Category Archives: Contribution

What Do You Have to Say for Yourself?

Years ago in Chicago, we had a friend who, on someone’s birthday, would put them on the spot and ask: “So, now that you are x years old, what do you have to say for yourself?”

I came to love the exercise, to watch others take account and share a bit of their distilled wisdom.

My birthday was this week, and my brother challenged me to answer the beloved question on the blog.  So, for 2021, here is my answer.

It has been of great value to me to discover my story, to understand who I am and how I tend to engage the world.

It has also been of great value to me to discover our stories, to understand the narratives of the tribes of which I find myself a part.

And it is of ultimate value to me to consistently lay both my story and our stories into the narrative of The Story, the mystery of a loving God.  This movement saves my story and our stories from becoming idols over which I obsess.  

Put another way, kenosis before The Story returns me to my story and our stories with power, clarity, and the freedom to love, tuned to what is of ultimate value.

Ways to Limit Our Intelligence

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.

Rest and Haircuts

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.

Enough

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 Senectus

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?

What Confers Status?

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.

Error Messages, Considered Curiously

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.

One-Browser-Tab Time

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.

A Saint Goes to Psychotherapy

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.