Living By The Spirit - 4
Here is the fourth chapter:
In the days before television, a popular radio comedy series, Fibber McGee and Molly, had a character called Mr. Wimple. He was a timid, squeaky-voiced man totally dominated by an overbearing wife. She was always telling him what to do, when and how to do it. Whenever she said something to him, he would answer in his humblest tone, "Yes, dearie." When she was not around, he would refer to as her "Sweetie Pie;" then he would giggle nervously in telling Fibber McGee how he had just done the exact opposite of whatever she had told him. That always got a big laugh from the studio audience. Or perhaps it was that canned sound effects.
There was another character in a newspaper comic strip as known Mr. Milquetoast. The cartoonist pictured him as a crouching, trembling, sissified little man with no mind of his own. Our common words *wimp* and *wimpy* have no known origin. They could well derive from those comedy characters because they did not come into the language until the 20th century.
"Meekness" or "Gentleness?"
Pictures of Jesus painted by medieval and renaissance artists frequently showed him as a wimpish kind of person. In 1999, a group of Roman Catholics were so concerned about this portrayal of Jesus that they ran a contest to see if a better portrait could be found. The winning image appeared to reproduce many of the same qualities. It portrayed Jesus as a person of mixed race and indefinite gender, and very uninspiring as a person to admire or follow.
The first line of the old children's hymn, "Gentle Jesus, meek and mild" expressed a similar attitude. As John Wesley wrote it in the 18th century, the hymn had a very serious purpose. He designed it as a teaching tool to mold illiterate children to be as Wesley imagined Jesus had been in childhood - humble, submissive and obedient. One verse of the original hymn says exactly that:
This attitude appears to have been taken from the only story we have about Jesus' childhood. It tells about Jesus and his parents visiting Jerusalem. (Luke 2:41-52) On the other hand, Jesus response to his parents' remonstrations for not being with them homebound from the festival appears to deny that attitude.
In my own childhood in the 1930s, children were expected to be seen and not heard - in church especially. Even our snickers when everybody's Aunt Lily dropped the tray of communion glasses were hushed up. We were rarely allowed to attend the celebration of communion, except on the coldest winter days. Actually, we regarded that as a gift of freedom. Who wouldn't after being in the church for an hour of Sunday school and then required to sit with our parents through the whole worship service, full sermon included, until the beginning of the hymn before communion? Only after we had been confirmed in our early teen years were we permitted to "stay for communion." Many of my peers in that small congregation left the church long before becoming eligible for confirmation. As I Recall now, it was parental example and our obedience that kept those of us who stuck it out in the church well into adolescence.
What This Word Meant to Paul
When he wrote to the Galatians, Paul used a very common Greek word praotés for this fruit of the Spirit. The adjective was *praus.* Either the noun or the adjective occurs in several other New Testament passages. In the King James Version of 1611 they were invariably translated as "meekness" and "meek." In our violently aggressive 20th century culture, meekness elicited derision. Nobody wanted to be known as a wimp. We all wanted to get away from that. The word appears to have lost its original sense of humility and gentleness. In the Revised Standard Version of 1952, "meekness" is used whenever an inner attitude is described; "gentleness" when it describes dealing with others. In one place, however, it brings out the special meaning of "perfect courtesy." (Titus 3:2) More recent versions of the Bible use "gentleness" to translate what Paul intended.
The word appeared a number of times in the Greek Old Testament to translate a Hebrew word that meant "poor" or "needy." It described the impoverished and oppressed people of Israel under constant threat from hostile enemies. That gave the word the religious sense of being totally dependent on God. Many of the psalms of lament express this spiritual dependence.
The third beatitude in Matthew 5:5 has usually been translated: "Blessed are the meek." My favorite paraphrase of the beatitude is: "Happy are those who need God and know it." In fact, the beatitude comes directly from Psalm 37:11 "But the meek shall inherit the land, and delight themselves in abundant prosperity." That whole psalm expresses a confidence in God in the face a repeated of onfrontations with wicked oppressors. In those days as today, those who were oppressed were inevitably poor. But the oppressed are not always gentle in their reaction to their poverty.
How We Can Be Gentle Like Jesus
There is a story that when the Greek philosopher Aristotle wanted to define praotés, he decided it was the happy mean between excessive anger and the total absence of anger. Being angry at the right time was as special gift that Jesus displayed on several occasions. He overturned the money-changers' tables and drove them from the temple. This story is told in all four gospels, so the early church must have regarded this quality as very characteristic of Jesus. He also rebuked Peter severely for wanting to turn him away from the cross. But he loved Peter to the end and, according to John 21:15-19, after the resurrection, Jesus restored Peter to a place of honour among the disciples.
In the summer 1945, I volunteered as a student minister for The United Church of Canada in northwestern Saskatchewan. I was assigned to seek out people in five communities and invite them to gather for worship. They had not had a student minister for three years. I succeeded in holding services consistently in only two of those communities. They lay thirty miles apart across a massive muskeg through which only one or two roads had been driven. For transportation, my landlord, an experienced horse breeder, gave me a three year old mare. She was smaller than she should have been because she had borne a colt when she was too young. She had never had so much as a halter on her head, let alone a bridle and a bit. We borrowed a saddle from a neighbor, got a bit into her mouth and then the saddle on her back. Mounting that horse for the first time was an unforgettable adventure. I just hung on for dear life and stayed there. When the horse realized that she wasn't going to dislodge me, she settled down and behaved perfectly. She quickly became totally obedient to my directions. She stayed that way for the rest of the summer. Babe, as I called her, became a very gentle mount who carried me over an estimated one thousand miles of western scrub and swamp country.
This kind of gentleness also includes strength. On one homeward journey, Babe was frightened by a dog and threw me from the saddle. I caught her again quickly and headed her toward home. She cantered about twenty miles without stopping. It was an exhilarating ride for a neophyte like myself. It was an even better test of how good a horse Babe really was. She exhibited that wonderful quality of praotés - strength under control.
Being Practical About Gentleness
Why should we be gentle in our ways of relating to other people? If we do, cynics will say, people will treat us like doormats to walk over and wipe their feet on.
My father was a salesman in Montreal all his working life selling advertising space for newspapers and magazines . He never made a lot of money, but he enjoyed the respect of his peers for the kind of man he was. He could close a deal, but never with the kind aggressive pressure that meant he would not be welcome in that office again. More than half his working life was spent in the employ of French publications for which he sold advertising space for English industries and businesses to reach French customers. He had the trust of his French superiors, even though he could speak very little French. He could always get an appointment with a busy executive to tell them of what he had to sell. Toward the end of his career, he told me that if he could toss his hat into any office in Montreal and not have it thrown out, he had a reasonable expectation of doing business there.
One of the reasons why women have been well received as pastors in recent years is that they exhibit a caring style which can only be described as gentleness. A few have not been accepted. It is my observation that some are rejected in large part because of the need of other people - and not always men - to have a more aggressive, domineering type of spiritual leadership; or because some women ministers themselves have been offensive in their dealings with opposition.
A recent Internet discussion about baptizing dying or stillborn infants offers a case in point. Most of those who participated were women who felt the need of the parents to grieve and offered their pastoral care in any way they could. The use of the sacrament of baptism, to some theologically unnecessary or even mistaken, was one way to be of service in such a situation. Others suggested that a simple dedication or anointing of the infant's body and prayer of blessing would be sufficient instead of baptism. They found such a suggestion readily accepted. One male participant in the exchange told of one of his seminary professors saying, "There are times when one has to throw out all the theology and just be sensitively pastoral."
The essence of gentleness
One unique paraphrase of the letters of the New Testament, Letters to Young Churches by J. B. Phillips, uses the word "adaptability" to translate praotés.
There is a story in Mark's Gospel (7:24-30) of Jesus visiting a foreign country, Tyre, which lay right next to Galilee on the Mediterranean coast. Apparently he needed to be alone and didn't wanted it known that he was there. A Gentile woman discovered where he was, threw herself at his feet begging him to help her sick daughter. Jesus refused saying that his ministry should remain primarily for Jews. In refusing the woman's plea, he used a metaphor about children needing to be fed first, so it wasn't fair for food to be taken from their mouths and fed to the dogs. Despite this, the woman persisted, "Even the dogs under the table eat the children's crumbs." Jesus changed his mind because of that retort and healed her daughter. He was adaptable.
In recent years a great many people have suffered the pain of being fired under humiliating circumstances because their employer was "downsizing." Although they had been employed by the same company for many years, their services were no longer required. The injustice of the experience broke the spirit of a considerable number. Faced with the same humiliation, others made changes in their lives, searched for new ways of using their skills, became self-employed or sought different work elsewhere. The most successful were those who were most adaptable.
To be adaptable in such a traumatic situation requires an inner strength not every one could muster. This was especially true for older workers or those with few alternative skills who had lived by much the same routines in declining industries. Such workers needed to be dealt with gently as they adjusted to the new realities of their lives.
There is yet another instance of how the authors of both Old and New Testament understood praotés. It is the opposite of pride. Boasting and pride which trust only in oneself is constantly contrasted with true humility. This particular meaning comes out in the birth stories of Matthew and Luke, especially in the Song of Mary (Luke 1:46-55), the birth of Jesus to an unmarried mother, and the manger cradle for the child (Luke 2:5-7). Paul repeats this sense of the word in his Letter to the Philippians where he described the lowliness of the Son of God (Philippians 2:6-8). In his Letter to the Corinthians too, he wrote of the wonder of this divine humility which Jesus so fully exemplified in that "though he was rich, for our sake he became poor" (2 Corinthians 8:9).
Paul believed that Jesus' death on the cross may have appeared to some as a sign of weakness. Because of the resurrection which followed, he saw it the full and final expression of the infinite power of God's love. Christians who live with the same self-sacrificing attitude in dealing with others are actually living by the same power God showed in raising Jesus from the dead. (2 Corinthians 13:4) This too is the energy that powers the universe. In writing to the Corinthians, Paul made an interesting combination of meekness and gentleness. "I appeal to you by the meekness and gentleness of Christ." (2 Corinthians 10:1) The Greek words Paul used in this instance were praotés translated as meekness; and epieikeia translated as gentleness.
Even the eminent scholar, the late William Barclay, had difficulty with that second word. He said, however, that it really conveys the quality of dealing with one another in ways that go beyond justice to compassion. He noted how some people will demand their rights in every circumstance, do no more than they are compelled to do, yet also require others to do all they can compel them to do. This kind of legalism soon breaks up any relationship. Barclay added with a touch of irony that if God demanded all God's rights from us and required that we meet every requirement of the law, we would be truly lost. Instead, God treats us with gracious gentleness, as Jesus treated the woman who bathed his feet with her tears and anointed them with ointment (Luke 8:36-50).
Paul had learned through his own conversion from an aggressive, violent persecutor of Christians that there are times when the spirit of gentle compassion overruled whatever the law might dictate. Time and again Jesus spoke of this same quality. It could all be summed up in that saying we name "The Golden Rule": "In everything do to others as you would have them do to you; for this is the law and the prophets." (Matthew 7:12) Slight variations of this simple truth can be found in every religious tradition.
Gentleness in the Corporate World.
Corporate expressions of this principle of gentleness are not easy to find. When the bottom line matters most, few companies seek other values. One businessman I knew had built up his bakery from a bankrupt company a creditor pleaded with him to take on during the Depression in the1930s. In 1939, the governor general of Canada asked him to prepare the cake for a garden party during the royal visit to Ottawa of King George VI and Queen Elizabeth. By the end of World War II the bakery was a thriving enterprise with vehicles delivering bread daily far and wide through the Ottawa valley.
When the housing shortage struck in the early 1950s, this very successful businessman realized that some of his employees needed homes for their families. With the mayor of Ottawa, he helped organize a low-cost housing development that became a model for other cities to follow. He never failed to give 5% of the annual profits of the company to charitable causes. He treated his employees so fairly that they refused to organize a union when he urged them to do so. He wanted them to share some of the principles of fair play and good management with others in the union movement. So he had to content himself with doing his thing in a small way until others could take notice. He never avoided an opportunity to tell anyone who would listen what he had done to be a light in his small corner of the rough and tumble business world.
Gentleness does not mean being without convictions that result in forthright action. A confrontation occurred between the executive of the Toronto Police Association and various civic authorities to whom the police are accountable. A relatively small group of women councillors banded together to stop the association's executive from bullying and intimidating any politician of whom they disapproved. The association executive had launched a money raising campaign that would be used to target politicians opposed to the hard-line stance of the association. They had gone so far as to say they would deliberately disobey an order from the police chief to cease and desist. Using their positions as elected public representatives, these women persuaded the police services board to adopt motions effectively ending the association's fund raising campaign. The city council unanimously supported their initiatives.
Where their male counterparts had been tentative and compromising, these women saw clearly the important principles of civilian oversight and police accountability. They were the catalysts for restoring order to a very tense situation at a time when the Toronto Police are making the transition from the leadership of one police chief to another. Their gentler style of effecting political change and asserting sound government did not prevent them from achieving goals beneficial to all citizens.
One of the recent developments in church government is the number of women who have been called to responsible leadership in church posts. This may well have brought about a changed ethos of church government in subtle but effective ways. Authoritarian rule favoured by many men in ministry is no longer in vogue. Gentler modes of consultation and negotiation have replaced it. Attitudes rooted in past traditions have given way to new approaches to difficult problems. Even preaching is no longer from the stance of "Thus saith the Lord!" but from a humbler position of "Consider this as what God requires of us."
The church's mandate for social action springs from a deep sense of compassion for the poor and underprivileged, not from a superior attitude of it being our duty to be charitable. In local congregations women hold many of the important positions of responsibility and leadership. No longer are they "the ladies aid" providing refreshments when men gather to make all the decisions. Women have also been very successful in recruiting and helping men learn what is involved in child care and nursery school teaching in the church.
4 - GENTLENESS
In the days before television, a popular radio comedy series, Fibber McGee and Molly, had a character called Mr. Wimple. He was a timid, squeaky-voiced man totally dominated by an overbearing wife. She was always telling him what to do, when and how to do it. Whenever she said something to him, he would answer in his humblest tone, "Yes, dearie." When she was not around, he would refer to as her "Sweetie Pie;" then he would giggle nervously in telling Fibber McGee how he had just done the exact opposite of whatever she had told him. That always got a big laugh from the studio audience. Or perhaps it was that canned sound effects.
There was another character in a newspaper comic strip as known Mr. Milquetoast. The cartoonist pictured him as a crouching, trembling, sissified little man with no mind of his own. Our common words *wimp* and *wimpy* have no known origin. They could well derive from those comedy characters because they did not come into the language until the 20th century.
"Meekness" or "Gentleness?"
Pictures of Jesus painted by medieval and renaissance artists frequently showed him as a wimpish kind of person. In 1999, a group of Roman Catholics were so concerned about this portrayal of Jesus that they ran a contest to see if a better portrait could be found. The winning image appeared to reproduce many of the same qualities. It portrayed Jesus as a person of mixed race and indefinite gender, and very uninspiring as a person to admire or follow.
The first line of the old children's hymn, "Gentle Jesus, meek and mild" expressed a similar attitude. As John Wesley wrote it in the 18th century, the hymn had a very serious purpose. He designed it as a teaching tool to mold illiterate children to be as Wesley imagined Jesus had been in childhood - humble, submissive and obedient. One verse of the original hymn says exactly that:
Meek and lowly may I be;
Thou art all humility;
Let me to my betters bow;
Subject to thy parents thou.
This attitude appears to have been taken from the only story we have about Jesus' childhood. It tells about Jesus and his parents visiting Jerusalem. (Luke 2:41-52) On the other hand, Jesus response to his parents' remonstrations for not being with them homebound from the festival appears to deny that attitude.
In my own childhood in the 1930s, children were expected to be seen and not heard - in church especially. Even our snickers when everybody's Aunt Lily dropped the tray of communion glasses were hushed up. We were rarely allowed to attend the celebration of communion, except on the coldest winter days. Actually, we regarded that as a gift of freedom. Who wouldn't after being in the church for an hour of Sunday school and then required to sit with our parents through the whole worship service, full sermon included, until the beginning of the hymn before communion? Only after we had been confirmed in our early teen years were we permitted to "stay for communion." Many of my peers in that small congregation left the church long before becoming eligible for confirmation. As I Recall now, it was parental example and our obedience that kept those of us who stuck it out in the church well into adolescence.
What This Word Meant to Paul
When he wrote to the Galatians, Paul used a very common Greek word praotés for this fruit of the Spirit. The adjective was *praus.* Either the noun or the adjective occurs in several other New Testament passages. In the King James Version of 1611 they were invariably translated as "meekness" and "meek." In our violently aggressive 20th century culture, meekness elicited derision. Nobody wanted to be known as a wimp. We all wanted to get away from that. The word appears to have lost its original sense of humility and gentleness. In the Revised Standard Version of 1952, "meekness" is used whenever an inner attitude is described; "gentleness" when it describes dealing with others. In one place, however, it brings out the special meaning of "perfect courtesy." (Titus 3:2) More recent versions of the Bible use "gentleness" to translate what Paul intended.
The word appeared a number of times in the Greek Old Testament to translate a Hebrew word that meant "poor" or "needy." It described the impoverished and oppressed people of Israel under constant threat from hostile enemies. That gave the word the religious sense of being totally dependent on God. Many of the psalms of lament express this spiritual dependence.
The third beatitude in Matthew 5:5 has usually been translated: "Blessed are the meek." My favorite paraphrase of the beatitude is: "Happy are those who need God and know it." In fact, the beatitude comes directly from Psalm 37:11 "But the meek shall inherit the land, and delight themselves in abundant prosperity." That whole psalm expresses a confidence in God in the face a repeated of onfrontations with wicked oppressors. In those days as today, those who were oppressed were inevitably poor. But the oppressed are not always gentle in their reaction to their poverty.
How We Can Be Gentle Like Jesus
There is a story that when the Greek philosopher Aristotle wanted to define praotés, he decided it was the happy mean between excessive anger and the total absence of anger. Being angry at the right time was as special gift that Jesus displayed on several occasions. He overturned the money-changers' tables and drove them from the temple. This story is told in all four gospels, so the early church must have regarded this quality as very characteristic of Jesus. He also rebuked Peter severely for wanting to turn him away from the cross. But he loved Peter to the end and, according to John 21:15-19, after the resurrection, Jesus restored Peter to a place of honour among the disciples.
In the summer 1945, I volunteered as a student minister for The United Church of Canada in northwestern Saskatchewan. I was assigned to seek out people in five communities and invite them to gather for worship. They had not had a student minister for three years. I succeeded in holding services consistently in only two of those communities. They lay thirty miles apart across a massive muskeg through which only one or two roads had been driven. For transportation, my landlord, an experienced horse breeder, gave me a three year old mare. She was smaller than she should have been because she had borne a colt when she was too young. She had never had so much as a halter on her head, let alone a bridle and a bit. We borrowed a saddle from a neighbor, got a bit into her mouth and then the saddle on her back. Mounting that horse for the first time was an unforgettable adventure. I just hung on for dear life and stayed there. When the horse realized that she wasn't going to dislodge me, she settled down and behaved perfectly. She quickly became totally obedient to my directions. She stayed that way for the rest of the summer. Babe, as I called her, became a very gentle mount who carried me over an estimated one thousand miles of western scrub and swamp country.
This kind of gentleness also includes strength. On one homeward journey, Babe was frightened by a dog and threw me from the saddle. I caught her again quickly and headed her toward home. She cantered about twenty miles without stopping. It was an exhilarating ride for a neophyte like myself. It was an even better test of how good a horse Babe really was. She exhibited that wonderful quality of praotés - strength under control.
Being Practical About Gentleness
Why should we be gentle in our ways of relating to other people? If we do, cynics will say, people will treat us like doormats to walk over and wipe their feet on.
My father was a salesman in Montreal all his working life selling advertising space for newspapers and magazines . He never made a lot of money, but he enjoyed the respect of his peers for the kind of man he was. He could close a deal, but never with the kind aggressive pressure that meant he would not be welcome in that office again. More than half his working life was spent in the employ of French publications for which he sold advertising space for English industries and businesses to reach French customers. He had the trust of his French superiors, even though he could speak very little French. He could always get an appointment with a busy executive to tell them of what he had to sell. Toward the end of his career, he told me that if he could toss his hat into any office in Montreal and not have it thrown out, he had a reasonable expectation of doing business there.
One of the reasons why women have been well received as pastors in recent years is that they exhibit a caring style which can only be described as gentleness. A few have not been accepted. It is my observation that some are rejected in large part because of the need of other people - and not always men - to have a more aggressive, domineering type of spiritual leadership; or because some women ministers themselves have been offensive in their dealings with opposition.
A recent Internet discussion about baptizing dying or stillborn infants offers a case in point. Most of those who participated were women who felt the need of the parents to grieve and offered their pastoral care in any way they could. The use of the sacrament of baptism, to some theologically unnecessary or even mistaken, was one way to be of service in such a situation. Others suggested that a simple dedication or anointing of the infant's body and prayer of blessing would be sufficient instead of baptism. They found such a suggestion readily accepted. One male participant in the exchange told of one of his seminary professors saying, "There are times when one has to throw out all the theology and just be sensitively pastoral."
The essence of gentleness
One unique paraphrase of the letters of the New Testament, Letters to Young Churches by J. B. Phillips, uses the word "adaptability" to translate praotés.
There is a story in Mark's Gospel (7:24-30) of Jesus visiting a foreign country, Tyre, which lay right next to Galilee on the Mediterranean coast. Apparently he needed to be alone and didn't wanted it known that he was there. A Gentile woman discovered where he was, threw herself at his feet begging him to help her sick daughter. Jesus refused saying that his ministry should remain primarily for Jews. In refusing the woman's plea, he used a metaphor about children needing to be fed first, so it wasn't fair for food to be taken from their mouths and fed to the dogs. Despite this, the woman persisted, "Even the dogs under the table eat the children's crumbs." Jesus changed his mind because of that retort and healed her daughter. He was adaptable.
In recent years a great many people have suffered the pain of being fired under humiliating circumstances because their employer was "downsizing." Although they had been employed by the same company for many years, their services were no longer required. The injustice of the experience broke the spirit of a considerable number. Faced with the same humiliation, others made changes in their lives, searched for new ways of using their skills, became self-employed or sought different work elsewhere. The most successful were those who were most adaptable.
To be adaptable in such a traumatic situation requires an inner strength not every one could muster. This was especially true for older workers or those with few alternative skills who had lived by much the same routines in declining industries. Such workers needed to be dealt with gently as they adjusted to the new realities of their lives.
There is yet another instance of how the authors of both Old and New Testament understood praotés. It is the opposite of pride. Boasting and pride which trust only in oneself is constantly contrasted with true humility. This particular meaning comes out in the birth stories of Matthew and Luke, especially in the Song of Mary (Luke 1:46-55), the birth of Jesus to an unmarried mother, and the manger cradle for the child (Luke 2:5-7). Paul repeats this sense of the word in his Letter to the Philippians where he described the lowliness of the Son of God (Philippians 2:6-8). In his Letter to the Corinthians too, he wrote of the wonder of this divine humility which Jesus so fully exemplified in that "though he was rich, for our sake he became poor" (2 Corinthians 8:9).
Paul believed that Jesus' death on the cross may have appeared to some as a sign of weakness. Because of the resurrection which followed, he saw it the full and final expression of the infinite power of God's love. Christians who live with the same self-sacrificing attitude in dealing with others are actually living by the same power God showed in raising Jesus from the dead. (2 Corinthians 13:4) This too is the energy that powers the universe. In writing to the Corinthians, Paul made an interesting combination of meekness and gentleness. "I appeal to you by the meekness and gentleness of Christ." (2 Corinthians 10:1) The Greek words Paul used in this instance were praotés translated as meekness; and epieikeia translated as gentleness.
Even the eminent scholar, the late William Barclay, had difficulty with that second word. He said, however, that it really conveys the quality of dealing with one another in ways that go beyond justice to compassion. He noted how some people will demand their rights in every circumstance, do no more than they are compelled to do, yet also require others to do all they can compel them to do. This kind of legalism soon breaks up any relationship. Barclay added with a touch of irony that if God demanded all God's rights from us and required that we meet every requirement of the law, we would be truly lost. Instead, God treats us with gracious gentleness, as Jesus treated the woman who bathed his feet with her tears and anointed them with ointment (Luke 8:36-50).
Paul had learned through his own conversion from an aggressive, violent persecutor of Christians that there are times when the spirit of gentle compassion overruled whatever the law might dictate. Time and again Jesus spoke of this same quality. It could all be summed up in that saying we name "The Golden Rule": "In everything do to others as you would have them do to you; for this is the law and the prophets." (Matthew 7:12) Slight variations of this simple truth can be found in every religious tradition.
Gentleness in the Corporate World.
Corporate expressions of this principle of gentleness are not easy to find. When the bottom line matters most, few companies seek other values. One businessman I knew had built up his bakery from a bankrupt company a creditor pleaded with him to take on during the Depression in the1930s. In 1939, the governor general of Canada asked him to prepare the cake for a garden party during the royal visit to Ottawa of King George VI and Queen Elizabeth. By the end of World War II the bakery was a thriving enterprise with vehicles delivering bread daily far and wide through the Ottawa valley.
When the housing shortage struck in the early 1950s, this very successful businessman realized that some of his employees needed homes for their families. With the mayor of Ottawa, he helped organize a low-cost housing development that became a model for other cities to follow. He never failed to give 5% of the annual profits of the company to charitable causes. He treated his employees so fairly that they refused to organize a union when he urged them to do so. He wanted them to share some of the principles of fair play and good management with others in the union movement. So he had to content himself with doing his thing in a small way until others could take notice. He never avoided an opportunity to tell anyone who would listen what he had done to be a light in his small corner of the rough and tumble business world.
Gentleness does not mean being without convictions that result in forthright action. A confrontation occurred between the executive of the Toronto Police Association and various civic authorities to whom the police are accountable. A relatively small group of women councillors banded together to stop the association's executive from bullying and intimidating any politician of whom they disapproved. The association executive had launched a money raising campaign that would be used to target politicians opposed to the hard-line stance of the association. They had gone so far as to say they would deliberately disobey an order from the police chief to cease and desist. Using their positions as elected public representatives, these women persuaded the police services board to adopt motions effectively ending the association's fund raising campaign. The city council unanimously supported their initiatives.
Where their male counterparts had been tentative and compromising, these women saw clearly the important principles of civilian oversight and police accountability. They were the catalysts for restoring order to a very tense situation at a time when the Toronto Police are making the transition from the leadership of one police chief to another. Their gentler style of effecting political change and asserting sound government did not prevent them from achieving goals beneficial to all citizens.
One of the recent developments in church government is the number of women who have been called to responsible leadership in church posts. This may well have brought about a changed ethos of church government in subtle but effective ways. Authoritarian rule favoured by many men in ministry is no longer in vogue. Gentler modes of consultation and negotiation have replaced it. Attitudes rooted in past traditions have given way to new approaches to difficult problems. Even preaching is no longer from the stance of "Thus saith the Lord!" but from a humbler position of "Consider this as what God requires of us."
The church's mandate for social action springs from a deep sense of compassion for the poor and underprivileged, not from a superior attitude of it being our duty to be charitable. In local congregations women hold many of the important positions of responsibility and leadership. No longer are they "the ladies aid" providing refreshments when men gather to make all the decisions. Women have also been very successful in recruiting and helping men learn what is involved in child care and nursery school teaching in the church.
Advertisers too have caught on to the realities of showing men a gentle nurturers, although mostly in domestic scenes. For the most part, however, the cut-throat corporate world does not really welcome displays of gentleness. More likely than not, aggressive businessmen interpret gentleness as weakness. It is to be avoided in one's own behavior and taken advantage of in others. Gentleness, the fruit of the Spirit in ordinary people, can be effective in the world however aggressive we may perceive the forces against it.
posted by John at 7:37 AM
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