Chapter 69: No one should act as advocate for another
Great care must be taken to avoid any tendency for one of the community to take the side of and try to protect another, even though they may be closely related through ties of blood. (From Ch. 69 of Saint Benedict's Rule, trans. by Patrick Barry, OSB, 1997.)
Protect another from what? I believe in standing up for those I love, for those in need. But perhaps I need to spare them my overprotection, when it would hinder their own growth in self-sufficiency, and their own growth in the Spirit.
This is a difficult territory that I enter into with this reading. Words of Thomas Merton are deeply needed for reflection as I walk through this "mine field" of concern for another and I quote: "A person is a person insofar as each has a secret and is a solitude of their own that cannot be communicated to anyone else. I will love that which makes them a person: the secrecy, the hiddenness, the solitude of their own individual being, which God alone can penetrate and understand."(quoted in a Life-Giving Way by Esther de Waal) Marriage has helped me to understand this concept of belief in and respect for another person through misunderstanding of another and being misunderstood myself.
ReplyDeleteBenedict here raises my helicoptering eyebrows: “what do you mean ‘don’t rise to the defense of another’?” But that was one of the big lessons I had to learn from “Toughlove”: there is a happy medium between “helicoptering” and abandonment. As the Toughlove people read at every meeting: “we do not believe in kicking our kids out. A healthy alternative is always found”. Kicking my rebellious adolescent son out of our home, as I, in frustration felt I had to do, was not a healthy alternative. I had to swallow my pride, learn some humility and reach out to others, including professionals, for help. Looking back now, twenty years later, I can see how my kids and grandkids have not been mine, but yours and you have done a far better job with them than we could ever do.
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