Archive for the ‘Quotations’ Category
Challenging presence
Edwin Friedman has his own way of charging parents to keep a close watch on ourselves, to pay attention to the logs in our own eyes:
Everything I have said above [about data addiction and anxiety] holds true for parenting as well. Over the years I found parents so engulfed in data and techniques that I stopped trying to educate them and started trying to free them from this “syndrome.” I developed a presentation entitled “How to Get Your Kid to Drop Out and Save $100,000 in Tuition” (it was $30,000 when I began). I always mention at the very beginning that all the specific “techniques” I am going to offer such as how to escalate conflict, screw up communication, and increase the generation gap will work better if parents will commit themselves to reading all they can about raising children. This, I point out, will help make them more anxious, more inconsistent, less self-confident, and far less the kind of non-anxious, challenging presence that could ultimately cost them a bundle of tuition. The advantages of trying to keep up, I point out, are that they can consistently worry if they are reading the right book, if the real truth has just come out and they do not even know about it, and if there are experts out there who “know” how to do it.
Parenting is no different from any other kind of “managing.” The critical issues in raising children have far less to do with proper technique than with the nature of the parents’ presence and the type of emotional processes they engender. I have, for example, almost never seen a mother who had mature relationship with her own mother have trouble with her daughter. Similarly, I never saw a highly reactive or hypercritical father who was not distant from his own family of origin (and who, thereby, made the members of his new nuclear family too important to him).
Where parents are willing to take responsibility for their own unworked-out relationships either with their own parents or with one another, children rarely develop serious symptoms. Symptoms in a child are most likely to develop in the areas of the parents’ own traumatization where they, therefore, have the least emotional flexibility. (Parents never seem to get the problems they can handle.) And to the extent child-focus enables parents not to have to deal with their own relationships or their own unresolved issues, that projection process will retard if not nullify all techniques and well-meaning efforts to improve the child, including the aid they seek from tutors and counselors.
To expect parents to focus on the emotional process in their own relationships rather than focus on their children requires having counselors (therapists, educators, clergy, and so on) who are willing to do likewise. And it is much easier for everyone to conspire to focus on data and technique instead. The social science construction of reality that would diagnose children instead of family emotional process, and that would allow parents to blame their ethnic background rather than take responsibility for their own responses, furthers the anxiety.
Edwin Friedman, A Failure of Nerve, 112-113
Duty
Duty impresses a structured hierarchy onto our lives. Duty never says, “You be you,” or “Go ahead and do what makes you happy.” Duty says, “This is who you are; do what is required.”
C. R. Wiley, The Household and the War for the Cosmos
I felt this was the key difference between the movie and book versions of A Wrinkle in Time, and perhaps many other such pairs as well.
See also: Self-control
Inventory
As soon as you don’t read the New Testament, all these irreligions come up again, because the Bible isn’t written as a luxury of sentiment. It is written as the inventory of the stupidities of the human race.
Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy, Comparative Religion, 1954
Worship
We all worship, every one of us, gentlemen, where he does something for nothing, you see. And we serve the Devil where we want to get something for nothing, which most of you try to get all the time.
Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy, Comparative Religion, 1954
Logos
Gentlemen, physics is for those poor people, the physicists, who are only able to dabble with things who cannot talk back. But you and I, gentlemen, in our highest moments, live in a living universe in which all the voices of the universe talk.
Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy, Comparative Religion, 1954
Good Timber
Douglas Malloch, HT: Michael Foster
The tree that never had to fight
For sun and sky and air and light,
But stood out in the open plain
And always got its share of rain,
Never became a forest king
But lived and died a scrubby thing.
The man who never had to toil
To gain and farm his patch of soil,
Who never had to win his share
Of sun and sky and light and air,
Never became a manly man
But lived and died as he began.
Good timber does not grow with ease:
The stronger wind, the stronger trees;
The further sky, the greater length;
The more the storm, the more the strength.
By sun and cold, by rain and snow,
In trees and men good timbers grow.
Where thickest lies the forest growth,
We find the patriarchs of both.
And they hold counsel with the stars
Whose broken branches show the scars
Of many winds and much of strife.
This is the common law of life.
Patience
The word patience means the willingness to stay where we are and live the situation out to the full in the belief that something hidden there will manifest itself to us. Impatient people are always expecting the real thing to happen somewhere else and therefore want to go elsewhere. The moment is empty. But patient people dare to stay where they are.
Henri Nouwen, via John Barach
Easy
A world where everything was easy would be a nursery for babies, but not at all a fit place for men.
C. H. Spurgeon; HT: Michael Foster
See also: Better
Becoming
We sometimes think our child is deficient because he wants to touch the vase and we have to transform the child into somebody who does not want to touch the vase. But your task is not to teach the child how to be a child—the child already knows how to be a child. You are not teaching your children to be children. You are teaching your children to grow into adults.
This is why, when you are in this showdown across the coffee table, you should look into the future with the eye of faith and see your child standing where you are now standing and their children standing where he is now standing. And how will he know how to deal his son? He will have learned how from you!
If you do not know how to be patient in the face of repeated provocations, your children are not going to know either. When you discipline your children correctly, you are loving your grandchildren. Your job is not to teach them how to be an acceptable child, but to show them how to be a responsible adult—because that is the whole point.
Be honest—you bought the vase at a yard sale last summer and that vase is going to be in another yard sale this coming summer. Who cares about the vase? The child is going to live forever. The child is not something you acquired or are going to get rid of in a yard sale. The vase is. You are not teaching the child to be a good version of what they are. You are rather teaching them to be what they are becoming. . .
This principle does not change. Suppose you are dealing with an obstinate teenager and you are thinking “How to fix the teenager” is your task for the day. Your job is not to fix the teenager. Your task is to model for that teenager how to be a parent. Your teen, in just a few short trips around the sun, is going to have a teenager of her own. You are not training her to be a teenager. She has that down already. You are preparing her for the day when she won’t be. . . .
. . . If I have mastered all the parenting techniques but have not love, I am nothing . . .
Imagine a father and a son in the presence of an unsplit cord of wood. What is the father’s duty? His duty is to take two axes, hand one of them to his son, and to love God and to also love a morning of splitting wood, and to do so alongside his son whom he also loves. That is what godly childrearing is.
Love God, love what you are doing, and love the people God gave you to do it with. Does that remove the need to correct? No, you have to show them how to hold the ax and keep them from swinging it around carelessly. Correction, discipline, teaching, mentoring—all of it must be there because you love Jesus, because you love the wood, and because you love your son. That is what you must do.
Douglas Wilson, Why Children Matter, Chapter 13
See also: Self-control
I gotta have my orange juice. 
Creed
with 3 comments
Written by Scott Moonen
September 2, 2019 at 5:03 pm
Posted in Books, Commentary, Quotations