Over the last several weeks, I’ve been considering the impact of history, both personal and corporate, on our experience of the present. There are many clichés about the importance of knowing history, and I will do you the favor of recounting not even one. It is enough to say that the past is, always, part and parcel of the present.
Our individual histories are the forces and factors that shape us into the people we are. We are products, individually, of our own experience. Each of us, through the maturation process, is molded by our attachments and relationships with others. Through this dynamic development, we learn everything that we know. We adopt a value system. We gain an ethical outlook. We gain, either through the acceptance or rejection of the images around us, our own vision of reality.
It seems naïve, at best, to think that we arrive as neutral human potential. We are born into larger frameworks. Even our own families are the product of generations of development where values, ethics and visions of reality have been shifting and sifting through the lives of our ancestors. We are born into a collection of related individuals, and each of the individuals, past or present, contribute to the self-discovery of our identities.
Of course, personal and family history is not all of it. As people, we live within cultures, political realities and boundaries. We also know historical movements. All of this evokes a response from the individual, and that response ripples throughout the personal and familial. In some way, the ripple makes it back into the realm of the cultural, political and historical, and the generational transmission continues.
It is probably obvious that much of the information passed through the generations of humans is emotional, rather than rational. Individuals transmit and receive information in all manner of ways. There is clear above-board communication, but there is also that sub-rational content that ripples through, and perhaps has even more impact than the overt.
The emotional is not so much separate, as it is operating on another level. Our emotional response to anything is meaning-level interpretation, and we instinctively do it. It is about acceptance and rejection, approval and disapproval. The entire process of becoming individuals is fraught with this exchange of receiving and interpreting.
Unfortunately, the receiving and interpreting phase is not foolproof, and we often misperceive and misinterpret. This could explain long-standing family disconnects that endure, yet no one seems to be able to articulate the problem. It could also explain the fact that some individuals seem to conduct themselves in unproductive ways, and seem incapable of changing despite all manner of negative feedback. The emotional dimension of generational transmission is very powerful.
Understanding emotional process and history, as passed through generational transmission, can be powerful as well. The power is in having a different perspective and a new vantage point. In my next few posts, I will be addressing various issues in the life of the Church using this lens. My hope is that a new perspective will open a new way into the future.
No comments:
Post a Comment