Browsing category: Chapter 2-Prerequisites

  • Punish Patiently

    He should not gloss over the sins of those who err, but cut them out while he can, as soon as they begin to sprout, remembering the fate of Eli, priest of Shiloh 1 Samuel 2:11-4:18 (RB 2.26-29).

     

     

    With children, the proper purpose of punishment is to make the evil path repulsive. This means that there’s no question of punishing them for actions outside their control. You don’t punish infants. Punishment only becomes a factor when the child begins to exercise his or her will in a harmful way. But there’s no point in punishing the child for bad behavior if you don’t simultaneously redirect the child toward a feasible correct alternative. It’s not enough to learn what not to do. We need to know what to aim for instead. If you punish without redirecting, you’ve only done half your job.

    Corporal punishment can be appropriate when the misdeed is corporal. It is fair to spank the child who throws a fit and kicks her mother. “That hurts!” she cries. Yes, and that’s the whole point of why you’re not allowed to kick and hit. Generally speaking, if the behavior involves a lack of empathy, it can be effective to give the child a taste of what he or she is inflicting on others. You can’t refrain from doing unto others what you would not want done to yourself if you’ve never suffered anything to refer to. Thankfully, human beings don’t need to suffer every possible harm in order to refrain from each particular behavior. Unlike machines, we have imagination and reason. By the time your child is old enough to carry on a conversation, you’ll be able to say: “Remember when so-and-so did such-and-such to you? Well, that’s how it felt to this person when you did that.” Most likely the child will resist the comparison, because accepting it entails accepting the whole weight of a moral life. But by practicing these small interventions, you’ll be setting your child upon the path of righteousness.

    This said, there is an age that feels like an eon: the months that stretch between the time when the child learns how to walk and, so much later, when he learns how to talk. During this phase, he can be a mortal danger to himself. Each day he acquires a new ability, but you never know what he’ll be capable of next. He has neither the reasoning ability nor the verbal comprehension to understand anything you tell him. What he does understand are emotions and bodily sensations. It is certainly better to be spanked than to be run over by a truck. So, if he breaks away from you and dashes toward a busy street, and if, by the grace of God, you catch him in time, that’s the moment to get angry and yell and spank: to impress the experience into his memory, so that next time you call his name in that tone of voice, he will hearken, heed, and turn back.

    This also means that you must aim to be habitually calm and measured in your reactions. If you’re always yelling and spanking, what your children will come to be good at is avoiding you. If your toddler figures out how to unlock the door when you’re not looking, and your kind neighbor returns him to you after finding him in the middle of the street, the proper reaction is not to spank the child but to install new locks on the doors so that the culprit can’t repeat his escapade. If you catch your daughter spreading a bagful of flour across the kitchen floor, when she has no concept of the difference between that and spreading paint across a piece of paper, which she has been allowed to do, you’ve got to find a way to enforce the distinction. But if you are going to spank, use the flat of your hand, because you will feel the sting too, and this will deter you from excess. No smack should produce any physical result more severe than transient pink flush on the skin.

    In some situations, it can be satisfying to all concerned for you to spank the table, or the chair, or some other inanimate object that can be made to take the blame for an unfortunate event. Humor is another thing that children understand before they’ve acquired words. Through all the messes, mistakes and mishaps of life with children, a sense of humor is one of the most important traits to cultivate. This in itself can make the difference between a happy and an unhappy home.

    However, if someone transgresses a law of God, you mustn’t just shrug it off and make a joke of it. Stealing, for example, is not just about secreting away a desired object. It’s an injustice with respect to a human being. And if she’s getting into the habit of it, don’t imagine that it will be easier to deal with when she’s a teenager. If she learns not to steal from stores but still pilfers around the house, enforce stronger boundaries. If she tends to take your jewelry, lock up your jewelry. Even adults have a hard time distinguishing between accessibility and permissibility. Make it harder to get the forbidden thing so that there’s a clear distinction between what she may use and what she must not take. But if she goes to her grandmother’s house and steals the purse that she knew was intended to be her sister’s birthday present, and then lies about it, you’ve got to break out of what has become a routine.

    Punishment by definition is aversive to the one punished. If your usual reaction evidently has made no impression, you’ve got to brainstorm some other plan. If the mother is the one usually interacting with the children, it is fair to hand the child over for a paternal intervention. The father will have a different vantage point on the situation. He’ll interact differently with the child. His punishment, for being unusual, as long as it is unusual, may have more impact. The most important thing, though, is for mother and father to work together to convey a shared resolve: that you will not price this behavior into the cost of doing business. There are things that you won’t absorb into the lifestyle of your household. Define what she did wrong, but also describe the actions you want to see instead. Detail how she could have behaved differently at the point of temptation. Tell her that you don’t want her to grow up to be a thief. You do want her to grow up to be an honest person.

    When you get angry, it’s because you care. Parents who don’t care are already long gone. But if you feel that you’re approaching a point where your anger may take control of you, give yourself a time out. Walk away, lock the door, and pray. Remind yourself of the good things in your life that you can thank God for. Allow the Holy Spirit to reassert joy. We have received a Spirit of self-control, and it’s this Spirit that we’re teaching our children to live by.

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  • Discipline Within

    In his teaching, the abbot should always observe the Apostle’s recommendation, in which he says: Use argument, appeal, reproof 2 Timothy 4:2.  This means that he must vary with circumstances, threatening and coaxing by turns, stern as a taskmaster, devoted and tender as only a father can be. (RB 2.23-24)

     

    The purpose of parental discipline is to train up children in good habits, directing them along right paths, understanding that in a few short years they will no longer be children and will have to direct themselves. But Christian discipline cannot be just a set of techniques to implement in order to produce desirable outcomes in one’s offspring. Christian discipline engages the heart, that is, the interior seat of the will, the emotions, the desires of the individual human being. You cannot engage the hearts of your children if you don’t put your own heart into the task.

     

    For very young children, habit formation and language acquisition occur simultaneously. While negotiations may slow you down, you do actually want your children to learn how to argue on their own behalf. This involves them learning how to articulate their thoughts and feelings in a way that is both understandable and bearable to those around them, that is, without screaming or hitting, but with words. Parents cannot teach their children what they themselves do not practice. This is why we have to work at engaging the arguing child with a counter-argument even as we enforce necessary boundaries and behaviors. In order to engage the child rationally, you must recognize the reasons for the norms you’re enforcing. You must understand your own course of action well enough to be able to explain it at a level that the child can understand. Sometimes your motivations are beyond logic: articulate your emotions as well. Inevitably the day will come when, upon examination, you realize that your reasons are trivial, arbitrary or indefensible. The thing to do at that point is to concede, and change course. If you feel yourself losing your temper, verbalize that too with an advance warning. No one can read your child’s mind, and no one can read your mind either. This is why we have language.

     

    There are parents who tolerate no divergence from their own opinions, decisions, and feelings. They don’t consider that they owe any defense or explanations for punishments that they inflict. The result is that the children are left to make their own deductions and draw their own conclusions, which they will not communicate back to the parents, because that’s not the sort of relationship that is formed in what is, in microcosm, a dictatorship. Such parents may obtain exactly the outcomes they are seeking, in terms of performance in the short term. But they are not developing in their children the capacity to make good decisions when no one is around to direct them. Parents who repress honest dissent also create the conditions for deceit to flourish. As in larger scale tyrannies, the only possible pathways are subservience, rebellion, or escape.

     

    At the other end of the spectrum are the parents who abdicate both authority and responsibility. They defer decisions even on life-changing matters, even to young children. Some go further and cultivate transgressiveness as the norm that they enforce. They appeal to a child’s good nature without taking action to thwart bad habits. Then they reproach the child for bad behavior without imposing consequences. These parents may not believe in obedience on principle, but they are the ones who stand around complaining about how disappointing their teenagers have turned out to be, a dozen years later. Responsibility, compassion and morality are not automatic settings that flip on when a young person turns eighteen. Parents who neglect to enforce these qualities can only hope that someone else will.

     

    Wise parents put thought and effort into examining their own behaviors in specific situations. They threaten sparingly, because at the end of the day when they’re tired they’d rather relax than inflict punishment—but they will follow through. They coax carefully, because their children are clever enough to turn bribes into blackmail when logic opens those opportunities. Wise parents are resolute as to principles but sympathetic as to feelings. Wise parents are smart enough to admit when they have made mistakes themselves. They teach the difference between ordinary rights and wrongs in real time, as they go along.

     

    For example: stealing. If your very young daughter takes something from a store, you bring her back to the place where the object was, and you require her to put it back, which means relinquishing it. Before she took it, she had no concept of theft: now she does. You have taught her that the thing that is not hers must remain where it is, and that this principle is important enough to be worth a lot of extra effort on your part. For some children, this simple intervention is all they’ll ever need. Once she realizes it’s wrong, she may very well never do it again. Of course, another child may know it’s wrong and do it anyway. That child must not only return the object but must apologize to the owner for taking it. This humiliating experience is a powerful exercise in practical repentance. Not many children want to put themselves in such a position ever again. But if the behavior escalates, so must the punishment. If you have a very hard-headed, stubborn child, chances are that you are hard-headed and stubborn enough yourself to figure out how to communicate that honesty is important to you. But of course, honesty must be, in fact, important enough to you for you to take the trouble.

     

    This said, wise parents also realize that sometimes children misbehave for circumstantial reasons. The challenge is to observe accurately and deduce honestly what those contributing factors may be. You should feed the hungry child and put the exhausted child to bed. You should administer appropriate treatment to injuries both physical and emotional. Complicated teenage tangles will require many hours of patient conversation. A mistake calls for the benefit of the doubt. Extenuating circumstances call for consideration. Certainly the child who is obedient, docile and patient deserves the gentlest of appeals. Sometimes a well-meaning child may be making the effort to comply with expectations but simply cannot perform as you wish.

     

    Realize that you too experience all sorts of variables that affect your behavior. Maybe you need to let go of something else in your life that is sapping your energy or taking your time, in order to have the time and energy to engage with your children constructively. Don’t be the father who didn’t bother. Don’t be the mother who was never there. Each of your children needs some time with you. When you slow down and make the effort to come alongside to help the struggling one, to look at the problem from the child’s vantage point, usually you do find that you have the understanding to assess, at least, what the problem is. If you don’t, seek help. The Christian premise is that we are part of the Body of Christ. We’re not supposed to be independent of everyone else.

     

    At the end of the day, having done your utmost and still feeling, perhaps, like a failure, the most difficult challenge can be to yield your child to God. In fact we do not have complete control over our lives, nor over the lives of our children, and the older they get, the less control we have. Renunciation is one of the most difficult spiritual disciplines to practice, but it is the very essence of the life of faith.

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  • Cultivate Fairness

    “The abbott should avoid all favoritism….But the abbott is free, if he sees fit, to change anyone’s rank as justice demands…. ‘God shows no partiality among persons’ (Romans 2:11). Only in this are we distinguished in his sight: if we are found better than others in good works and in humility” (RB 2.16-22).

    Christian fairness is going to look different from atheist equality, because Christian fairness tends toward the justice of God, not the sameness of human beings. Christian fairness does not erase your own natural preferences. You can love your children equally and still prefer babies sleeping to babies screaming. Each child will be difficult to deal with at some phase of life, for all sorts of reasons. Each one also has innate qualities that you want to encourage and cultivate. Each one thrives in different conditions because each one has a unique personality. Part of Christian love is exactly the effort to detect and develop the qualities that God has bestowed on each individual.

    But with all sorts of variation in the details, the same fundamental principles should apply to everyone, including Mom and Dad. Encourage good habits, but be cautious about proclaiming laws, because your children will soon be clever enough to interpret those laws and apply them back to you in ways that you failed to foresee. You’ll excuse younger children from tasks that are beyond their ability (but those will be the jobs they beg for). You’ll exempt older children from restrictions that are no longer needed at their age (but expect relapses on the way to responsibility). Fairness doesn’t mean that everyone is the same. Fairness means that you don’t require of someone else what you exempt yourself from attempting.

    Even if you aim to foster the same virtues in boys and girls, there will be divergences of practice that will be preferable for all concerned. A boy shouldn’t be excused from cleaning up the kitchen because he’s a boy. But if he’d rather pick up dog poop from the yard, why not let him take the chore that no one else wants? A girl shouldn’t be allowed to primp forever in front of the mirror. But if she manages to get dressed on time in feminine attire, with her hair done on her own, doesn’t she deserve the accessible seat in the car? Maleness and femaleness are bestowed by God, but masculinity and femininity must be cultivated by parents who recognize the worth of each.

    If one child puts away the clean dishes unasked, when all the other children run away from the kitchen, it is absolutely fair to praise that one, and to call attention to the difference in behavior. The other children are sure to speak up and inform you of any unacknowledged virtuous acts of their own that you might have failed to praise. The best thing you can do to foster virtues in your children is to be on the lookout not for their faults but for their good deeds, and to be sure to call attention to those. Each thirsty little soul can be gratified with a word of encouragement, and those words make all the difference.

    Sometimes parents begin to favor one child over the others because circumstances funnel the family in that direction; or because one child is needier; or one is more demanding. Fairness requires parents to remain vigilant and to recalibrate resources as needed. Explain to the children what your goal is. They can contribute to figuring out ways to achieve a balance, and sometimes when you involve them in decisions, you discover that their priorities are different from your own. Let them negotiate terms with each other: why not? There’s more than one way to resolve a logistical imbalance.

    Actual favoritism is an insidious vice that results from identity issues on the part of the parent. Sometimes a parent will favor a child who embodies an ideal. A mother may favor the daughter who is everything she wishes she could have been when she was a girl. The other daughter, who resembles her in other ways, perhaps with traits that the mother dislikes in herself, becomes the inferior one. Both daughters are hobbled as a result: one by the tangled expectation of success; the other by the cutting expectation of failure.

    Christian identity allows for differences of talent, feature, personality. Only Jesus is the definition of God as man. But each of us is an example of God at work in a human being. To accept this is to let drop the crushing burden of idealism. If the Holy Spirit is at work in us to develop the traits that God desires, we don’t have to be so terribly anxious to produce the traits that the world admires. Yes, we do have to make an effort to participate in the work of God. But this effort is not a desperate attempt to win recognition. Our hope is not in our ability to make something of ourselves, but in the promise of God that he will bring his work in us to completion.

     

    Sometimes God’s work in our children is harder to accept. Their trials wring our hearts. But no handicap they may labor under is insurmountable in an ultimate sense. We grieve when we see them suffer. But we retain hope that God is working out some good purpose for each one. Therefore we don’t flog them on to outperform everyone else, if they have the traits associated with worldly success. Nor do we give up on them, if they lack those traits. For all the anxieties and challenges along the path of life, the destination is assured: that is the promise of Christ, in which we place our hope.

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  • Reckon With The Day Of Reckoning

    “Whatever the number of brothers he has in his care, let him realize that on judgment day he will surely have to submit a reckoning to the Lord for all their souls—and indeed for his own as well (RB 2.38)

     

    The bad news is: you have to face God on Judgment Day. The good news is: you don’t have to dress your son in polyester from head to toe and make him play Little League in 100 degree weather while you broil in the bleachers. Patience, kindness and faithfulness are mandatory. Olympic medals, faultless test scores and perfect teeth are optional. You must conform to the image of Christ. You don’t have to conform to the image on the screen.

     

    We do so want the best of everything, for ourselves and for our children. But we also want to enjoy what we’ve got. When you see how miserable people can be when they have it all, you realize that there should be more to life than what the world has to offer. You still want the good things. But you grasp that the good life does not proceed from those things. It’s all about ordering worth rightly.

     

    “That he may not plead lack of resources as an excuse, he is to remember what is written: Seek first the kingdom of God and his justice, and all these things will be given you as well. Matthew 6:33 (RB 2.35)

     

    To seek first the kingdom of God is to aim for what is consistent with the will of God. Raising the children God has entrusted to you is certainly consistent with his well. So lay out your needs in prayer. You are the manager, the trainer (and the janitor). God is the owner. This doesn’t mean that you never lose a game. It means that you don’t quit when you see the bills. You have someone to turn to when you need more resources.

     

    Your job is to arbitrate a variety of temperaments with some similarities to your own. You coax, reprove and encourage. You adapt your strategy to each child’s personality and abilities. You foster each one’s well-being. But the child is not your property. Parents are trustees of persons who belong to God. We develop their potential. He determines their fate.

     

    The goal is not to render our children into realizations of our ideals. The goal is to form characters in the image of Christ. In the process of correcting our children’s faults, we realize exactly where they came from. Their most annoying traits are often the ones they inherited from us. Sometimes it’s only through the process of parenting that we even begin to understand our own weaknesses. So we too much change. We ask God to transform us together with them into people who reflect his character.

     

    “And all of us…seeing the glory of the Lord as though reflected in a mirror, are being transformed into the same image from one degree of glory to another (2 Cor. 3:18).

     

    God is the one in charge of this makeover. Our part is to take Christ as our model and adjust ourselves accordingly as best we can. When you look into a mirror, you alter your appearance to conform to what you think you should look like. As Christians, we adjust ourselves to resemble Christ. This doesn’t mean not facing limitations. If God himself willingly took on human limits, should a human being expect to transcend them? But at the end of the day, even the impossible—if it is consistent with God’s purpose—will be done. Sometimes this means venturing the impossible. Sometimes the impossible is the ordinary day ahead.

     

    A psalter organizes each day into hours, with prayers for each period of time based on the Psalms. At whatever moment you feel yourself faltering, take a minute to pray to God for strength just to make it through the next few.

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  • Be A Good Model

    Therefore, the abbot must never teach or decree or command anything that would deviate from the Lord’s instructions (RB 2.4).

     

    Parents shouldn’t teach or demand anything that would deviate from Christ’s instructions either, but to hold yourself to this standard means regularly examining your own words and actions. If you catch yourself deviating, it also means making an effort to realign yourself according to Christ’s standard. Your children will not only imitate what you do: they will perceive what you are aiming for. This is good news for parents who are sincerely trying. Your children will grasp the concept and come up with strategies that you never would have thought of.

     

    Then at last the sheep that have rebelled against his care will be punished by the overwhelming power of death (RB 2.10).

     

    No!  Not eternal death!  As a parent, you’re responsible to turn away from the hot door with the smoke seeping around it.  Don’t imagine that your children won’t follow you through it.  You no longer have the option to ruin only your own life.  Even if there’s not always an exit marked Fun, your job is to find one marked Possible.  Sometimes it opens onto a deep stairwell with many steps, but in front of you are extraordinary people with far worse injuries than yours who still have the courage to go on: follow them.

     

    He must point out to them all that is good and holy more by example than by words. . . .  Again, if he teaches his disciples that something is not to be done, then neither must he do it (RB 2.11-13).

     

    Human being copy each other, especially when they don’t know what to do in a given situation. Children especially copy their parents—maybe not today, but perhaps thirty years from now, when they find themselves facing what you face today, and they have no other model for how to react except for what they absorbed from your reactions. If there’s a contradiction between what you told them and what you actually did, they will have to untangle the truth. It will be easier for them if you do the work now of untangling whatever contradictions you inherited from your own parents.

     

     

     

    How is it that you can see a splinter in your brother’s eye, and never notice the plank in your own? Matthew 7:3 (RB 2.15)

     

    The most important model that parents offer their children is their relationship with each other. The hardest thing to do for that relationship is to hand over to God the defects of your spouse and to focus your energies on fixing your own flaws. Each of us must pry out the stake impaled in our own eye socket, so that when our spouse needs help with a speck, we’ll be half blind but hands free. If each of us has one functioning eye and a hygienic patch, together we’ll have the perspective to guide our children.

    That’s not to say that we can’t ever ask our spouse to change. One tactic is to sit down for a swap talk, where each person picks one thing—only one thing—for the other person to work on changing. This is tricky, because the unhappiest person is going to ask for the more difficult change. The other spouse may feel hurt and may not have an equally painful request to make—not yet. Sooner or later the tables will turn. One day you will make the big request, and because you made that effort, back in the day, you will have sufficient influence.

    It makes all the difference in how you feel about someone to see that the person is trying. What drives you to desperation is to feel that you’re stuck with someone whose habit is making your life miserable and who stubbornly refuses to do anything about it. That’s when it starts to look like the only solution is to escape from the marriage. But if you see your spouse attempting to work on the problem, you can feel sympathy instead of disgust. You can hope that life will get better.

    It’s up to the two of you to decide whether the story of your family will be a comedy or a tragedy. Imperfect families that find ways to work things out are always comedies.

     

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  • Father and Mother: Titles Worth Wearing

    To be worthy of the task of governing a monastery, the abbot must always remember what his title signifies (Rule of St. Benedict, 2.1)

    Father and mother today need guts just to assert that their titles signify anything. These are words under attack, and the linguistic debates are just the tip of the social iceberg. What would in the past have been a yawning tautology today provokes a frisson of risk: a father is a man, and a mother is a woman. But beyond linguistic debates, St. Benedict brings in the concept of worthiness, and that has to do with behavior. A man who begets a child had a consequent responsibility to behave as a father to that child. A woman who conceives a child has the ensuing duty to behave as a mother to the child. Marriage is a partnership between a man and a woman who render each other into father and mother and together serve as parents to the children they engender. These statements are merely observations of phenomena recognized by all human societies—with cultural variations—since the dawn of civilization.

    What the Church adds in is a concept of the sacrament of matrimony in which the marriage of a man and a woman becomes a sign of the relationship between Christ and the Church. In this sign, the husband figures Christ, and the wife figures the Church (Mark 10: 6-9; Catechism of the Catholic Church II.3.7). It’s clear that a Christian understanding of the human being includes a dynamic between male and female that goes all the way back to Adam and Eve. But the harmony of masculinity with maleness and of femininity with femaleness has only recently needed defending. For two thousand years, the Church, for all her struggles, never had to prove the essential maleness and femaleness of humanity. 

    However, the Church in all times and places has taken a stand for the essential humanity of human beings. Human beings are not merely matter and form, but also souls. We’re not just biological machines enmeshed in sociological parameters. We are eternal persons made in the image of God. And God knows individuals. Far from flattening personalities and erasing differences, the Holy Spirit fulfills and brings to completion the design of God in each person—not despite but within the bodies he gives us. Both G.K.Chesterton in Orthodoxy and C.S.Lewis in The Screwtape Letterswrite eloquently about the individuation of Christians. This is why we don’t have to rebel against our bodies in order to be free. We are free to be ourselves already. But we are each called to take up our cross daily and head uphill. And sometimes it’s our own bodies that make us suffer.

    We don’t reject pronouns or representatives because we ourselves are representatives of Christ on earth. As redeemer of the world, Christ is the Pronoun, the part of speech that stands in for another. This is why Christians do not reject the power of “him” to represent us. To reject “him” would be to reject the whole concept of redemption, the atoning sacrifice who stands in for us before the holy God. 

    All this is to say that worthiness is something we give ourselves to, the effort we make each day. But worth is something given to us, something that an atheist culture does not have the right to take away. We know that we are worth the self-sacrifice of God. Therefore each day we make an effort to be worthy, to embody in our circumscribed, imperfect persons the divine character qualities of Christ.

    So be boldly and bodily the man or woman God bids you to be. Your choices will light the way for people who are groping for their souls.

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