A
Father's Day Card From My Son
Brooks
Ramsey
Excerpted
from "Beyond
Nothing But to More Than" -
a homily delivered at Calvary Episcopal
Church, Memphis, TN, on July
9,
2000.
A
few years ago, I received a Father’s Day card from my son
Tim. On the front of it was a picture of a little boy sitting
up in bed. Terror was written on his face. His hair was standing
straight up, and the card said, "Dad, I want to thank you."
Well,
I wondered, a Father’s Day card with this boy terrorized,
had I done that to my son?
I
opened the card up and it said, "I
want to thank you for helping me kill all the dragons of
my mind so I could go out and fight the real ones."
You
know, we all have our dragons of the mind. My old professor,
Conrad Sommers, the psychiatrist whom I trained under in St.
Louis, said, "There are five drivers that get in the saddle
and drive us. They’ve got spurs on their boots and they
kick us, and all of our emotional miseries come from being dominated
by one of those drivers."
Here
are the drivers he listed: Be perfect. Please everybody. Try
harder. Be strong. Hurry up.
Have you got any of those driving you? At one time, I had them
all.
These
dragons of the mind keep us from going and fighting the real
ones. They keep us from living in our humanity or experiencing
God’s grace, and they certainly keep us from the joy of
growth. We can’t take time to grow. We have to do it now.
We’re driven by pleasing everybody and doing everything
perfect. These are dragons of the mind.
There’s
a greater dragon though, the dragon that Jesus faced when he
went back home--the dragon of unbelief, the dragon of devaluing
people.
When
Jesus went back home, he could do no mighty works among them
because they said, "Is not this the carpenter?
Do we not know his family? Are not his brothers and sisters among
us? Who is this man that claims to do mighty works? He is really
just one of us." They devalued Christ. They made him less
than he really was.
The
real demon that we have to face is the demon that takes away
from us the power to be who we are--those
ideologies and philosophies and political views and social
and cultural views that reduce us to less than being children
of
God. These demons tear us down.
Carl
Jung, the psychoanalyst, said, "The goal of therapy is to
move persons from the nothing buts of life to the more thans
of life." That has stuck in my mind.
As
a counselor, I have been dominated by that desire to move persons
from the nothing
but to the more than. You are nothing but a housewife, a businessman.
You’re nothing but a consumer. You’re nothing but this
or that.
They
put a label on you and you become simply a pawn on the chessboard
of life, you become dominated by the system.
You
let other people control who you are and what you think about
yourself, and so to move beyond the nothing but to the
more than
is a movement of grace.
That’s
what God is always doing, moving us from what we are to what
we can be.
Copyright ©2000
Brooks Ramsey
Excerpted
from "Beyond Nothing But
to More Than" - a homily delivered at Calvary
Episcopal Church, Memphis, TN, on July 9, 2000. |
