on accompaniment, attentiveness, and contribution
If we want to limit our intelligence, the following list is a good place to start:
1) Love being right.
2) Be addicted to the moral high ground.
3) Restrict your sources of knowledge.
4) Relate only with people who are like you.
5) Relate only with people who agree with you.
Let’s acknowledge that intelligence can be a communal virtue, and work diligently to cultivate it.
I love getting a haircut, and I think it is mainly because, for those fifteen minutes, it is my job to do nothing. There is zero pressure to accomplish anything. There is no real way to use my smartphone. I can just breathe and enjoy the experience.
And, really, releasing my mind from all tasks for a chunk of time may be the best thing I do all day for my imagination, and so my productivity.
Put another way: Imagination without rest is not possible, and skill without imagination is barren.
Managing a family’s financial future is a lifelong balance with a great many variables.
One central variable, that affects many others, is the variable of “enough.” At any given point in our lives, can I say if we have “enough?” Enough money. Enough living space. Enough stuff.
It is tricky to solve for “enough,” but it is worth the mental energy because when our answer for “enough” becomes clearer, so does our capacity to be generous.
Memento mori, latin for “remember your death,” is a powerful spiritual practice. When we recall that we are finite, we are freed to live with singular purpose and focus on the most important things.
Relatedly, I wonder what happens when we consider memento senectus, “remember your old age?”
God willing, we will reach old age and, during that time, our bodies and minds will probably work less well and the context of our days will have changed considerably.
When we consider this reality, what effect does it have on how we want to live today?
Here is a question that gets right to the heart of a community’s culture: Within this community, what confers status?
Put another way: You see those people at the top of the heap? Why do we have a collective understanding that those people are at the top?
I’ve been part of communities that have conferred status based on the following:
-Seniority
-Generosity and consistency
-Conspicuous performance of ideological purity
-Looking like other people regarded as high status
-Level of contribution
-Articulate confidence
-Athleticism
-Professional excellence
Getting clear on what confers status in a community helps us understand how it runs. That is a huge step toward understanding the culture and, therefore, gaining perspective on how you can help it to grow.
When programming a web application, error messages constantly appear in the browser where the project is being built, displaying text describing that something is going wrong. (A file is missing. A typo broke part of the program. A module is missing. The server is misconfigured.)
Some error messages are clear. Some are difficult to decipher.
These messages are a constant part of the building experience, and so the programmer must make a constant choice. She can see the error as a chance to learn, to improve the project, to hone her skill. Or, she can let herself hate the error message and bear down in frustration each time a message appears.
One approach will lead to growth and the other will lead to painful frustration.
We encounter error messages, in life, all the time. Those things don’t go quite right based on our narratives about the world, in professional, personal, political, or social spheres.
Let us try to welcome these messages with a compassionate curiosity and generous engagement, and, when we fail, resolve to become curious about what keeps us from being able to do so.
When working on my computer, I am often guilty of having a comical number of browser tabs open at one time. Each tab represents a reminder to do something or an open loop I need to close. And the sheer number of tabs that are open keeps me from attending to any one task well.
The most important things (our most cherished relationships, time spent in prayer, dedicated generosity) deserve our single-minded attentiveness, as if it were the only browser tab open in our minds. Protecting this focused time is both tough and worth it.
Did you know that St. Oscar Romero went to psychotherapy? He did!
As a young seminarian and priest, Romero’s prayer and discipleship was bound by his obsessive-compulsive personality disorder which manifested as a self-absorbing scrupulosity.
Here is a key bit from the book where I learned about all this, linking his therapeutic and his saintly journeys.
“[A] psychic / affective conversion within the particularities of [Romero’s] OCPD and scrupulosity revealed psychological complexes, which, once engaged, freed him from the rigidity of their hold, healing and transforming the complexes into a source of energy he never imagined or realized he had at his disposal.” (Pg. 154, Archbishop Oscar Romero: A Disciple Who Revealed the Glory of God, by D. Zynda)
Romero channeled this energy into becoming a superlative pastor and archbishop, and his commitment to God and the Salvadoran people flowered more fully each year.
Much is written and taught about Romero’s courage in the face of the violence that ultimately took his life. We should write and teach more about how an indispensable part of his capacity for such a witness was rooted in the courage to show up to psychotherapy.
To create and share that thing you have imagined.
To commit (actually) to that habit that will lead you on a healthier path.
To reach out and start that important conversation.
To develop a relationship with a therapist and / or a spiritual director.
How long are you going to wait?
When Ernest Shackleton publicly solicited applications for an expedition to the South Pole early in 1914, he reportedly did so with words similar to the following:
“Men wanted for hazardous journey, small wages, bitter cold, long months of complete darkness, constant danger, safe return doubtful, honor and recognition in case of success.”
The response to the advertisement was massive and overwhelming. Around 5,000 applications poured in, many of them from men with superlative talent. When the crew had been chosen and the ship finally set sail, someone even stowed away on the ship, so badly did he want to be part of the journey.
They were motivated by the crystal clear sense of adventure and mission.
What if we, as a church, shared a similarly clear sense of adventure and mission? If we had this sense, what would we do differently?
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