I am thinking about going out of balance.
Let me explain.
I used to think that balance was the key to a serene life.
Don’t go to extremes. Eat in moderation. In school study hard, but don’t burn yourself out. In a career, be a good worker, but don’t neglect you home life. Wisdom seemed to consist of navigating my ship between the excesses and extremes of life. Or keeping the teeter-totter level.
I am slowly letting go of that grid. I haven’t thrown it to the wind yet. But there are some problems with the balance approach.
One problem is that each generation and culture has its own view of where balance is achieved. For example, I was dismayed by the amount of work our local Kindergarten expected students to do. I was griping and complaining that Paul was expected to read and write so young. I felt it was too much work, for children too young. Children need more time just to be children. Then Steve told me about one of his coworkers who was adopting children from Ethiopia. He told Steve about the studies these children were doing in preschool. In Ethiopia. It was fairly advanced. My own perception of the proper balance of schooling and childhood play time shifted a bit. It is hard to use balance as a guide for living, if the fulcrum of the teeter-totter shifts.
Another problem with balance is that it doesn’t leave much room for the passionate embrace of anything.
I started doubting balance when I read “Orthodoxy” by G.K. Chesterton. One of the things that drew him back to Christianity was the way its critics attacked it. Christianity would at once be attacked on one side for being too gloomy and pessimistic, and then on the other side for being too Pollyanna and optimistic. Although he was an athiest at the time, the attacks annoyed him. When he looked at Christian orthodoxy, he found that it somehow reconciled gloom and hope as opposite sides of the same coin, each to be viewed in its proper time.
Since then, I have abandoned balance as the standard in my parenting. I no longer try to balance discipline (we’re mad at each other) and attachment (we’re happy with each other). I use discipline to achieve reconciliation so that attachment can be possible.
And I don’t see God using balance as the golden path either. He never said, “I will balance justice and mercy.” There are no scales to weigh our good and our bad. He wouldn’t mar Himself by accepting anything less than perfect justice. Nor would He ignore His beloved children and deny them mercy. Instead, at great sacrifice to Himself, he embraced justice and mercy, making them like two sides of the same coin. The triune God came to earth to create a place where justice and mercy could cross. I want to throw out the work of balancing. I want to dwell at that cross.
