More On Parenting As Hospitality ~ Part One

More On Parenting As Hospitality

This past Sunday I received one of the most meaningful compliments in my life. It was a comment said just in passing, by one of the more respected people of the church I attend. He is an author of a couple books, with another one about to come out, and he has written countless articles for publication, mostly on the subject of religion. He is currently a professor at Vanderbilt University. And as far as I know, he never speaks an idle word.

He told me that he found my blog post on Parenting as Hospitality through a link on another blog, The Bald Blogger, while on a search of a completely different subject. No, he doesn't usually read my blog. But, he complimented the post and said he'd never made that connection before, between hospitality and parenting.

Immediately, I felt like debasing myself, and shying away from any credit for the post. Hospitality, especially Christian hospitality isn't something I came up with. It's just an idea I've been reading about recently. What I wrote in the post was, if anything, only a variation of the theme – someone else's theme. But, instead of embarking on some rant of self denial and false humility I just blushed, and thanked him for the compliment. He knew, and I didn't have to say.

Hospitality, especially of the Christian variety, is not one of my strong suits, and I think this blog bears witness to this, to some degree. As I wrote in another recent post, there are two attributes to all chronically homeless people, sadness and anger. And I certainly possess both of those, in spades. And it is anger which inhibits people, including myself, from acting out real hospitality. And this anger, I must admit, is not some cross to bare as some people might claim, it is instead unadulterated sin, and I must work to overcome it. I believe this anger within me comes from life experiences with the world, but especially from events with my family when I was treated with less than the respect. Well, "lack of respect" may just be a nice way to describe moments of abuse that shaped who I became as an adult.

Yesterday I watched the movie, “The Breakfast Club,” for the umpteenth time. And this story took on a new dimension, in light of the concept of parenting as hospitality. It was clear very early on that each of the five students was suffering from a lack of hospitality from their parents - the kind of respect that is necessary to make hospitality real and meaningful. By the end of the movie, the characters discover themselves, and become the hospitality for each other that they are not receiving from their parents. (As a side note, you can see how this movie could have turned out badly, if the hospitality they received came by way of a gang involved in criminal activity. And that is exactly how gangs recruit, by finding youth in need of a little acceptance and respect and who are currently not receiving the kind of hospitality the need from other sources.)

I empathized mostly with the Brain of the group, played by Anthony Michael Hall, because I too felt so much pressure that I could not handle it. Like the character, I took a gun to school. And although I did not hurt anyone, including myself, I got very close to doing so. I was expelled from that school, and was sent to another one farther away, where I didn't know anyone. Sadly, this new social isolation also caused my problems to worsen. This new school was on the outskirts of a “bad neighborhood” and so there were few expectations on the students to achieve anything – except to stay out of trouble. That school's definition of “trouble” was a lot more lenient than the schools in the rest of the city. And I quickly learned that I need not complete any class assignments to receive passing grades from my teachers. I was actually allowed to graduate without having the required number of class credits. My counselor allowed two of my elective class credits in Physical Education to count towards the two math credits I did not have. During these last years of school I was more inclined to press weights than press buttons on a calculator. I wasn't the dumb jock type, though. Statewide standardized academic testing put me in the top ten percent of my class. But, because of my suspension from my first school early in my sophomore year, I was not eligible to play for any of the school's athletic teams. I learned this only after attending tryouts for the football team. I never told any of the students in my second high school why I had to leave my first one. And so I was accused of being “chicken” by some of the members of the football team for not playing.

Ok, I really digressed there. Just something I hadn't thought of in a while.

The pressure I was under, that nearly led to early tragedy, (as apposed to the later tragedy my life turned into) was due to my inability to perform well and succeed academically. Although there was every indication to believe I was smart, my grades did not reflect it. And instead of my parents and others thinking that I may need help, I was instead accused of being lazy, and lacking the essential character necessary for success. It was my father's belief that, “a good swift kick to his ass,” would fix the situation. Only once did my father make good on this threat, by hitting me a couple times with a two by four piece of wood, when I was in the 8th or 9th grade. It did not have the desired effect. My grades did not improve. More specifically, I had a memory problem, actually I still do, but my father was under the belief that the threat of violence, and making that threat real, would motivate me to remember. And I extrapolate this a little and say that this type of motivation is just as ineffective as attempting to get homeless people to leave homelessness by punishing them for it.

From the very beginning of my career as a public school student, I had trouble with the subject of English, and all its various forms. I was good with memorizing the alphabet, but beyond that I had difficulties. My spelling was atrocious, and I was a painfully slow reader. And though I was a solid C student in every other subject I was a D to F student in English. Actually I was more of an F student, but most teachers took pity on me. The additional problem with not doing well with English is that reading and writing are essential for doing well in every other subject. Given my level of intelligence, if I had been just a solid C student in English, I would have excelled in everything else.

Again, according to my parents, and eventually everyone else, my problem was that I was lazy. Of course the logic doesn't really follow, being that I did satisfactorily in all other subjects. For a brief moment there was hope that I would get the help I needed. I was either in the second or third grade when my parents considered sending me to a psychiatrist. When I asked them why, they said it was to determine if my trouble was based on me actually being smarter than the other kids. But, before seeing a psychiatrist, my mother first had a conference with my school teacher on the subject. I remember going with my mother to this meeting. It was after school, no other kids were around. And when my mother went into the classroom with the teacher, my teacher told me to stay outside and go to nearby playground. When the door shut, leaving me outside, I tried to peer into the classroom, past the side of the closed blinds, but all I could see was darkness. What was said during this conference, between my mother and teacher, I was never told. But afterward, my parents no longer pursued the psychiatrist idea, or any other form of help for my condition.

In hindsight, this event seems extremely pivotal, setting the course for the rest of my life. Things could have gone in a completely different direction from that moment on, but they didn't.


Part two I'm still working on, and will post it here. And believe me, this is just the start. No comments will be allowed here.