We have time so things do not happen all at once. For the longest time she did not answer. I felt I could say no more. My heart ached as much as it had ever ached. We lay so near to one another, so bound in one another’s limbs, so warm and belonging to each other that the night had gone quiet of all its random sounds for us. At last she stirred ever so faintly, ever so tenderly. Although there are many theories concerning personality development, there is rather general agreement on at least one important point—the significance of early family life. The emotional environment created by parents (or parent substitutes) is of crucial importance. And although there may be great disagreements as to details, there is general consensus that in families that are relatively healthy in their emotional attitudes, children generally develop a high degree of their potential, while in relatively unhealthy families children are likely to realize less of their potential and often tend to develop personality problems. Thinking in opposite extremes is always risky, and so it is ere. There are, of course, no completely healthy or unhealthy families. Rather we might think of a long life or scale along which families could theoretically be places as relatively healthy or unhealthy. And no family would be found at either extreme. #RandolphHarris 1 of 15

This discussion will probably be most meaningful to us if we think of it as it applies to our own personal lives. For must of us it will be helpful to think of ourselves in two roles. One role is that of one’s own childhood: “What effects did the family situation in which I lived as a child have upon my personality? How are these influences affecting my relationships with other people, including my own family, now?” The second role that might well be kept in mind is our relationship to our children (or future children): “Am I emotionally equipped to be an effective parent? How can I become better able to meet the emotional needs of my children?” While it is important to see that our childhood family had a profound influence on our present degree of maturity, which in turn will have a great deal to do with the quality of our relationships with our children, it is also important to know that we can change and reach higher levels of maturity. If this were not true, there would be little purpose in discussing personal and family life; and the future would look bleak indeed. Every family tends to develop repeated patterns of behavior. The parent will do something to which the child’s response by repeating his or her original action in an ever more forceful way. Like a snowball rolling downhill, this circular pattern gains size and momentum with each repetition of the cycle. #RandolphHarris 2 of 15

One is tempted to use the phrase vicious circles in regard to many of these patterns, for it is most easy to see them in operation in negative aspects of personality development and in the growth of our fear of love, but as we shall see later there can be healthy cycles also. Unhealthy cycles begin with feelings of rejection in family life. Since parents are the primary influence in the family, it is basically the relationship of children with their parents that is under consideration, even though children often feel rejected by brothers or sisters. It can be safely assumed, however, that in early childhood the existence of such feelings can be traced back to the parents, for it is they who establish the emotion tone of the home. It is no accident that the phrase feeling of rejection rather than simply the word rejection is used. There is an important distinction, for while it can be shown that children often experience feelings of rejection it often remains a question whether the rejection really exists. There are probably a few parents who are so hostile and unfeeling in their relation to their children that they do not want to express feelings of affection. More often parents are crippled by personality problems, are frightened of their love, and so are unable to communicate their love freely. #RandolphHarris 3 of 15

When parents have emotion damage of their own to work through, they behave toward their children in ways that appear to be rejecting. Unfortunately, feelings of rejection are damaging even though the parent does not mean to be rejecting. First of all, every child experiences some feelings of rejection from parents or, in those instances where the child is not reared by his or her natural parents, from those who become substitute parents and who are primarily responsible for the child’s early experiences. A child reared in an orphanage and foster homes, for example, may have frequently changing series of parents, a process that in itself may feel like abandonment and rejection to the child. However, whatever our family circumstances were, each one of us experienced some of these feelings of rejection, and our children will experience some from us. This is only to ay that no parent is perfect. As we discuss these cycles of rejection we are talking about all of us, and we are talking about our children. The degree to which children feel rejected will vary, of course, for parents differ in their maturity and in their ability to express love. However, every one of us is involved, for feelings of rejection are part of the universal dilemma of being human and rearing child in an imperfect World. #RandolphHarris 4 of 15

Secondly, there are many kinds of rejection that children encounter. Perhaps the most easily recognizable is that which is accompanied by open hostility toward the child. Most of us have known parents who could not speak to a child without speaking in anger. One such couple seemed unable even to call their children in from playing in the backyard without using a tone of voice seething with hostility. Such parents are often overly severe in punishment and no doubt take out on the child their feelings of frustration in other areas of life. More basically, they are so frightened of genuine emotional involvement that they seem unable to experience their love for their children. We can understand more clearly what freedom is if we first look at what it is not. Freedom is not rebellion. Rebellion is a normal interim move toward freedom: it occurs to some extent when the little child is trying to exercise his or her muscles of independence through the power to say “No”; it occurs more clearly when the adolescent is trying to become independent of parents. In adolescence (as possibly in other stages too) the strength of the rebelliousness against what the parents stand for is often excessive because the young person is fighting one’s own anxiety at stepping out into the World. #RandolphHarris 5 of 15

When parents say, “Don’t” the child often must scream defiance at them, because that “don’t” is exactly what one feels the craven side of oneself is saying, the side of oneself which is tempted to take refuge behind the walls of parental protection. However, rebellion is often confused with freedom itself. It becomes a false port in the storm because it gives the rebel a delusive sense of being really independent. The rebel forgets that rebellion always presupposes an outside structure of rules, laws, expectations—against which one is rebelling; and one’s security, sense of freedom and strength are dependent actually on this external structure. They are borrowed, and can be taken away like a bank loan which can be called in at any moment. Psychologically many persons stop at this stage of rebellion. Their sense of inner moral strength comes only from knowing what moral conventions they do not live up to; they get an oblique sense of conviction by proclaiming their atheism and disbelief. Many adults are against external compulsions on love, against rigidly curtailing free development of children. #RandolphHarris 6 of 15

And some people think the parent should not interfere with what their children are doing, and, in the extreme forms of their doctrines, the child must be allowed to do anything he or she wished. It was not seen, at one time, that such structureless living actually increased children’s anxiety. It also was not see that the parent must obviously take a good deal of responsibility for the child’s actions, and that absolute freedom consists of the parent’s doing this in the context of a genuine respect for the child as a person, actually and potentially, that one gives all realistic room for the potentialities of the child to develop, and that one cannot require the child to falsify one’s wants and emotions. Since the rebel gets his or her sense of direction and vitality from attacking the existing standards and mores, one does not have to develop standards of one’s own. Rebellion acts as a substitute for the more difficult process of struggling through to one’s own autonomy, to new beliefs, to the state were one can lay new foundations on which to build. The negative forms of freedom confused freedom with license, and overlooked the fact that freedom is never the opposite of responsibility. #RandolphHarris 7 of 15

Another common error is to confuse freedom with planlessness. Some individuals these days argue that if the system of economic laisse-faire is so successful and working in California (which boasts of being the World’s fifth largest economy has a budget surplus of $14 billion)—letting everyone do as they wish—were altered as history marches on, our freedom would vanish with it. The argument goes like this: Freedom is like a living thing. It is invisible. And if the individual’s right to own the means of production is take away, one no longer has the freedom to earn one’s living in one’s own way. Then one can have no freedom at all. Well, if these writers were right it would indeed be unfortunate—for who then could be free? Not you nor I nor anyone else except a very small group of persons—for in this day of giant industries, only the minutest fraction of citizens can own the means of production anyway. Laissez-faire was a great idea, as we have seen, in earlier centuries: but times change, and almost everyone nowadays earns their living by virtue of belonging to a large group, be it an industry, or a university, or a corporation, or a club. It is a vastly more interdependent World, this “One World” of our twentieth century, than the World of the entrepreneurs of earlier centuries or of our own pioneer days; and freedom must be found in the context of economic community and the social value of work, not in everyone’s setting up own’s own factory or university. #RandolphHarris 8 of 15

Fortunately, if we keep our perspective, this economic interdependence need not destroy freedom. The pony express was a great idea, also, back in the days when sending a letter from coast to coast was an adventure. Also, keep in mind that new inventions do not always replace the old one. Although we now have vacuums, the old fashion straw broom with a sturdy wooden handle is still thriving. However certainly we are thankful—complain as we may about mail service these days—that now when we write a letter to a friend on the coast, we do not have to give more than a passing thought to its method of travel; we drop it in the box with an air-mail stamp and forget about it. We are free, that is, to devote more time and concern to our message to our friend, our intellectual and spiritual interchange in the letter, because in a World made smaller by specialized communication we do not have to be so concerned to our message to our friend, our intellectual and spiritual interchange in the letter, because in a World made smaller by specialized communication we do not have to be so concerned about how the letter gets there. We are more free intellectually and spiritually precisely because we accept our position in economic interdependence with our fellow beings. #RandolphHarris 9 of 15

I have often wondered why there is such anxiety and such an outcry that freedom will be lost unless we preserve the old laissez-faire practices. Is not one of the reason the fact that modern mortals have so thoroughly surrendered inward psychological and spiritual freedom to the routine of their work and to the mass patterns of social conventions that one feels the only vestige of freedom left to one is the opportunity for economic aggrandizement? Has one made the freedom to compete with one’s neighbor economically a last remnant of individuality, which therefore must stand for the whole meaning of freedom? That is to say, if the citizen of the suburbs could not buy a new car each year, build a Mc Mansion, and paint it a slightly different color from his or her neighbor’s, might one feel that one’s life would have to purpose, and that one would not exist as a person? The great weight placed on competitive, laissez-faire freedom seems to me to show how much we have lost a real understanding of freedom. To be sure, freedom is indivisible: and this is precisely why one cannot identify it with a particular economic doctrine or segment of life, least of all a segment of the past; it is a living thing, and its life comes precisely from how the whole person relates oneself to the community of one’s fellow people. #RandolphHarris 10 of 15

Freedom means openness, a readiness to grow; it means being flexible, ready to change for the sake of greater human values. To identify freedom with a given system is to deny freedom—it crystallizes freedom and turns it into a rigid doctrine. To cling to a tradition, with the defensive plea that is we lose something that worked well in the past we will have lost all, neither shows the spirit of freedom nor makes for the future growth of freedom. We shall keep faith with those courageous mortals, the pioneer industrialists, the mortals of the commerce and the capitalists of the sixteenth to nineteenth centuries in the Western World, as well as with the independent frontiers people of our own country, if we emulate their courage, dare to think boldly as they did, and plan the most effective economic measures for our day as they did for theirs. Mortals have always lived in a social World, and that World conditions our psychological health. We simply propose that our social and economic ideal be that society which gives the maximum opportunity for each person in it to realize oneself, to develop and use one’s potentialities and to labor as a human being of dignity giving to and receiving from one’s fellow mortals. The good society is, thus, the one which gives the greatest freedom to its people—freedom defined not negatively and defensively, but absolutely, as the opportunity to realize ever greater human values. #RandolphHarris 11 of 15

Freedom follow that collectivism, as in fascism and communism and socialism, is the denial of the values we recognize as freedom, and must be opposed at all costs. However, we shall successfully overcome them only as we are devoted to absolute ideals which are better, chiefly the building of a society based on a genuine respect for persons and their freedom. The living human being is not a dead image and cannot be described like a thing. In fact, the living human being cannot be described at all. Indeed, much can be said about me, about my character, about my total orientation to life. This insightful knowledge can go very far in understanding and describing my own or another’s psychical structure. However, the total me, my whole individuality, my suchness that is as unique as my fingerprints are, can never be fully understood, not even by empathy, for no two human beings are entirely alike. Only in the process of mutual alive relatedness can the other and I overcome the barrier of separateness, inasmuch as we both participate in the dance of life. Yet our full identification of each other can never be achieved. Even a single act of behavior cannot be fully described. One could write pages of descriptions of the Mona Lisa’s smile, and still the pictured smile would not have been caught in words—but not because her smile is so mysterious. #RandolphHarris 12 of 15

Everybody’s smile is mysterious (unless it is the learned, synthetic smile of the marketplace). No one can fully describe the expression of interest, enthusiasm, biophilia, or of hate or narcissism that one may see in the eyes of another person, or the variety of facial expressions, of gaits, of postures, of intonations that exists among people. The mode of being has as its prerequisites independence, freedom, and the presence of critical reason. Its fundamental characteristic is that of being active, not in the sense of outward activity, of busyness, but of inner activity, the productive use of our human powers. To be active means to give expression to one’s faculties, talents, to the wealth of human gifts with which—though in varying degrees—every human being is endowed. It means to renew oneself, to grow, to flow out, to love, to transcend the prison of one’s isolated personality, to be interested, to list, to give. Yet none of these experiences can be fully expressed in words. The words are vessels that are filled with experience that overflows the vessels. The words point to an experience; they are not the experience. The moment that I express what I experience exclusively in thought and words, the experience has gone; it has dried up, is dead, a mere thought. Hence being is indescribable in words and is communicable only by sharing my experience. It the structure of having, the dead word rules; in the structure of being, the alive and inexpressible experience rules. (Of course, in the being mode there is also thinking that is alive and productive.) #RandolphHarris 13 of 15

Perhaps the being mode may best be described in a symbol. A blue glass antique Victorian chandelier appears to be blue when light shines through it because it absorbs all other colors and this does not let them pass. This is to say, we call the chandelier blue precisely because it does not retain the blue waves. It is named not for what it possessed but for what it gives out. Only to the extent that we decrease the mode of having, that is of nonbeing, for instance, stop finding security and identity by clinging to what we have, by sitting on it, by holding onto our ego and our possessions—can the mode of being emerge. To be requires giving up one’s selfishness, by humbling oneself before God. However, most people find giving up their having orientation too difficult; any attempt to do so arouses their intense anxiety and feels like giving up all security, like being thrown into the ocean when one does not know how to swim. They do not know that when they have given up their attachment to solely focusing on the material World, they can begin to use their own proper forces and walk by themselves with full faith in the Lord. What holds people back is the illusion that they cannot walk by themselves, they have would collapse if they were not supported by the things they have. However, the reason we are alive today is because God willed it to be. #RandolphHarris 14 of 15

People who do not walk in faith are like children who are afraid that they will never be able to walk, after they have fallen for the very first time. However, nature and human help prevent human beings from becoming lost. Those who believe that they would collapse without using the crutches of having also need human help, in addition to God’s guidance. When one is caught in a whirlpool of emotion, it is difficult to find a way out alone. When answers to urgent prayer do not seem to come, it can be that we do not understand some truths about prayer, or because we do not recognize answers when they come. Our Heavenly Father did not put us on Earth to fail but to succeed gloriously. It may seem paradoxical, but that is why recognizing answers to prayer can sometimes be very difficult. Some face life with only their own experience and capacity to help them. Others, seek, through prayer, divine inspiration to know what to do. When required, they qualify for power beyond their own capacity. Communication with our Heavenly Father is a scared privilege. It is based upon unchanging principles. When we receive help from out Heavenly Father, it is in response to faith, obedience, and the proper use of agency. We are here on Earth to gain experience we can obtain in no other way. We are given the opportunity to apply the truth so we can grow, develop, and gain spiritual maturity. #RandolphHarris 15 of 15