At the start of my senior year at my all-boys Catholic high school, the Age of Aquarius was in sunrise, and the Xaverian Brothers, like all reasonably observant adults of the time, were awakening to the realization that a profound and terrible shift had occurred -- that they no longer were in control of the culture, and that there was a grand and glorious joke that seemed to be on them.
We had a required Religion course every year. This year's course, in a first, was titled Love, Sex, and Marriage, with one of the older brothers, let's call him Gildea, to lead us through this fraught content. We were accustomed to God's working in mysterious ways, so we obediently strapped ourselves in for this ride.
Maybe two weeks in, one of my classmates, Joe, raised his hand. "Brother," he asked, "How do you, as a celibate, feel qualified to teach this course?" I continue to hold great admiration for the clergy: nuns, monks, and priests, who taught me. This was an example. They trained us to challenge them. Brother had been waiting for the question.
"One does not have to personally experience a thing to know a great deal about it. I have read a large number of books . . . "
I'm sure Brother continued talking after this, but none of us heard anything following.
I would have hired a recovering alcoholic ex-priest on this third marriage to teach that course. There's knowledge and there's practice. I wouldn't have challenged Brother's knowledge in any number of categories, including this one. Here, however, he was missing practice.
There's a lot to say about practice. While the resume of my ideal candidate for the Love, Sex, and Marriage course would have included many dimensions of practice, the candidate who acquired this resume is highly likely to have engaged the demanding practice of resilience.
My children and I delighted in Helen Oxenbury's nursery rhyme of a story, which models resilience in every refrain. We can't go over it. We can't go under it. Oh no! We've got to go through it!
And, for myself, the amazing message and vocalizing of Nat King Cole, lyrics by Dorothy Fields, Pick Yourself Up. I should wake up to this every morning.
Pick yourself up, Take a deep breath, Dust yourself off And start all over again.
Nothing's impossible, I have found For when my chin is on the ground. I pick myself up, Dust myself off And start all over again.
Don't lose your confidence If you slip Be grateful for a pleasant trip And pick yourself up, Dust yourself off And start all over again.
The practice of resilience is essential to every other practice because our brains don't like delayed gratification. Our brains know better than we do that all we have is this breath. It's our metacognition that can imagine how I want to experience that breath in ten years. Some day, and that day may never come, I may take a breath that I want to breathe in a good place. Resilience gets me from this breath to, maybe, that breath.
Next up is more on the correct part of correct practice. Getting from where we are to where we're not requires the ability to tolerate the slippery place of being where we're not for a while. The correct practice of resilience comes in picking yourself up, and starting again. Further correct practice requires the application of that resilience to refine specific skills in the service of the best possible outcome. In short, pick yourself up, and start all over again applying something you learned from the fall.
Correct requires correction.
If Going on a Bear Hunt is my bedtime story, and Pick Yourself Up is my wake up call. Jimmy Cliff brings some midday motivation.
Warm regards,
Francis Sopper
REFERENCED IN THIS LETTER:
Helen Oxenbury's: https://www.theguardian.com/books/2018/dec/21/helen-oxenbury-life-illustration-motherhood
story: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/We%27re_Going_on_a_Bear_Hunt
Nat King Cole : https://natkingcole.com/?srsltid=AfmBOopQQy7QrJme6-lWDW70h7NpvKbJxNjsHLVeufB-iRfwiCp-2ks_
Dorothy Fields: https://www.dorothyfields.org/home.htm
Pick Yourself Up: https://youtu.be/20ViFpURIDk?si=Kz5ZBeOTkb6nivDG
story: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/We%27re_Going_on_a_Bear_Hunt
Pick Yourself Up: https://youtu.be/20ViFpURIDk?si=Kz5ZBeOTkb6nivDG
Jimmy Cliff: https://www.jimmycliff.com/
motivation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jg7qsW8qboE