Building Bridges in a Household Divided
An Essay on Stewardship and Rekindling Relationship With Humanity's Long-Lost Father
Dear Reader,
For more a bit more than ten years now, I have been consciously constructing my life.
Little things like not keeping junk food in the house.
Big things like running a small business that routinely said “No” to jobs that didn’t match my values.
Countless in-between things like structuring my habits in accordance with my goals, paying attention to how I spend my time, paying attention to how I speak to other people, paying attention to how I speak to myself, paying attention to how I present myself.
The list goes on.
For a long time I’ve wanted to develop a coherent philosophy of how to live a good life.
For a long time I’ve found that project to be too intimidating to even begin.
This is my first attempt at developing a framework of a moral philosophy and subsequent principles by which to live.
It isn’t all encompassing, and it isn’t complete (and it never will be). But its a start.
My essay “Antidote to Hurry Sickness” set the tone for my life in 2023, and helped me begin to be happy in the present and not always yearning for some imagined future, probably for the first time in my life.
Today’s essay is the intellectual successor of “Antidote to Hurry Sickness” and I hope that I can reflect back upon it in a similarly meaningful way.
2023 was the year of slow down and be.
2024 is the year of belonging to my world and earning my keep. 2024 is the year of The Steward.
-Charles
Our Broken Home
Humanity is missing a parent.
Likely, no one alive today has met this missing parent. We’re well acquainted with our Earth Mother and our Sky Father, but we used to have other parents, parents whose influence balanced out the shortcomings of these two parents we know best.
The whole of humanity is too big a household to fit under the roof of one binary nuclear pair. In this modern house-divided, our two remaining parents war against one another, and we pay the price.
. . .
We have inherited a world where our cruel, idealistic Sky Father wields powerful institutions and unflinchingly turns them to the task of raping and pillaging, extracting anything he deems useful no matter who else might be using it.
Our Sky Father cares only for what his children could become. He has no time nor care for the past, or even the present.
On the contrary, our Earth Mother cares only for the nurture of life, not for its improvement. She plays no favorites, creates no hierarchies of value.
Our Earth Mother is infinitely forgiving, the one who loves us all equally no matter if we achieve greatness or squander every bit of our potential. Our Sky Father sees her unconditional love as a threat to his disciplined idealism. He believes that she coddles her children, encouraging them to be weak and foolish.
Every living niche that our Sky Father destroys in his relentless pursuit of greatness leaves a void that our Earth Mother seeks ever more insistently to fill (think super-bugs born of antibiotic overuse).
. . .
Humanity has been born into a household at war, torn between two parents who have no qualms about pitting their children against the other parent.
Where is our long lost third parent whose job it was to be the bridge between the two? Where is the parent who might guide us through that lonely wilderness between unconditional love and idealistic achievement?
If we are to bring peace to our household, we must find our missing parent and bring him back into the fold.
We must find our Earth Father.
The Earth Father
The only parents that we modern humans have ever known live at the extremes. Our Sky Father scorns all but the most accomplished among the billions of us, while our Earth Mother would restrain any one of us from ever growing up and leaving the safety of her bosom. The gulf between the two is too great to traverse alone.
Without help, we humans cannot hope to navigate the vast void between the slovenliness of indiscriminate nurture on the one hand and the flagellation of indifferent judgment on the other.
Our Earth Father is long forgotten, but he’s still out there, waiting to meet us.
. . .
Our Earth Father doesn’t love all of his children equally the way our Earth Mother does. He sees that some of us are more beautiful than others, not because of inherent worth, but because of effort put towards our potential. Nor does he hate those of us who have not yet achieved greatness the way our Sky Father does. Instead, our Earth Father values the work being put in by those who wont give up, even those who will likely never reach our Sky Father’s pinnacle.
Our Earth Father is not a foster mother, adopting any and loving all equally. Nor is he a king, casting judgments from high upon a distant throne.
He is a steward.
A Model Steward
You own nothing.
Everything you have, you hold in trust, as it was held in trust before you.
You carry a debt to the past and a duty to the future.
Our two warring parents are destructively obsessed with ownership. Our Earth Mother sees all life as belonging to her because it is her, it came into being from her body and is, in practice, an extension of her body. Our Sky Father sees himself as the arbiter of value and thus the owner of all things he deems good or useful.
But our Earth Father is not encumbered by thoughts of ownership. As the model of good stewardship, his first responsibility, the one that cannot be usurped, is to care for the household he inhabits, the household that he does not own.
The steward cares for a thing, not because of what it might yield or because he loves it like he loves himself, but because the act of caring is worthy as an end in itself. Stewardship is a deliberate, moral stance.
. . .
The first job of the steward is the maintenance of his entrusted household. Only second can he seek to improve the household, and never at the expense of its maintenance.
If we are given charge of a household, to hold in trust, we do not have the right to dispose of it as though it were solely ours. We are obligated to preserve the thing in at least as good a state as when we inherited it. But, if we are wise, we know that the world changes whether we like it or not, and so anything that does not change as the world changes necessarily degrades. Thus our role as good stewards is not to preserve our household in a form unchanged forever, but to keep it vital, to keep it relevant for the present, and to plan for its future well-being without forgetting its past.
The good steward honors the past by maintaining what he has inherited, and sets the future generations up for success by not taking on more responsibilities than can be well-maintained.
Preparing for Responsibility
Every danger you tuck away out of their sight robs them of the chance to overcome, to grow stronger.
It is not their destiny to walk over-long in your footsteps.
Both our Earth Mother and Sky Father are prone to over-protection.
If she had her way, our Earth Mother would never allow even one of her children to know hardships that might make us feel as though we aren’t already perfect. She would protect us from the pain of growing up, and so she discourages pursuit of our potential by showering us with unconditional love.
Achieving a similar over-protection in spite of his opposite reasons, our Sky Father would never allow his few favored children to know any failure which might crack our grandiose self image. He would protect us from loss of face, and so he discourages deviation from his one correct path.
Our Earth Father would care for us by preparing us for risk rather than protecting us against it.
. . .
As we bring our Earth Father back into our lives, we might ask that he help us emphasize preparation since our other parents have the protection angle covered. As preparer rather than protector, our Earth Father would encourage us to struggle so that we may grow.
The good steward doesn’t hide his household away from difficulty. Rather, he guides it toward appropriate challenges.
The good steward doesn’t shield his household from failure. Rather, he encourages it to learn the lessons contained therein.
The good steward doesn’t lock his household behind high walls. Rather, he orients it to life’s many paths.
. . .
Enjoy this humorous example of steward-like preparation from Ted Lasso.
(warning: curse words)
Earning Our Keep
There are no ends, only means.
You will not be judged by your works themselves, but by the sacrifices you made in the name of those works.
Our Sky Father cares only for what his favored children achieve, not how they get there. He has no trouble justifying foul means in pursuit of fair ends. This is how he justifies withholding love from under-performing children and why he so often disregards the wishes of our Earth Mother. He’d sacrifice the whole household if it’d guarantee perfection.
Our Earth Father’s values strike a balance between our Earth Mother who values any and every effort and our Sky Father who values only the pinnacle of achievement.
Our Earth Father would have us work to improve, but consistently, at a pace that can be sustained for generations to come. He knows that no one person’s effort nor one single work day will make or break the success of the household. Only the aggregate of those efforts, executed so consistently that they become a part of who we are, will keep our household well-maintained and responsive the unique demands of the times.
. . .
The good steward is process-oriented. He looks to his goal, asks himself what repeatable actions will take him there, and then focuses upon those actions. Attachment to the goal can be allowed to drift into the back of his mind. He keeps his attention in the present.
Those who cannot restrain their attention are prone to the error of sacrificing the good of the present for the unreliable promise of the future, or even worse, sacrificing the accumulated wealth of the past for the unreliable promise of the future. Because maintenance of the household (in the here and now) is his first duty, the good steward does not make sacrifices of this sort. He knows that some sacrifices are too great. He knows that attainment of a goal, no matter how lofty, cannot come before the maintenance of the household. He works intimately within the household, where he can be quick to notice when his means are inappropriate to the task or begin yielding unintended consequences.
. . .
The good steward belongs to his household, it does not belong to him.
Polarizing Times Call for New(Old) Role-Models
We humans look up to our parents. We model our values and our decision-making around how we see them behave. Our Earth Mother and Sky Father have let their differences escalate out of hand into a war, a war that is ripping our household apart. So long as they are the only role models we have, it is inevitable that we pick up their torches and perpetuate their warring.
We need another role model.
We need a peacemaker, someone who can bridge the gap between the two warring parents, someone who can begin the process of reconciliation.
The Earth Father, and the stewardship qualities he exhibits, are exactly what humanity needs right now.
We need to remember that we don’t own the world in which we live and are not justified in disposing of it however we please.
We need to maintain the institutions we inherited before building shiny new ones.
We need to loosen our grip on our fears, stop doing harm in the name of making the world safe, and start preparing ourselves to face the inescapable risks of life.
We need to bring our eyes down from the distant horizon and onto the works of our hands right in front of us.
We need to reevaluate the appropriateness of our sacrifices.
We need to remember where we belong.
. . .
The whole of humanity is too big a household to fit under the roof of one binary nuclear pair, and our Earth Father is just one additional role model to add to the mix. There are potentially many more, like our Sky Mother, to name just one.
Maybe you’ve heard of her? You know, the parent who evokes the enfolding darkness of the winter night sky, the parent in charge of respite, the parent in charge of repose.
We modern humans could really stand to reacquaint ourselves with her. We could really stand to reacquaint ourselves with rest.