glory.
This is why charity (love, an emotion/will/capacity, not a series of actions) is the greatest of all the spiritual gifts, and the one without which, in the end, we are "nothing," all our actions being (in) vain. Wholeness implies a condition/state of being. God is (has become) LOVE. He is no-thing other. He acts only out of wholeness, and having no disposition to do evil, he can only do good. That is perfection.
Here's something: We don't learn "things" in the temple. We learn a way of being. Think of how your (one's, my) problem with your temper utterly vanishes in certain contexts. Instantly. God doesn't get up in the morning and say, Wow, Lucifer really makes me angry, so I'd better get that under better control. God is what he does. (Does what he is.) Because he is love. I don't think this is like hitting the perfect tennis ball without thought because I have trained myself over and over again to do it. It's that my whole body is filled with light, and there is no darkness in me. Missing the ball is not an option. Nor is missing anything else, regardless of whether I have ever tried it before.
I can't stress enough how important this is. Is has taken me most of my adult life to shake off the shackles of accomplishment, striving, the training/product mentality that got me where I am today (and I'm glad of it) and in the meantime plunged me into a depression I couldn't pray myself out of. When there was no one else to measure myself against, I would measure myself against myself. It was never enough. A house divided against itself cannot stand. I didn't.
I have been studying this matter since I was a 19-year-old freshman. That's more than 40 years now. When my big crash came (just under 25 years ago, just after my adorable Mikey was born), I had already been pondering love and accomplishment for many years. In the old days before these new editions of scriptures were produced, without a reliable concordance, I had to go through the Standard Works line-by-line to find all the references to love. So I understood the thing intellectually pretty well before the stresses of striving for perfection (6 kids in 9 years and no report card to tell me how I was doing) got me. I pondered taking drugs for the depression, as the doctor ordered. But instead, through a combination of hard work that I called "scrupulous mental hygiene" and a re-ordering of my understanding of God, I came out of it. After about 15 years.
Sounds like training, doesn't it? I re-trained my brain. So this is the sense in which you are surely right, Graham. I have treated this issue at some length elsewhere, as some of you already know. In a nutshell, it's a mortal paradox. We live in a time-bound sphere in which scarcity makes competition necessary. And we are aiming for eternity, where abundance makes competition pure evil.
I'll leave you with that for now. I have to go mow the back lawn before it rains. AGAIN!
Love to all on a Monday morning!
P.S. Could it be that Graham and I are merely exhibiting the typical masculine/feminine, Greek/Hebraic, spear/vessel, linear/circular, mechanical/organic polar modes of thinking about the same thing, both of which modes are necessary to the comprehending of Reality? (The kind of "opposition" in all things ... note not rival but necessary ... that "must needs be"?) The "proving" of which contraries will yield ... eventually, finally ... Truth? (Which is ultimately experiential, contextual, not factual?) Hey, hey!
It's all in the process. The means doesn't justify the end, it IS the end! Or is this just another example of my mode at work? Can I no longer even think outside of it? Wait, but I AM thinking, and striving. Hm.
The problem is that I'm back inside blogging because I couldn't get the lawn mower started, so I have to wait until my husband comes home and figures it out. I lack both experience with and information about this mower. It's not that I'm a girl; it's that I'm lawn-mower challenged. Actually, it IS that I'm a girl and am mowing the lawn only for exercise. I certainly did mow as many lawns in my youth as my brother did, but since I've had husband and sons ....
Never mind.
Logically speaking (and in reality, I think), a product (training) orientation can never lead to wholeness, which is what "perfection" is. I'm happy that the "new" annotated LDS scriptures (the ones you all grew up with) contain in the footnote to Matthew 5:48 an explanation of "perfect" as it would have been understood in a 1611 translation of teleios into English: "complete, finished, fully developed." (Think teleology, that which something is fundamentally, in and of itself. Think whole number; the Latin equivalent is integer; think integrity.) And think about this in the context of D&C 67:13: "Ye are not able to abide the presence of God now, neither the ministering of angels; wherefore, continue in patience until ye are perfected." Made whole, made what you fundamentally are, without that which holds you from perfection, constrains, tempts, pollutes you, holds you back, draws you away. Made complete, increased in capacity and then filled with the knowledge, power, and will to goodness that makes you (like) God.
The problem with a checklist/training/product orientation is that you CANNOT be perfected (made whole) that way. It's an impatient, self-directed, finite, never-ending process looking outside itself, toward an end, a goal, a product. If you proceed in increments (think Zeno's arrow), there will always be another increment. Perfection can't be linear. Infinity isn't linear. That's Greek thinking, with the head. The Hebrew thinking, with the heart, is circular. All truth is circumscribed into one great whole. As a man thinketh in his heart, so IS he. It can happen in a moment for the person prepared, as that person completely submits to the will of God and becomes a new creature in Christ, whole. And it can be lost in an instant, as we turn from the center (Christ) and veer off on a tangent. This is a process, to be sure, but involving yielding not striving, one with which we must have patience, working out our salvation with fear (awe) and trembling, before the Lord. While we are in mortality, we'll never finish, it will never "hold" (unless we have our callings and elections "made sure" by the presence of the Lord Himself). But if we are experienced in the process, we are ready at the end of mortality to enter into the Rest of the Lord, to come into His presence and know His Glory.
This is why charity (love, an emotion/will/capacity, not a series of actions) is the greatest of all the spiritual gifts, and the one without which, in the end, we are "nothing," all our actions being (in) vain. Wholeness implies a condition/state of being. God is (has become) LOVE. He is no-thing other. He acts only out of wholeness, and having no disposition to do evil, he can only do good. That is perfection.
Here's something: We don't learn "things" in the temple. We learn a way of being. Think of how your (one's, my) problem with your temper utterly vanishes in certain contexts. Instantly. God doesn't get up in the morning and say, Wow, Lucifer really makes me angry, so I'd better get that under better control. God is what he does. (Does what he is.) Because he is love. I don't think this is like hitting the perfect tennis ball without thought because I have trained myself over and over again to do it. It's that my whole body is filled with light, and there is no darkness in me. Missing the ball is not an option. Nor is missing anything else, regardless of whether I have ever tried it before.
I can't stress enough how important this is. Is has taken me most of my adult life to shake off the shackles of accomplishment, striving, the training/product mentality that got me where I am today (and I'm glad of it) and in the meantime plunged me into a depression I couldn't pray myself out of. When there was no one else to measure myself against, I would measure myself against myself. It was never enough. A house divided against itself cannot stand. I didn't.
I have been studying this matter since I was a 19-year-old freshman. That's more than 40 years now. When my big crash came (just under 25 years ago, just after my adorable Mikey was born), I had already been pondering love and accomplishment for many years. In the old days before these new editions of scriptures were produced, without a reliable concordance, I had to go through the Standard Works line-by-line to find all the references to love. So I understood the thing intellectually pretty well before the stresses of striving for perfection (6 kids in 9 years and no report card to tell me how I was doing) got me. I pondered taking drugs for the depression, as the doctor ordered. But instead, through a combination of hard work that I called "scrupulous mental hygiene" and a re-ordering of my understanding of God, I came out of it. After about 15 years.
Sounds like training, doesn't it? I re-trained my brain. So this is the sense in which you are surely right, Graham. I have treated this issue at some length elsewhere, as some of you already know. In a nutshell, it's a mortal paradox. We live in a time-bound sphere in which scarcity makes competition necessary. And we are aiming for eternity, where abundance makes competition pure evil.
I'll leave you with that for now. I have to go mow the back lawn before it rains. AGAIN!
Love to all on a Monday morning!
P.S. Could it be that Graham and I are merely exhibiting the typical masculine/feminine, Greek/Hebraic, spear/vessel, linear/circular, mechanical/organic polar modes of thinking about the same thing, both of which modes are necessary to the comprehending of Reality? (The kind of "opposition" in all things ... note not rival but necessary ... that "must needs be"?) The "proving" of which contraries will yield ... eventually, finally ... Truth? (Which is ultimately experiential, contextual, not factual?) Hey, hey!
It's all in the process. The means doesn't justify the end, it IS the end! Or is this just another example of my mode at work? Can I no longer even think outside of it? Wait, but I AM thinking, and striving. Hm.
The problem is that I'm back inside blogging because I couldn't get the lawn mower started, so I have to wait until my husband comes home and figures it out. I lack both experience with and information about this mower. It's not that I'm a girl; it's that I'm lawn-mower challenged. Actually, it IS that I'm a girl and am mowing the lawn only for exercise. I certainly did mow as many lawns in my youth as my brother did, but since I've had husband and sons ....
Never mind.
Subscribe to:
Comments (Atom)
