Something from Peter Marin in 1970, most of which is quoted in Eugene Peterson’s A Long Obedience in the Same Direction:
I remember talking to one planner about what one wants from others.
“Respect,” he said, “And their utmost effort.”
“But all I want,” I said, “is love and a sense of humor.”
His eyes lit up. “I see,” he said. “You mean positive feedback.”
Positive feedback. So we debauch our own sweet nature. I don’t want positive feedback, nor do the young. What they need is so much more important and profound—not “skills” but qualities of the soul; daring, warmth, wit, imagination, honesty, loyalty, grace, and resilience. But one cannot be taught those things; they cannot be programmed into a machine. They seem to be learned, instead, in activity and communion—in the adventurous presence of other real persons.
. . .
But if that is the case, my friends ask, what do you do? I have no easy answers. There are cultural conditions for which there are no solutions, turnings of the soul so profound and complex that no system can absorb or contain them. How would one have “solved” the Reformation? Or first-century Rome? One makes adjustments and accommodations, one dreams about the future and makes plans to save us all, but in spite of all that, because of it, what seems more important are the private independent acts that become more necessary every day: the ways we find as private persons to restore to one another the strengths we should have now—whether to make the kind of revolution we need or to survive the repression that seems likely. What I am talking about here is a kind of psychic survival: our ability to live decently beyond institutional limits and provide for our comrades enough help to sustain them. What saves us as men and women is always a kind of witness: the quality of our own acts and lives. This is the knowledge, of course, that institutions bribe us to forget, the need and talent for what Kropotkin called “mutual aid” — the private assumption of responsibility for others.
We could certainly add that life lived as “witness” is able to appreciate the best ways in which we are able to assume responsibility for others while also avoiding the worst: a way of living that takes seriously the profound resonances of that life which we live but with all the inescapable creaturely humility that also is our lot and our glory.
Marin closes:
What we are talking about here are really acts of love, the gestures by which one shares with others the true dimension and depth of the world. Those gestures are a form of revelation, for they restore to others a sense of what is shared.
. . .
That isn’t much, but it is also almost everything . . . The few real teachers I know, those really serving the young, are simply those who try to live such lives in their company, as freely and humanly as they can. The rest of “education” is almost always rhetoric and nonsense.