The Roots of Our Stories

That story that helps you begin the day with energy, to engage the world with insight and empathy…  Where did that story come from?  Can attending to the roots of that story amplify it, or help you to grow similar stories?

And that story that closes you off, makes your thoughts spin without effect or love… Where did that story come from?  Can naming and letting these stories go then release you from their negative effects?

The stories we rehearse form us profoundly.  It is right to inspect their roots.

More Than God Requires

I once had a spiritual director tell me the following. 

“You know… It is possible to do more than God requires, and less than God desires.”

While infuriatingly vague, the maxim has stuck with me and functions to pose the following productive question.

What, in fact, does God desire?  

More than we can comprehend, surely, but perhaps essentially this: that we know how profoundly we are loved.

Truly knowing oneself as loved by God changes everything, and enables clearer vision of what, then, God requires.

The Retreat House, in Winter

Before we had kids, I would make a silent retreat every summer at the guest house on the campus of St. Mary’s College in South Bend.  

My favorite room in which to sit, read, and pray was a thin room that wrapped around the south wall of the house. On the second floor and with giant windows, the room welcomes visitors right in the trees, into a world of leaves and light. The depth of field in the summer months is about forty feet, obscured by vegetation.

After a few years of summer retreats, I then spent one winter weekend there.  The view from the room was completely different.  The leaves were gone.  The sun was filtered through many clouds.  And, most strikingly, the depth of field was much greater.  I could see over a mile now, through the leafless trees, all the way down to the river.  

Winter, then, afforded an enhanced perspective.

The “winters” of life, moments of loss, conflict, or pain, can be a challenge, sometimes of uninterpretable ruthlessness.  Only with good company, I think, can we navigate these winters, and tune into the unique perspective that they offer, the expanded depth of field.  This transformed vision can fuel a life of remarkable compassion. 

Teaching That Takes Something Away

When both of our sons were learning to eat solid food, they would occasionally stuff so much in their mouths that they could no longer eat.  The only way forward was to take all the food out and start again.  Teaching them to eat, then, meant taking food away.

The best teachers, I think, do something similar.  If a learner is stuck on a limiting belief or an idol of the mind, the savvy teacher does not add more input.  Instead, she works to relieve the learner of the limitation.  Once this idol is removed, the learner has more space to see what is real.

Frustratingly, our brains protect these idols with brutal force, namely through confirmation bias, making giving up limiting beliefs uniquely difficult.  The idol’s bodyguards can live inside the texture of our own thinking. 

While difficult, relinquishing a limiting way of thinking is some of the most important learning we can do.  Giving up the “information” that limits our intelligence, imagination, and love can save our lives.

Beginning With Joy

Most afternoons, I take our sons to a neighborhood park.  Our two-year-old is fascinated by the basketball hoop there.

He will take our mini soccer ball out of the stroller, square up to the hoop, and shoot the ball.  The hoop is regulation size, so his attempt falls well short.  Sometimes it flies backwards over his head.

Two bits to note:

First: He loves this exercise.  He knows he is not “doing it right,” but delights absolutely in the attempt.

Second:  He is actually getting better.  He is jumping and releasing the ball at (more or less) the right time.  The ball flies a little higher.

When we start any new thing, we are not going to be awesome at it.  A new flavor of empathy.  Communication in a new context.  Navigating the interior life after major life events.  We will surely stumble.  How could it be otherwise?

But if we accept the newness with joy and gentleness, a new world can open up.  And absent this gentle joy, it can be very difficult to begin something new.

Who Is Thriving?

When I am at my worst, I consider the constraints in my life with the mindset of a victim.  (“This is terrible!  I don’t have x!  I cannot do y!”)

Two things help break this cycle:

First, I realize that many other people have the same constraints that I do.

Second, I realize that many of these people with the very same constraints are thriving.

I escape from my impoverished mindset when I ask: Why are these people thriving?  Can I do the same?

Feel Good or Think Hard?

When we choose where and how to learn about the world, (i.e. a news source, a podcast, membership in a community) what guides this decision?  

Do we seek to feel good?  Perhaps morally superior?  

Or do we seek to learn?  To think hard and cultivate an expansive vision of the world?

It’s up to us to strike a balance.  This balance takes courage and serves the common good.

Teaching, Involuntarily

I am obsessed with my son’s dentist office.

The first time we showed up, they let me know that only children were allowed back to the exam rooms. Parents had to wait in the car or in the waiting room. 

When I first heard this, I had a pretty severe interior allergic reaction to it. (He was only three!)  Then, I considered their reasoning.  Their experience as well as numerous studies show that young people learn to fear the dentist from the grown-ups in their lives.  That is, the parents teach their children, non-verbally and without intention, to fear and resist the dental exam.  Without the grownups, the exam goes smoothly.  

The place runs like a dream.  My son loves the dentist.  The boundary works.  

We are always teaching, for good or for ill.  That something is scary, or not.  That someone or something is worthy, or not.  Let’s watch how we teach, and be grateful for the boundaries that save us from teaching something that we never wanted to.

Insurance Policy or Treasure Map

These are two very different pieces of paper.  Humans relate very differently to each one.

Sometimes I wonder: Is my relationship with the Gospel more like that of an insurance policy or a treasure map?

An insurance policy makes me feel secure for minimal input.  It leads me nowhere and exerts no attractive moral force over my life.

A treasure map leads us on an adventure and gives us hints about where the good stuff is. 

A Child Attends to Beauty

Our firstborn learned to walk in the middle of a Chicago winter.  I was home with him full-time, so, to survive, we had a lot of indoor adventures together.

One of our favorite outings was to go to the children’s area at the planetarium by our apartment. 

During one morning at the planetarium, faint sounds of a choir carried into our area.  I heard it, but stayed seated.  My son lifted his face toward the sound, grabbed my hand, and ambled off toward its source. On the other side of the complex, we found a children’s choir and sat together to listen.  He was rapt, turning away only to make sure that I was listening, too. 

Attending to a child attending to beauty is a deeply remarkable thing.  I am convinced that, in moments like these, we are invited to become like children.