Roots of Transformation

Negotiating the Dynamics of Growth

Stockitt

• Publisher: Cascade Books
• Year: 2015
• eBook ISBN: 9781498220798
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

The call towards transformation lies at the heart of the Christian message. It is a call to create something beautiful that bears all the hallmarks of the kingdom of heaven. The journey towards transformation however is a demanding one, requiring us to engage in a process of negotiation with a number of key issues. These issues cluster around the themes of Narrative, Permission, Discomfort, Culture, Language, Other, and Silence. This book explores these themes in the company of brave individuals who have shared their own stories as well as some significant thinkers who have already left their mark on our world.

1

Permission

I have long been fascinated by the seemingly innocuous, touching story10 of the twelve-year-old boy Jesus finding himself stranded in a huge bustling city while his frantic parents scour the band of pilgrims searching for the whereabouts of their son. What an odd story to be selected by Luke to be included in his gospel! It is the only tiny snippet of information about the childhood and approaching adolescence of Jesus that the Gospels offer us. It is a very human story, ordinary and earthy in its honesty. It is a story that some parents could perhaps also recount when their own child suddenly became lost in a busy supermarket or shopping centre. However, in this biblical account there is an oddness about it. It seems to be rather unimportant, a piece of trivia from a life that is usually narrated in terms of miracles, extraordinary storytelling, suffering, and rising to new life. What did Luke think he was doing in offering this morsel, this tidbit of information sandwiched as it is between the presentation of Christ in the temple at the age of eight days and his adult appearance at the time of John the Baptist?

One could rather easily interpret the story as an example of typical childish irresponsibility. Here is a young boy who is seized by a spontaneous impulse to dart into the temple and engage in some intellectual jousting with the academy. He is too immature to realize the distress he might cause to Joseph and Mary, unable as yet to make the link between actions taken now and reaping the consequences later. Anyone who has had any dealings with young boys around the time of puberty will know how ungainly and awkward they can be.

Yet I believe that something far more important and profound is happening here; something that everyone at some time in their lives has to face for themselves. It is the question of attachment. Until this point in the earthly life of Christ he had, one must presume, an ordinary childhood within the care and discipline of Joseph and Mary. This would have demanded adherence to the family codes of practice and an honoring of his parents’ intrinsic dignity. Yet now there is an apparent rupture, the entry of anxiety, panic, and irritation at the young boy Jesus. It is clear that Jesus had made a choice that would send a clear signal about the direction that he would take in his life. The choice was quite simply whether he was to remain within the orbit of Joseph and Mary or to step away and enter the temple. He chose the latter, without—it would seem—consultation or permission. It has resonances with his apparently alarming injunction uttered years later, that unless his followers “hate their mother and father,” they cannot be his disciple. And there are surely similarities with the story of the man who wanted to follow Christ, but first wanted to go and bury his father. “Let the dead bury the dead,” was the cold reply from Jesus.

How can we interpret the decision of the boy Jesus when faced with the choice to return home with Mary and Joseph or remain in the city with the religious leaders? One must assume that this cameo is an intentional inclusion by Luke in the construction of his gospel narrative. It is no accident therefore that it is included in Scripture for it is a pivotal moment both in the life of Christ himself and in the narrative flow Luke’s composition.

One way of interpreting the incident is with reference to a psychological model known as Attachment Theory, first proposed over sixty years ago by the British psychologist John Bowlby. But why Bowlby? one might ask. Why choose him from amongst the huge range of developmental psychologists that are available? The answer lies in the way in which Jesus frames the call of discipleship. “Come follow me!” he declares boldly, “but remember” (one might add by way of further explanation) “that if you heed this call it will demand a radical rethink of all your current attachments. It might mean renouncing that which is most dear to you, it will demand a reorientation towards me and thus a repositioning of other relationships.” The call of Christ is essentially a call to make a deep, daring, and enduring connection with him. It is this profoundly subversive attachment that automatically raises questions about the relative importance of all other relationships. The call to follow Christ and remain intimately attached to him creates immediate echoes within us of forming familial attachments. A resonance can be detected within that speaks of ancient memories of early attachments and all the emotional baggage that comes with that memory. Heeding the call of Christ is no simple matter. It challenges and reframes all previous human attachments and places them under a new spotlight. The one man who has done most in exploring the way on which our attachments are formed, emerge, and metamorphose over time is John Bowlby.

In 1950 Bowlby was invited by the World Health Organization to advise on the mental health of homeless children. He spent years researching the effects of separation in young children in the aftermath of the Second World War and his findings led him to conclude that the nature of the attachment between mother and child was pivotal in shaping the subsequent psychological health of children. His initial findings led him to the conclusion that

What is believed to be essential for mental health is that the infant and young child should experience a warm, intimate and continuous relationship with his mother (or permanent mother substitute) in which both find satisfaction and enjoyment. . . . [I]t is believed that observation of how a very young child behaves towards his mother, both in her presence and especially in her absence, can greatly contribute to our understanding of personality development.11

What was so revolutionary about Bowlby’s work is that he started his research from an entirely new standpoint. Up until this point, the influence of Freud upon psychoanalytical research had been immense and the accepted approach to understanding human psychology had been to start with the presenting pathology and then work backwards towards early childhood experiences. Bowlby did not do this. He began with observing how infants and young children behave and interact with their mothers in healthy situations and in situations where there was a severance or disruption of the maternal child relationship. From these early observations he was able to predict how psychological disturbances might unfold in future adult life. Over the years his ground-breaking insights have been developed and honed by clinical psychologists12 such that Attachment Theory now identifies four main clusters of attachment types. These are:

• secure attachment

• anxious-preoccupied attachment

• dismissive-avoidant attachment

• fearful-avoidant attachment

The healthiest form of attachment is one that is secure. This means that both parent and child are able to give and receive love unconditionally. There exists a deep knowing from both sides that the relationship is robust, enduring, intimate, affirming, and respectful. From such a secure base individuals can develop and mature without undue anxiety about the relationship. It means that risks can be taken, challenges accepted, failures experienced, and successes enjoyed, secure in the knowledge that the attachment relationship is capable of being maintained. There is an unconditionality about this kind of attachment. Success, failure, prestige, adulation, and disappointment make no difference to the quality of the relationship. There are no preconditions and not the slightest whiff of anything contractual. A secure attachment might mean that an individual grows up adopting exactly the same values, beliefs, and lifestyle of their parents. Conversely they might travel an entirely different path through life. Whatever direction is chosen, the attachment remains safe.

I surmise that it was precisely this kind of secure attachment that Jesus enjoyed with Joseph and Mary. Luke writes that Jesus submitted himself to them upon his return to Nazareth,13 an indication that his extended stay in Jerusalem was no act of adolescent rebellion. So what was going on then when Jesus quietly deviated from the throng of returning pilgrims and entered the temple courts alone? I suggested that this was a pivotal moment of attachment conflict. To whom did he have a deeper allegiance—to his earthly parents or to his heavenly Father? His decision to enter his Father’s house (the temple) was not a rejection of parental attachment but a new ordering of priority. Although Jesus was the incarnate Son and thus perfectly holy, he was also fully human and as such needed to go through the normal, ordinary process of maturation. This is precisely what Luke states when he writes that Jesus grew in wisdom. Wisdom, by its very nature, is acquired through reflection upon the experiences of life. It does not come down from heaven to us in one single installment. The choice of Jesus to enter the temple courts instead of returning home with the others was crucial for his own personal development. It signaled to Joseph and Mary that he was prepared to be radically obedient to the call of his heavenly Father and that this vocation might bring him into tension with his human relationships. It is no surprise then to find that once the ministry of Jesus begins some twenty years later, he repeatedly returns to the need to consider how family ties impinge upon discipleship choices. Consider for example this startling saying of Jesus in the Gospel of Luke:

If anyone comes to me and does not hate his own father and mother and wife and children and brothers and sisters, yes, and even his own life, he cannot be my disciple.14

Here Jesus is issuing a call to follow him yet framing the cost of that apprenticeship in the starkest possible terms. That cost is none other than the detachment or loosening of familial relationships at such a deep level that it feels like hatred. Jesus is not, of course, advocating that one adopts a posture of hatred towards one’s own family. He is deploying hyperbole in order to make a point. And that point is that the patterns of family relationships that one has known must now be examined and exposed for what they are. If there are attachments that are hindering the daring choice to follow Christ then they will be challenged.

The difficulty that many of us face, however, in following the path of transformation is that all too often our own attachment histories are far from being secure and healthy. The three other forms of adult attachment each carry with them associated responses to the prospect and the challenge of change. If the basic life orientation is imbued with high levels of anxiety or fearfulness, this will unavoidably determine how one faces new challenges, how one takes risks, and how the world itself is perceived. Many people know what it is to experience anxious-preoccupied relationships with our parents. In such environments a child can grow up imbibing the anxiety-based culture of the home and consider that to be normal. Those who grow up in homes in which relationships are characterized by anxious-preoccupied attachments can produce individuals who in later life develop a range of coping strategies that mask the deeply rooted fears that they have imbibed. Children growing up with a highly anxious parent may find themselves feeling responsible for that parent at a very young age, a state of affairs that is potentially highly toxic. If the parent is continually preoccupied or distracted, the child may easily begin to feel invisible, unnoticed, and easily forgotten. When the nature of the parental attachment is characterized by anxiety the effect on the child is to doubt the absolute security of that bond. An element of conditionality enters the parent–child dynamic so that the child might feel the need to constantly prove that he or she is worthy of parental love and affirmation. The seeds of performance-driven perfectionism lie here and it is maybe no surprise therefore to find adults who still feel the urgent need to win the approval of an aging parent. It is this longing for secure parental attachment, sought through achievement or obedience to the assumed values of the parental home that continues to drive behavior and choices. The call to follow Christ and to make this relationship primary inevitably brings such people into a collision course with the earlier attac...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Foreword
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Chapter 1: Permission
• Chapter 2: Discomfort
• Chapter 3: Narrative
• Chapter 4: Language
• Chapter 5: Culture
• Chapter 6: Other
• Chapter 7: Silence
• The Transforming Gaze
• Reflections
• Bibliography