THE OBLIGATION OF BEING
But the primary duty of parents is to learn and to teach that happiness
is not the supreme end of life and to dare to live it. We are so bent
upon giving to our children that we forget to ask aught of them. We seem
to be unmindful of what the wisest teacher of our generation has called
the danger of luxury in the lives of our children. Those parents who in
largest measure have learned to do without seem to think that they must
overwhelm their children with things. How many parents are equal to the
wisdom of the heroic Belgian mother who would not permit her children to
leave Belgium in the hour of its deepest stress and suffering, saying:
"Yes, we intended to take our children to England for safety but when we
remembered that in the future they might hold important positions in our
country and perhaps be influential in future leadership, we did not
want them to come to this work ignorant of what our people have
undergone and suffered during this terrible war. They would not have
known because they would have spent all the period of the war in
pleasant living in England. When we thought of this, we felt with
sinking hearts that we owed it to them and their country to keep them
here, though we knew and know now that there is great danger." Did not
this Belgian mother serve her children infinitely better than do those
parents who imagine that they must deny their children nothing save the
possibility of discomfort and want?
Edward Everett Hale tells a story which clearly shows what Emerson
thought best for a young man and wherein he conceived the
responsibility of parents to lie. I congratulated him as I
congratulated myself on the success of our young friend, and he said:
"Yes, I did not know he was so fine a fellow. And now, if something
will fall out amiss, if he should be unpopular with his class, or if
he should fail in business, or if some other misfortune can befall
him, all will be well." He himself put it, "Good is a good doctor,
but bad is sometimes a better."
With one further evil effect, perhaps the worst, of the habitude of
ceaseless parental giving, I have dealt elsewhere. It fosters more
than all else the parental sense of possession. Have I not given my
children everything?--asks a hyper-wasteful father or a
super-bounteous mother. Yes, it might be answered, you have given them
_everything_ and that is all you have given them. Giving a child
things without number is no guarantee of peace or beauty in the
parental-filial relation. Giving, giving, eternal giving is bound to
narcotize into sodden self-satisfaction, or at last to rouse to
protest an awakening soul. If, Mr. Successful or Madam Prosperous, you
think that you are satisfying your children because you are giving
them an abundance of things, you may be destined some day to suffer a
sorry awakening. Remember that too many things kill a home more surely
than too few. Children may ask and ought to ask more of parents than
things, and, far from being satisfied with things, they ought to
demand of parents that these minimize things and magnify that of
life which is unconditioned by things. To magnify the home is not to
furnish it richly but to give it noble content.
Over-stressing the physical side of the life of children and
under-emphasizing the spiritual side of their life leads inevitably to
certain results. Some years ago, I knew a family in which both parents
died within a brief period. There was some perfunctory grief, though
in each case the funeral was one of the new-fashioned kind, marked
alike by tearlessness and the use of motorcars. The interesting thing,
as I looked upon these comfortable, unworried, immobile children, was
that probably it had been the dream of the parents for a lifetime to
make their children comfortable and happy. Well, the parents had
wonderfully succeeded, had so succeeded in the matter of making their
children comfortable that not even the death of parents in swift
succession could shake them out of their deep-rooted comfortableness
even for a moment. Within a few weeks of the passing of the mother, I
met the son and heir--heir rather than son--at an amateur baseball
game in which he was one of the vociferous and gleesome
participants, with a cigar perched in his mouth at that angle which
is, I believe, considered good form at a baseball game.
As I surveyed that sorry specimen of filial impiety, apparently
without reverence for his parents or respect for himself, I was moved
to ask myself where lies the fault, whose the ultimate responsibility?
True enough, the children of those parents were rather empty-headed
and superficial beings, but it was the parents who were primarily at
fault. The mother was a blameless rather than a good woman, and the
father was an unseeing, soulless money-grubber with but one aim in
life--namely, to multiply his children's rather than his own comforts,
and to enable them to indulge in every manner of luxury. These gave
their children things and only things, and still there was something
touching in the devotion of the parents, however poor and mistaken its
objects. But there was something repulsive in the indifference of the
children to the parents who had lived for naught else than their
well-being, however mistakenly conceived.
Parents who give their children only things must face the fact that
they make themselves quite dispensable, seeing that they are not
things. For things and the wherewithal to secure them are alone
indispensable according to the parental standards. The ultimate
responsibility? Any possibility of change involves the re-education of
parents. Parents must learn long before parenthood what are the values
in life for which it is worth while to toil and to contend. The root
of the matter goes very deep in conformity to the hint of Oliver
Wendell Holmes with respect to the time at which a child's education
is to be begun.
Some years past, I came upon a ludicrous illustration of the maximum
care devoted to the physical nature and the minimum devoted to the
moral and spiritual nurture of child-life. I heard a very
well-circumstanced mother declare: "I never permit my child to have a
crumb of food handed it by its governess which has not previously been
tasted by me." Quite innocently I asked: "Where is the little
gentleman?" The answer was: "Napoleon--I call him that because his
name was Caesar--is at the 'movies' this afternoon." Upon further
inquiry, I learned that the mother did not know the name and nature of
the play upon which her son was looking, and that in order to keep him
out of mischief he was sent every afternoon to the motion picture
theatres. Here was the good mother tasting every mouthful fed to the
heir-apparent lest harm befall him, and, yet, he was spending an hour
or more daily in attendance at a motion-picture theatre where poison
rather than food might be and probably was fed to the child's mind.
But no hesitation and no fear were felt on that score. Underlying the
one concern and the other unconcern is a crude materialism which
assumes that the avenue of access to a child's well-being is feeding
but that the mind, howsoever fed and impoisoned, even of a little
child, could somehow be trusted to take care of itself.
There are certain things which we deny to our children partly because
we have them not, and yet again because we are not often conscious of
the need of them in the life of the child. I place first
spiritual-mindedness; second, the sense of humility, and third, the
art of service. These three graces must come again into the life of
our children from the life of their parents and they can hardly come
in any other way. If they come not, it will be an unutterable loss
from every point of view, remembering the word of a distinguished
university president, "the end of the home is the enlargement and
enrichment of personality, the performance of the duty owed to general
society in making contributions for its betterment."
I address myself particularly to Jewish parents when I say to them
that it is a terrible blunder to ignore the spiritual responsibility
which rests upon them. A Christian child is almost invariably touched
by the circumambient spiritual culture but the Jewish child is in the
midst of a non-Jewish culture and almost untouched by spiritual
influences. The home gives little, the Jewish religious school gives
no more than a fragmentary education in the things of Jewish history
instead of exercising a characteristic spiritual influence. And, as
for the Synagogue, it is the part of kindness or of guilt to be silent
touching its hardly sufficing influence in American Israel in the
creation of a distinctive spiritual atmosphere or the enhancement of
definite spiritual values.
With respect to the spirit of humility, I happened not long ago to
confer with two young men, one of whom is about to enter into the
ministry. When asked quite conventionally what it was that had moved
him to think of himself as especially fitted for the ministry, his
answer was: "I feel that I am a born leader of men." On the other
hand, I asked a young graduate of an American university who was about
to leave for Europe what was his life's purpose, and he answered: "To
serve in the foreign mission field." Is it not true that the youth who
felt that he was a born leader and sought a field in which he could
exercise the qualities of leadership lacked spirituality, was wholly
without humility, evidently did not have the faintest understanding of
the possibilities of service, and the other revealed the possession of
spiritual-mindedness, of humility and finally the spirit of service.
There is no more serious indictment to be framed against the family
than that it does little and often nothing to foster the social
spirit. The home is not often enough a school of applied social
ethics, and the home that is not is likely to witness such conflict as
arises out of revolt against the smugly self-centered and unsocialized
home on the part of those sons and daughters who have caught a gleam
of the social life. If we had or could share with our children the
spirit of service, would not great numbers of young people throughout
the land rise up, eager for service to Israel in the midst of its
terrible needs at home and abroad? Few were the well-circumstanced
youth in the course of the war, who gave themselves to service through
agencies classed as non-military, and fewer still such as volunteered
for service as relief workers in East-European lands at the close of
the war--again among the well-to-do. This is very largely a matter of
upbringing, of the ideals implanted by parents and teachers. What is
your son's ideal of living? Is it to serve or to be served? Do you try
hard enough to get out of your son's head the notion that being served
by butler and valet and chauffeur is the greatest thing in the world?
The greatest thing in the world is not being served but serving, to be
least served and most serviceable.
As Tolstoy put it, I believe shortly before his death, woman's bearing
and nursing and raising children will be useful to humanity only when
she raises up children not merely to seek pleasure but to be truly the
servants of mankind. The ultimate question underlying every other is,
what are you giving to the souls of your children? And the answer
is,--what you are. "In my dealing with my child, my Latin and Greek,
my accomplishments and my money, stead me nothing. They are all lost
on him: but as much soul as I have avails. If I am merely willful, he
gives me a Roland for an Oliver, sets his will against mine, one for
one, and leaves me, if I please, the degradation of beating him by my
superiority of strength. But if I renounce my will and act for the
soul, setting that up as umpire between us two, out of his young eyes
looks the same soul; he reveres and loves with me."[E]
Thus pleads Emerson in the name of the child's potential oversoul.
Not long ago, I made an attempt to interest a young woman of a
well-known family in social service. She shuddered as if some
verminous thing had been held up to her gaze. "Not for me that kind of
thing." You must teach your children the methods and the practice of
selfless service. If you do not, well, your children may rise up
against you or fall to your own level, or, worst of all, awaken and
discover what you are.