The Road Less Traveled

I am not very motivated to blog right now, though there are lots of things I could blog about.... Yea, I'm lazy...

I've been reading The Road Less Traveled by M. Scott Peck. It isn't exactly a "Christian" book, but I've been really challenged by some of his concepts and thoughts.

Peck believes that love is at the core of any spiritual change. It is how Peck defines love, and the implications that follow, that I find really interesting.

Peck's definition of love: "The will to extend one's self for the purpose of nurturing one's own or another's spiritual growth."

According to Peck one cannot love someone else without loving their own self. I know. That sounds like modern psychological BS. But think about it. Can you really give someone else something you don't have? Can we impart character or discipline to our children that we don't have? Or, that God is not living in us and through us?

Next, Peck emphasizes the word "will" in his definition of love. "Will is desire of sufficient intensity that it is translated into action." There is a difference between desire and action. We can desire to be loving, and not be loving. This sounds trite, but when I think about my own life, and my "lived-out" definition of love, it tends to be nebulous. This definition forces me to think about love on an individual level rather than the "we are the world" level. Who is God putting right in front of me, right now?

Last, this definition implies that love is work. (I'm sure there are some with a "romantic" view of love who will have problems with this. The romantic view of love is based on feeling so would fall outside of the definition that we are using here.) In Peck's view, love is always a form of work and/or courage because we are extending ourselves to include someone else in our "world". That extension of ourself implies risk and work.

After pointing out the many things that love is not, Peck discusses the "work of attention". The fact is that a large part of love is attention. It is listening. It is entering in to the other person's world. If you have ever really tried to that, you know that it is work. I don't know about you, but my thoughts drift so easily...."What will I say next?"...."Oh, I can fix that."...."Dang, I forgot to put that load of laundry in."....."My kids are being to loud."..... I've thought about how often I truly enter in to my kid's world too. Peck points out that there are many different levels of listening and we need to use each one at certain times. But, how often do I fully enter in to my kindergartener's world with all my attention? Not often enough.

I'll end with a quote from a part of the book about the role of love in psychotherapy. I think it describes a way in which we, as the Church, can and should be present to the broken in our world.

"It is not "unconditonal positive regard," nor it is magical words, techniques or postures; it is human involvement and struggle. It is the willingness of the therapist to extend himself or herself for the purpose of nurturing a patient's growth - willingness to go out on a limb, to truly involve oneself at an emotional level in the relationship, to actually struggle with the patient and with oneself. In short, the magical ingredient of successful deep and meaningful psychotherapy is love."

Am I willing to go to the broken places and broken people of the world and enter struggle?
Who, specifically, am I struggling with?
How am I doing at struggling with my wife and kids?