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"And their love will grow cold..."
"The violence against persons that offends our moral sensibilities can be...[subtle]. Everyone knows the experience of encountering other persons only under the aspect of how they intersect with our projects, and of noticing them only insofar as we have to notice them in order to interact with them as we pursue our goals. But from time to time we realize more keenly that the other with whom we are dealing is a person, and then we feel the irreverance and the arrogance of our attitude. We become aware of a certain violence with which we have been treating other persons; we realize we have to draw back and grant them a space in which to be themselves as persons, and that we have to cease seeing them exclusively in relation to our projects."
Dr John F Crosby, in "The Selfhood of the Human Person", The Catholic University Press of America, Washington, DC, 1996, p13
posted by Holly at 8:58 PM
1 Comments:
A teacher in a school dies - they think it is suicide. Staff and students are shocked. There was a hurting person in that school, a person no one knew was hurting...
I grew up understanding what a 'professional relationship' was - it meant maintaining a level of distance from someone else - of not getting 'too personal' - and fostering the retention of interpersonal barriers.
It also meant focusing on the job to be done. Heck, weren't we all raised like this in school? Wasn't Math more important than the fact you were dead beat from being up all night with a cough, and you just wished you could durl up and take a snooze? Wasn't the droning of the science teacher's lesson more important than the heart-rendering fight you just had with your best friend - And while you'd stop at nothing to reconcile, you have to WAIT until the very important science lesson is over, and the history lesson, and the school announcement... and... and...
Hmmm. There's something wrong here. I don't think Jesus came to earth to tell us tasks were more important than people.
My housework isn't more important than my chidlren either. Am I in 'get the work done' mode more often than not? Am I looking at my children as 'helpers' more than 'persons'? Do I spend time with them 'personally', or are they pawns in my daily agenda? Or am I glad they have their OWN agenda so I can live mine?
Our society's school formation has led us to believe, in practice, that tasks are more important than persons. We can have a working relationship, and still not know the person we work with. People pass in and out of our lives and we know them not. In fact, perhaps Scripture's warnings about the end times - where love grows cold - has been fostered by our own education...
Is my homeschool fostering personhood and personal growth or is it a fact-factory, intent on the lessons, the pages, the drills, the questions and tests, no matter what is happening in the personal private life of the children... or in mine? Am I myself plugging away, doing school in a way I hate, not allowing my heart to have it's say in how to school my kids? Am I being Me with my kids? Or is my mind on school texts and my heart in pain and stress?
I think this whole notion of person to person living - heart to heart contact- is something our society needs to re-discover. Perhaps, as products of this society, we do too...
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