Sermon: Taking Responsibility

[ previous | index | next ]

Taking Responsibility - II

By Charles Rush

October 15, 2006

[ Audio (mp3, 6Mb) ]

generation, the MBA and Law school graduates of the early 80's, were the subject of ridicule by the likes of Tom Wolfe in 'The Bonfire of the Vanities' in which he chronicles the excesses of wealth and the ironies it portended in that very expansive decade. I believe it was Mr. Wolfe who called the new found titans of investment banking the "Masters of the Universe".

It was during this generation that Leona Helmsley, the wife of the Hotel magnate Harry Helmsley, made a casual remark that 'only the little people pay taxes'. That was in the late 90's, an apt aphorism of the time. There is one set of rules for ordinary people, another set for the elite. This was truer for the generation than we would like to admit.

So a few years ago, I was at the annual fraternity golf outing with 20 guys that I went to college with. Now that we are older and one of us is dying, we spend a few minutes every weekend on a serious subject to all of us, a very few minutes. This year, we were talking about our sons, our teenage sons. We were thinking back when we were young and how we are relating to our sons now.

One of my fraternity brothers practices law in Atlanta and his son is enrolled in a prestigious prep school there. He wanted our feedback on an incident that had happened to him recently. His son plays football and was out with some other football players towards the end of the season. They were drinking rather heavily that night. A bunch of them piled in the car and were racing around when they swerved the car in a residential neighborhood at a high rate of speed, the car skidded into a tree and got wedged in a ditch. The boys piled out of the car and the driver called his Dad, also a prominent lawyer in Atlanta. The kid tells his father what happened and asks him what to do. The father says, 'did anyone see you hit the tree.' The kid says, 'I don't think so, no one is around.' The father says, 'Get out of there as fast as you can and leave the car where it is.'

My fraternity brothers son was in that car that night and only heard about this story months later. He was livid for a number of reasons but he asked us what he should do? Apparently, this father's motivation revolved around protecting his son's admission to a reputable college, worried that a DUI would compromise that and complicate his son's life. None of the boys appeared to be hurt too badly and legally speaking an abandoned car that was wrecked was something for Father to investigate aggressively or just drop and pay for himself.

This provoked a round of stories about our own High School infractions, how they were dealt with, and the advice that we received about them. At the end of a longish discussion, we just wondered out loud, how it is that we have become so over-protective of our children that one of us, whose vocation is to uphold the law, could seriously counsel his child to blatently violate the law because he is so special. What are we teaching our kids? And, what kind of relationship is this with the younger generation?

I thought of that conversation last summer. I was in our nations capital because one of the kids I had in Youth group a few years ago was on trial. Towards the end of his Senior Year, he had gotten into a fight with another Senior after a long year of mutual recriminations- a woman was involved, a damaged car was involved. At any rate, they went at it one Friday night and my kid got the first three or four punches in and whipped the other kid pretty good. Young men do these things from time to time. The family of the whipped pressed charges aggressively and my kid ended up in the Big House for a few weeks awaiting trial. I was down there as a character witness.

I wasn't sure what to expect, as I hadn't seen him in a couple years. He was the same sweet kid I'd known. He'd spent the summer doing volunteer service, working, depressed, because he also wasn't sure that his college would actually admit him with violence on his record. But, after thinking about everything, he plead guilty, and asked me to come to his sentencing, which I did.

I was sitting with him in the courthouse before we went in. His father was talking with him. I talked with him. He was afraid. The judge had a reputation of throwing the book at suburban kids and he had no interest in going back to jail ever again. We asked him if he was sorry for what had happened. He said 'yes'. We asked him to be as genuine as he could with the judge. He said he would.

We went into the court. After the plaintiffs made a statement about the suffering they had endured, the judge turned to my kid and asked him if he had anything to say. His eyes were full of tears. He stood up and said, "Your Honor… I take full responsibility for my actions." The judge was silent for a while, looked down at her papers. I'm sure that she so rarely hears that line that she was taken aback. After some moral admonishment, she gave him a moderate sentence and it was over. I was never so proud of one of my kids, one of our kids, as in that moment. By the way, he decided to tell the college about the episode rather than let them find out. And they figured out a reasoned approach to dealing with the situation that allowed him to start school and get on with his life.

The truth is, this is what we really want for our children. We want them to grow up to be responsible. Someone gave me a book recently called "The Blessing of a Skinned Knee" by the psychologist Wendy Mogel. She wrote the book because she started to recover some of the best insights from her tradition in Judaism after many years of working in an environment of over-protective parents in California.

"The Talmud sums up the Jewish perspective on child-rearing in a single sentence: 'A father is obligated to teach his son how to swim'", she writes. "Jewish wisdom holds that our children don't belong to us. They are both a loan and a gift from God, and that gift has strings attached. Our job is to raise our children to leave us. The children's job is to find their own path in life. If they stay carefully protected in the nest of the family, children will become weak and fearful or feel too comfortable to want to leave."[1]

Dr. Mogel sees a level of over-protection that I don't, but I suspect that our teachers who see a broad swath of the culture would confirm that general outlines of the trend. She is at a conference in California and a mother asks a question about her child being unable to sleep through the night after an earth quake.

Dr. Mogel asks her if the child sleeps with her at night. The mother says no, so the Dr. asks how she knows she's afraid and the mother says, "She sleeps in the housekeepers bed." That draws a slack-jawed look of incredulity.

The Dr. asks, 'Does the housekeeper mind?'

'No', says the mother, 'that was a condition for her employment.' Frankly, I gotta tell you, I don't recall this in a house-keepers job description when I was a child.

The therapist stops for a moment and says, "A human teddy bear… Your daughter has a human teddy bear."[2]

What was interesting about the exchange is that this mother had not had any exceptional traumas herself, nor had her child. She thought this was a relatively normal, somewhat eccentric, but relatively normal way to deal with the situation… and she could pay for it.

The sub-text here appears to be two-fold often. One is parents thinking to themselves that they can't handle whatever the issue is, they need some extra help. The second is that they can afford it, they have the opportunity to give their children certain advantages that they never had, and they want to do extra for them in order to do for them. It does not seem to have occurred to us yet, that we can actually over-compensate and create a different set of problems.

Dr. Mogel has an instructive analogy from the Bible. She reminds us that in the Exodus, God appears as the Miracle Maker in the beginning. The waters part, so the Israelites can flee, manna appears in the desert so they can eat, Moses taps his staff on a rock so they can drink water. All their needs are provided for.

It is the way parents appear to infants. They cry, we feed them, we change them, we make them warm, we give them medicine so their illness abates.

But, she says, as the Israelites get further in the desert, God retreats. God is more aloof and they have to figure things out on their own. They have to experience a certain amount of pain that comes from living. They have to endure the consequences of bad choices. Jews call this the tzar gidul banim, the pain of living that helps us to learn and makes us stronger, and orients us to value the right things and avoid destructive things. But if we parents continue making "miracles on demand, we are unwittingly slowing down the development of our children's (inner) strength."[3] This is what we are doing broadly across this generation.

She says, "When Dustin's teacher won't allow him to be in the school play because of his C grade in English and his mother promises to go talk to the principal, telling Dustin, "I don't see why she's making such a big deal out of one C,' She's giving him an unrealistic impression of the world. Dustin's college professors, colleagues and employers won't be creating special rules just for him. When Ellie's feelings are hurt about not getting invited to Mimi's birthday party and her dad offers to call up Mimi's mom to try to find out why, he's teaching her that missing out on aparty is a catastrophe that deserves special intervention. When we treat our children's lives like we're cruise ship directors who must get them to their destination- adulthood- smoothly, without their feeling even the slightest bump or wave, we're depriving them."[4]

"Cruise Ship directors"… I love that line painful as it is. My generation set out to follow the Grateful Dead as a life ambition and somehow we became parental Cruise Ship directors, spiritually speaking.

This is a broad generational ethos that permeates the background we all live in to some degree. And it is ironic. If I had to speculate, I think the well-intentioned reasoning went like this. I didn't have much guidance or help as a youth and I managed to become pretty successful. How much better my children's lives out to turn out if they got some selective guidance.

I went to public school and a small liberal arts college, how much better if I can send them to a great public school or a private school and they can get into an elite college. I had a lot of free time on my hands as a child and my parents only attended just a few of my games and I had quite a lot of talent, how much better if my kids are in structured sports, camps, and we work together. I hardly ever went on vacation, only saw other countries because I paid for myself to go to Europe in college, how much better if I can afford to send my children to see all manner of interesting places with me and we can discover together, earlier some of the mysteries I only learned of much later. On and on this goes… until we do not realize the degree that we are oversteering the boat of our children's lives.

But we have plenty of anecdotal evidence that the boat is being over-steered. You probably saw the series of articles last summer in the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal on dropping Johnny and Jill off at college. Nowadays, the colleges can't get parents to leave. Colleges are having to hire upper-classmen to gently steer parents towards their cars so their kids can go to the retreat alone. They call them 'helicopter parents' because they hover right over their children's lives.

They listed examples of parents going to the registrar to try to alter their kids class schedule- and at $45k/yr. who can blame them? Professors cite numerous examples of parents inundating them with e-mail over every paper and exam. The reporter asked one of them if it was really as bad as it was made out to be. He peered over his glasses and said, "You can't make this up."

Gone are the days when college coed's and their parents talked once a week on Sunday nights because it was cheaper and there was only one phone on the dorm hall.

It is almost like we are collectively thinking, 'We now know what we would have done differently- and we turned out pretty successfully- so if my kids will just do X they ought to be really successful and happy.'

I completely understand how this happens. I remember sitting with one of my kids, editing a college application for the 4th time, realizing that I had done way too much- and it was starting to feel like the more I did, the more I was asked to do, and I said to myself and to my child, "I've already gone to college… This is your application."

We have our own lives to live, (and they actually aren't that sad or sorry), we have to let our children live theirs. It is true that maybe, as a generation, we wish we had been given some more support. But it doesn't seem to have occurred to us collectively that maybe- just maybe- the upside of not having so much support, the upside of having to go out there and sort of flounder on our own until we figured it out with some failures along the way and some wasted time along the way, and some bad experiences along the way- is that we got stronger inside. And this is the spiritual point of our lives, to become people of substantial character. That is what our lives are all about. This was our destiny, so to speak. It was what we had to learn so that we could grow. It could have been different, but it wasn't, in large part, because we were who we were. At any rate, that is the point now, that where we were weak, with God's help, we became stronger and more rounded.

Ultimately, the point of our lives is not about controlling external forces, getting the right breaks so that we end up on top. The point of our lives is being internally substantial, authentic, and whole so that we can deal with whatever the world throws at us.

Probably because of our evolutionary history of deprivation, we humans seem to be particularly vulnerable to a fixating anxiety around material security. Unfortunately, it recurs long after the threat of want is no longer a serious threat.

I was reminded of this reading an article in Esquire magazine about Ivanaka Trump, the Donald's daughter. She is blonde, sexy, 24, already graduated from Wharton summa, and in charge of one of her father's huge hotels. Unconsciously, we are deeply drawn to that model.

If we can build the empire to here, pass the baton to the next generation, they will take it to there, and there will be an ever rising prosperity, not only materially but we will all be happier too.

I deeply wish life were that simple but it is not. I deeply wish that our goals could be that truncated but they can't. That is only one dimension of strength but it cannot compensate for learning how to love, for having a meaningful marriage, for being understanding and generous, for developing an instinct to do the right thing, for having courage in the face of a menacing mob, for helping a friend face death, for knowing how to inspire your friends and family, for being a healing balm to one's who are broken, for creating something beautiful, for radiating genuine joy.

No, our spiritual lives are that complex and interesting and challenging. And when we become broadly whole, and only when we become broadly whole, will our anxieties remarkably resolve themselves. That is why Jesus said, "Seek Ye First the Kingdom of God and all these things will follow after." Amen.

[1] Mogel, Wendy. The Blessing of a Skinned Knee (New York: Penguin, 2001), p. 90

[2] ibid. 89.

[3] Ibid. p. 93

[4] ibid. p. 91.