Thursday, January 16, 2025

Chain Breakers and Legacy Makers

 


I do not know whether the sound of humans screaming at each other is the same as that of doves crying.  In 1984, the musician known as Prince seemed to think so.  I do know that it does not accomplish much when we blame others for our lot in life and that there are better options.


Stoic Wisdom


Errant...qui aut boni aliquid nobis aut mali iudicant tribuere fortunam:  materiam dat bonorum ac malorum et initia rerum apud nos in malum bonumve exiturarum.  Valentior enim omni fortuna animus est et in utramque partem ipse res suas ducit beataeque ac miserae vitae sibi causa est.

"They make a mistake...who judge that fortune gives something either good or bad to us.  Fortune gives the raw material of good and bad and the beginnings of things that will come out among us either good or bad.  Stronger than all fortune is the mind and it itself leads its own affairs in either direction and is the cause of a happy or wretched life for itself."  Seneca, Epistle XCVIII 

My students and I discuss this passage from one of the letters of the Roman Stoic philosopher Seneca (4 B.C. -- 65 A.D.) in our third-year Latin class.  It seems an apt reminder in an age in which blame seems the name of the game, although that does not greatly separate our current age from any other, and it came to mind when a middle-aged friend recently emailed me the following.

"My sister used to blame everything wrong with her life on our parents, my father especially.  I explained to her that Mom and Dad weren't perfect parents, and neither were we, and screaming [at him] won't solve anything.  Our parents have left us with problems to deal with, but our parents weren't able to fix those problems, so they're 'our' problems now.  Hopefully we can add a few pieces to the puzzle so our children won't have to deal with the same problems we had to deal with.  Also, never forget that while our parents dealt with those problems, they still loved us enough to raise us to the point where we [were] mature enough to deal with such problems, just as we will do for our children.

"Our parents are human, with all the human frailties and glorious potential of the next person.  We think of them [as] perfect beings when we are children, which is appropriate for a child's development, but, as Paul said in 1 Corinthians 13:11, 'When I became a man, I put away childish things.'  Unless they were simply monsters, our parents did the best they could most of the time, although sometimes not reaching the mark of what they could have achieved in their own lives or ours, but again, no one does."


Chain-Breakers and Legacy-Makers


Turkey Run State Park


When our son was a teen, he and I went away for a few days each fall to Turkey Run State Park in western Indiana.  We hiked the trails and talked of what it meant to become a man and in particular, a man of God.  As I planned something special for the autumn when he turned eighteen, I asked him who were some of the men who meant the most to him, and he quickly named four.  I then invited each of them to join us on one evening of our annual trip to share their own thoughts about manhood with my son.

One of them spoke to him about those who are chain-breakers and those who are legacy-makers.  Rob explained that some people will be the ones to break the chains of abuse or addiction or the many other curses that afflict families and often continue across the generations.  Others, he said, will be the legacy-makers, those who live lives of fullness in Christ and pass on His life and light to their descendants.

It is far easier to blame others for the things that are not working well in our lives.  Some of those people may indeed be the cause of the worst that we experience, and not blaming them in no way exonerates them.  Not blaming them, however, frees people to become the chain-breakers and legacy-makers that help themselves and others live the lives for which we were made and to which we are called.  The choice, of course, is always our own to make.

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