Last week, I posed the question of what motivation leads to withdrawal (and ultimately dissipation), based on the thesis of The Fabric of Faithfulness that a burden of responsibility leads to engagement (and ultimately multiplication).
The answer (as usual) was to keep reading...
[T]he years between adolescence and adulthood are a tumultuous time, anywhere and everywhere. Many students, perhaps most, emerge from their university experience ready to take on the world; the idealism of youth, we call it. But then somewhere along the way the reality of life in the fast lane of adult responsibility hits--sometimes like a ton of bricks, sometimes like acid rain. In a thousand ways they see how hard it is to be faithful to family, at work, in politics. Day in an day out they experience disappointments in every part of life--every part of life--and see how hard it is to be hopeful (and therefore responsible) actors in human history as they try to be neighbors to those next door and to those around the world. --The Fabric of Faithfulness, page 33 (italics is Garber's; underlines are mine)
So, it would seem that disappointment (bred by hardship) leads to hopelessness which induces an abandoning of responsibility--AKA withdrawal.
And it seems to me that we make the disappointment more painful and the hopelessness bleaker when we are sensitive only to hardships that are similar to those with which we are familiar. How often do we hear of someone's struggle in life, only to respond with, "Well, you're not as far along as I am, so you've got it easy?" (And how many times have we used that response on a student!)
Garber says that cultivating responsibility requires a community who cares. So, how can we expand our range of sympathy to include those in our community whose struggles seem foreign to us?
The Emerging Scholars Blog is hosting a discussion of Steven Garber's The Fabric of Faithfulness. I read this book a couple years ago, and am enjoying a reread.
One of the main themes (or, at least, how I would word it) of the book is that a burden of responsibility leads to engagement. My wife Amy and I were discussing this theme last night, and considered how such responsibility-based engagement, when pursued in a healthy community of fellow engagers, leads to a multiplicative cascade. The "community of fellow engagers" is one of the three goals that Garber encourages his readers to pursue (along with a worldview that inspires responsibility and a mentor to nurture that worldview).
We pictured the process as:
responsibility --> engagement --> multiplication/cascade
Yet many Christians and churches seem to exhibit disengagement, and feel their energies being sapped and dissipated. We came to the question of, "If a burden of responsibility leads to engagement, what kind of motivation leads to withdrawal?" In other words, what would replace ??? in the picture:
??? --> withdrawal --> sapping/dissipation?
What do you think?
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