"Reflections on a Peach-Seed Monkey": Empowering Relationships

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1 Journal of Religion and Health Volume 29, No. 1, Spring 1990 "Reflections on a Peach-Seed Monkey": Empowering Relationships ROBERT M. BAIRD ABSTRACT: The focus of this essay is on human relationships, specifically, the empowering potential of those relationships, and, most particularly, on the empowering potential those relationships have for enabling us to discover our respective possibilities. It is argued that we often discover who we are and what we can become as our possibilities are discovered by another and reflected back to us. This empowering potential of human relationships can be helpfully understood as a manifestation of the redemptive role of God in human life. While teaching at a small, private college years ago, I assigned my students a term paper. When I read their essays, I came across one, the brilliance of which was far beyond the ability of most professional philosophers. Because the title was so esoteric, it took me only a few minutes to locate the article in a journal in the library. The essay the student had turned in was copied verbatim from an already-published work. I borrowed the journal from the librarian and called the student to my office. I placed the two essays side-byside and pointed out the duplication. His immediate response was, "Professor Baird, I paid someone ten dollars to write that paper for me." Before I could respond, he added, "Do you think I should get my money back?" Until this day, I recall how lost for words I was. A portion of the title of this essay, too, is esoteric, so esoteric, in fact, that some readers surely recognize it. It is the title of the third chapter of Sam Keen's book To a Dancing God. And while, unlike my student, I did not pay anything for it, also unlike my student, I want to acknowledge its source. In fact, I want to begin by recounting Sam Keen's experience with the peach-seed monkey: Once upon a time when there were still Indians, Gypsies, bears, and bad men in the woods of Tennessee where I played [as a boy], and more important still, there was no Robert M. Baird, Ph.D., is Professor and Chair of Philosophy at Baylor University in Waco, Texas Institutes of Religion and Health

2 22 Journal of Religion and Health death, a promise was made to me. One endless summer afternoon my father sat in the eternal shade of a peach tree, carving on a seed he had picked up. With increasing excitement and covetousness I watched while, ~using a skill common to all omnipotent creators, he fashioned a small monkey out of the seed. All of my vagrant wishes and desires disciplined themselves and came to focus on that peach-seed monkey. If only I could have it, I would possess a treasure which could not be matched in the whole cosmopolitan town of Maryville! What status, what identity, I would achieve by owning such a curio! Finally I marshalled my nerve and asked if I might have the monkey when it was finished (on the sixth day of creation). My father replied, "This one is for your mother, but I will carve you one someday." Days passed, and then weeks and, finally, years, and the someday on which I was to receive the monkey did not arrive. In truth, I forgot all about the peach-seed monkey. Life in the ambience of my father was exciting, secure, and colorful. He did all those things for his children a father can do, not the least of which was merely delighting in their existence. One of the lasting tokens I retained of the measure of his dignity and courage was the manner in which, with emphysema sapping his energy and eroding his future, he continued to wonder, to struggle, and to grow. In the pure air and dry heat of an Arizona afternoon on the summer before the death of God, my father and I sat under a juniper tree. I listened as he wrestled with the task of taking the measure of his... life. There came a moment of silence that cried out for testimony. Suddenly I remembered the peach-seed monkey, and I heard the right words coming from myself to fill the silence: "In all that is important you have never failed me. With one exception, you kept the promises you made to me-- you never carved me that peach-seed monkey." Not long after this conversation I received a small package in the mail. In it was a peach-seed monkey and a note which said: "Here is the monkey I promised you. You will notice that I broke one leg and had to repair it with glue. I am sorry I didn't have time to carve a perfect one." Two weeks later my father died... For me, a peach-seed monkey has become a symbol of all the promises which were made to me and the energy and care which nourished and created me as a human being. And, even more fundamentally, it is a symbol of that which is the foundation of all human personality and dignity. Each of us is redeemed from shallow and hostile life only by the sacrificial love and civility which we have gratuitously received. 1 From first reading, I have been captivated by this passage--for two reasons. One is personal; I will mention that in passing. The second is philosophical-theological and is the point on which I want to focus. Bear with the personal note; I will, in a moment, try to justify it. Well before my dad died in 1972, I began to understand that in large measure I was who I was because of who he was and because of his impact on me. I loved him deeply; I realized that my values were rooted in his values; and I sensed that he had had a deep emotional impact on me that I wanted to be able to articulate. After he died, this desire to put into words who he was and why I felt him to be so deeply a part of me increased. But it was only when I read

3 Robert M. Baird 23 this passage from Sam Keen that I found a way of saying what I longed to say. Keen's language exploded in my mind, for I realized that what I had felt from dad from as far back as I could remember was his delight, his sheer delight in my existence. As Keen would put it, it is to say that he gave his son the greatest gift a father can give--delightful acceptance. And I have come to believe that to whatever extent I am secure, to whatever extent I believe God to be for us and not against us, to whatever extent I have any creative energy, it is to a significant degree rooted in the empowering love of a father who delighted in his son's existence. My excuse for this personal excursion is my belief that the kind of experience to which I refer can be helpfully interpreted in religious terms; to point to such an interpretation is the purpose of this essay. My thesis is that the empowering potential of every human relationship (symbolized for Keen by that peach-seed monkey) is a manifestation of the redemptive role of God in human life. The German philosopher Karl Jaspers speaks insightfully of the empowering role we play in one another's lives. The thesis of his philosophizing, he says, is that "the individual cannot become human by himself. Self-being is only real [the self achieves its full being only] in communication with another self... If the never completed movement of communication succeeds with but a single human being, everything is achieved "Alone," he adds, "I sink into gloomy isolation--only in community with others can I be revealed in the act of mutual discovery. ''3 I would make two comments about this passage. Jaspers' position here is quite Hegelian. One of the fundamental themes of Hegel's The Phenomenology of Mind is that self-consciousness in the fullest sense emerges only in interaction with other selves. 4 The Hegel-Jaspers claim is that the self is a social product, a product of its interactions. Indeed, the self seems to require other selves for its very existence. Self-consciousness requires another self off whom it plays itself, another self with whom it contrasts itself in the process of becoming self-aware. It is as if reality has been structured in such a way that a social framework is required for the emergence of the self. To the extent that this is so, human relationships are empowering in the most fundamental of ways. But I want to focus on Jaspers' more specific observation that "only in community with others can I be revealed in the act of mutual discovery." For it is at this point that the possibility most clearly exists of interpreting the empowering potential of human relationships as manifestations of God's redemptive role in human lives. We often discover who we are as our possibilities are discovered by another and reflected back to us. This is at the heart of the empowering role we can play in one another's lives. The possibility reflected may be as specific as a teacher's discovery that a student has a gift for writing or as broad as a

4 24 Journal of Religion and Health mother's love affirming the worthwhileness of her child. It may be as specific as a friend eliciting courage from a grieving friend or as broad as a father's delighting in the existence of his son. It may be as specific as a counselor making a client aware of his or her own resources or as broad as the ongoing sustaining ministry of a parish priest. But in every case we are talking about the ability of one human being to empower another. I often ask my students at the beginning of the semester to make a list of what they value above all. The item that appears first in most lists is human relationships, human relationships expressed as "family" or "friends" or simply "other people." I also inquire of them why they value what they value. The reasons given for valuing human relationships are varied, of course, but often it is the empowering role of human touching to which students point. "My parents encourage me even when I fail." "My teacher saw a possibility I did not even know was there." "My friends don't give up on me." And though it is true that we are free, that our futures are open, and that to deny such freedom is (as the existentialist Jean-Paul Sartre would put it) self-deception or bad faith, nevertheless, our possibilities are possibilities we become aware of primarily through relationship, through communication, through an empowering interaction with others. Of all of life's values, nothing is more potentially valuable than the relationship between one human being and another--a parent and a child, a husband and a wife, an individual and a friend. And at the heart of this value is the fact that it is in these relationships that we mutually discover who we are, that we mutually discover our possibilities, that we are mutually empowered to be who we can be. While thinking about these issues, I happen to be reading Wellsprings by Anthony de Mello. Throughout de Mello's work this empowering theme is sounded. "I am a treasure. Someday, somewhere, someone discovered me. I should have no awareness of my worth if someone had not found it. ''5 While pondering Jesus' call to become fishers of people, de Mello reflects on the inspiration he (de Mello) could provide, on the goodness he could elicit, on the talents he could draw out by his love2 Think of the person, he directs, who is the dearest to you of all who are alive today, think of how he or she has enriched your life. 7 In the language being used here, think of how he or she has empowered you. "I make my way," says de Mello, "into the temple of my heart and invent a form of worship... Enshrined there in the temple are the persons who have changed me by their love... and those whom I have changed by mine. ''~ Sam Keen is surely right: each of us is redeemed from shallow and hostile life by the sacrificial love we have gratuitously received, a sacrificial love that empowers us to love in return. This kind of redemptive experience mediated by human relationships is at the heart of John Claypool's work, Opening Blind Eyes. In the midst of the hollowness of his "successfully" competitive life in the mid-1960s, Claypool, through the initiative of another, became a member of a small group of ministers meeting periodically to share their struggles and to provide mutual

5 Robert M. Baird 25 support. Though he initially had reservations about such a process, the experience resulted in altering his "consciousness of reality itself. ''9 Motivated by the honesty of the others, Claypool says that he removed his own mask in one session by acknowledging his constantly felt need "to acquire a sense of worth" and "to be somebody in the eyes of others" by his "own strenuous effort. ''1~ The beginning of redemption came for Claypool that morning through the words of an Episcopal priest who interprete d God's grace in such a way that Claypool was able to affirm: 9.. my eyes were opened in that instant as never before. I began to "see" myself and eventually all things in a completely different light. It suddenly dawned on me that I had been mistaken all along in my conclusions about reality. Instead of being an emptiness that must be filled from without by strenuous effort, I was, in fact a fullness by the creative act of God. There had been worth in me from the beginning--not by virtue of what I had made of myself, but by virtue of what God had made of me in calling me out of nothingness into being. ~1 As the result of the empowering act of another human being, Claypool says that his perceptual world was literally turned upside down, and the movement from acquisition to awareness began. All my life, I had thought that in order to have worth, it was necessary to bring what is outside in, but at that moment, I saw that it is the other way around: The challenge is to become aware of what is already inside by the grace of creation and to learn to bring that fullness out through generous and sacrificial service to the whole of creation. 12 Claypool understands that experience to be an experience of God's grace, that is to say, he interprets the empowering potential of human relationships to be manifestations of the redemptive role of God in human life. Let me try to uncover the theological significance of this understanding in the following way. There are individuals whose nature is such, whose selfdiscipline is such, whose prayer life is such, that they are aware in their own devotional lives of the empowering call of God into a new future every day. But I suspect that that is true of few. Most of us are intensely distracted by the constancy of responsibilities, by a world that is too much with us, by what I would simply call the massiveness of existence. We are so distracted that God's empowering call, his call to new possibilities, is heard by us, if it is heard at all, when we are confronted by the equal massiveness of another human being. Skin and bones--that's what it takes for most of us, an encounter with flesh and blood, an encounter with a person who risks something by demanding that we be who we can be. For most, such encounters are essential avenues of God's redemptive work. And is this not, in fact, a crucial dimension of incarnational theology? God was in Christ empowering the world9 But incarnational theology does not end

6 26 Journal of Religion and Health with Christ. It begins there. God was in Christ empowering the world. But incarnational theology, broadly conceived, affirms also that God is in you, in me. And the potential for dramatic empowering is in you and in me. Recall the encounter between Jesus and the Samaritan woman. Here was a person in need of empowering, symbolized by her desire for water, made explicit by the observation that though she worshiped, she worshiped without insight. It has even been suggested that one of the reasons she was fetching water in the heat of the day rather than in the cool of the evening was because of a reputation so disreputable that she was publicly scorned and avoided. Jesus comes, relates to her, proclaims her free, calls her to new possibilities, and, in the process, so empowers her l~hat she is able to see that this is, indeed, the Christ. Do you remember the Mary Magdalene song from "Jesus Christ Superstar"? It expresses dramatically the power of a relationship to call forth heretofore unrecognized possibilities. It could be the Samaritan woman's song: I don't know how to love him What to do, how to move him I've been changed, yes really changed In these past few days when I've seen myself I seem like someone else. This is the point--the power of a relationship to redeem a human being from a shallow and hostile life. The religious claim, then, is that we have all been the recipient of God's call to be who we can be, a call mediated by those who loved us enough to delight in our existence, who loved us enough to call us to be more responsible than we had been, who loved us enough to help us to be the best we can be. And the point, of course, that someone like de Mello would make is that out of gratitude to them and to the creative source of such redemptive activity, we should be moved to play that redemptive, that empowering, role in the lives of those around us. The encounter of Jesus with the woman of Samaria is a compelling model. An encounter that left her, in effect, saying: I've been changed, yes really changed In these past few days when I've seen myself I seem like someone else. The empowering potential of every human relationship is a manifestation of the power of that one who is the ultimate author of every redemptive act.

7 Robert M. Baird 27 References 1. Keen, S., To a Dancing God. New York, Harper and Row, 1970, pp Jaspers, K., "On My Philosophy." In Kaufmann, W., ed., Existentialism From Dostoevsky to Sartre. New York, New American Library, 1975, p Ibid. 4. Hegel, G.W.F., The Phenomenology of Mind, J.B. Baillie, trans. London, George Allen & Unwin Ltd., 1931; see especially pp In commenting on Hegel, Robert Solomon observes that Hegel is "the one philosopher in the modern tradition who saw rather clearly that selfhood and self-consciousness presuppose interaction with other people... " Solomon, R., "Reflections on the Meaning of (Fetal) Life." In Bondeson, W., et al., eds., Abortion and the Status of the Fetus. Dordrecht, Holland, 1983, p de Mello, A, Wellsprings. New York, Doubleday and Co., 1986, p Ibid., p Ibid., p Ibid., p Claypool, J., Opening Blind Eyes. Oak Park, Ill., Meyer Stone Books, 1987, p Ibid., p Ibid., p Ibid., pp