Like Father, Like Son? 10-27-11

Anderson, South Carolina

An oft quoted verse in the Old Testament, one meant to offer encouragement to haggard parents is “Train up a child in the way He should go, even when he is old he will not depart from it.” The good intentions of those quoting it is to offer conservative parents in moral conflict with the larger secular culture the hope their spiritual and ethical values will ultimately hold sway over their children’s lives. Alas, this is true in ways undreamed of, ways we perhaps wouldn’t wish on anyone.

In the past several decades the environmental influence of parents on emotional and physical health of their children has been proven nearly limitless, for good and for ill. The youngest infants are prodigious students, learning from their parents or caregivers about the friendliness or hostility of the world, the rules of engagement insuring the arrival of food, clean diapers, and emotional presence. Even with abundant food and clean clothes, infants often die or at best are emotionally shipwrecked if parents or caregivers don’t provide emotional nurture and presence. The emotional wreckage suffered by children in orphanages operated by totalitarian states is legendary.

Children learn all too well what is acceptable behavior. Fear of rejection often drives them to compensatory behavior rendering them unable to function well in society. Self-denying self-protective behavior in childhood can lead to a lifetime of tentative reclusive non-engagement with others. Loners often live unhappy disconnected lives, starved for a sense of belonging.

Ancient Jewish writings provide unsettling promises. “That will by no means clear the guilty; visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children, and upon the children's children, unto the third and to the fourth generation.” Another suggests bad karma will pass down through the generations, even to an entire city. “Because for our sins, and for the inequities of our fathers, Jerusalem and thy people have become a reproach to all that are about us.” Traditionally, interpretation of these declarations has typically been theological in nature, indicating some kind of sin contract which must be paid off. The insights of John Sandford in his The Transformation of the Inner Man and Gabor Mate’s ongoing work suggest there’s far more to it than this. Spiritual realities give rise to psychoneuroimmunological realities often manifesting in destructive behaviors and emotional and physical disease.

Reading the work of Sandford, Mate, and others suggests there’s almost an immutable determinism for which there is no recourse. Mate states “Whatever affected one generation but has not been fully resolved will be passed on to the next.” Some years ago I read Lance Morrow’s Heart. This unsettling and forthright account of his journey through catastrophic cardiovascular disease declares in non-theological terms the curse of the generations. “The generations are boxes within boxes: Inside my mother’s violence you find another box, which contains my grandfather’s violence, and inside that box (I suspect but do not know), you will find another box with some such black, secret energy – stories within stories, receding in time.”

Mate adroitly states: “Blame becomes a meaningless concept if one understands how family history stretches back through the generations.” He cites John Bowlby, a noted British psychiatrist who observed dryly, “Recognition of this quickly dispels any disposition to see the parent as villain.” Our parents and grandparents whom we tend to blame are merely caught up in a stream of Morrow’s black secret energy going back into the dim recesses of time.

There’s been a tendency in recent decades to assign our griefs to genetic bad luck, medicalizing our circumstances, behaviors, and propensity to contract catastrophic disease. Medicalizing our lives absolves us of personal responsibility, suggesting we are victims of a bad hand in life. Mate comes up against this directly in his view of the Genome Mapping Project. “Contrary to the genetic fundamentalism that currently informs medical thinking and public awareness, genes alone cannot possibly account for the complex psychological characteristics, the behaviors, health or illness of human beings. Genes are merely codes. They act as a set of rules and as biological template for the synthesis of the proteins that give each particular cell its characteristic structure and functions. They are, as it were, alive and dynamic architectural and mechanical plans. Whether the plan becomes realized depends on far more than the gene itself ... Genes are turned on or off by the environment. For this reason, the greatest influences on human development, health, and behavior are those of the nurturing environment.”

A crack in the determinism? More than a crack. Mate and Sandford didn’t spend lifetimes doing research and clinical work just to tell us we are toast. They suggest we don’t have to remain victims of genetic bad luck or unpaid spiritual sin contracts. Mate pushes further. “The genome hype is not only poor science, it is also suspect as theology. In the Book of Genesis creation story, God fashions the universe first, then nature, and only afterwards does He shape humankind from the substance of the earth. He knew, even if Bill Clinton did not, that from their earliest beginnings humans could never be understood apart from their environment.”

The century-earlier work of Williams James in his Varieties of Religious Experience and James Lawson in his Deeper Experiences of Famous Christians clearly indicates spiritual interventions in our lives can override any possibility of genetic or spiritual determinism in our lives. No matter how challenging our environments of origin may have been, there is a way out if we seek it. Those of us who never had fathers, never experienced emotional attunement from a parent, and were subjected to all manner of abuse can rise above our circumstances.

As Mate articulates, “Fortunately, human experience and the ever-unfolding potential of human beings ensure that the biology of belief, though deeply physiologically engrained, is not irreversible.” What we came to believe about the world as infants does not have to hold sway over our lives any longer. We are able to have what Carl Jung called a vital spiritual experience. Such an experience was had by all of the subjects in Lawson’s work, usually in the context of severely challenging life circumstances. James suggests there are many ways one can arrive at such an experience. What I can be certain of from evidence revealed in many lives around me is that Jung, Lawson, James were not writing works of fiction. Neither was the Apostle Paul.

“Therefore, if any man is in Christ, he is a new creature, the old things have passed away; behold, new things have come.”