An important factor in success for life is the building of meaningful relationships. Chosen relationships for purpose provide the context and atmosphere for the best learning, and learning to effectiveness in whatever we decide to be and do in the course of productive lives. There can be mentoring, perhaps a mutual mentoring in the context of relationships. There are E-mail services, including Christian accents, dedicated to bringing persons together with similar interests. At this writing they appear to be helpful.
Mentors are sometimes identified as examples or models, as super persons, as idealists, as heroes. Jesus is our model, but he was full mentor to at least twelve men, and less intense with 120 other persons, likely including women. But modeling (good or ill) is not a chosen influence. It is forced on us, whether we like it or not. Mentoring, for long or short duration, is chosen by agreement between the mentor and mentored. I entered a limited mentoring experience, as a teacher, with my brother-in-law, Milton Erway, and with Ed McCulley, for the purpose of winning specific contests in public speaking. Both achieved their purposes, but they felt they would not have done so on their own. These experiences early in my professional life taught me something good about how to pass on anything that I might contribute from my person to those who were given time periods for special attention, and who accepted the terms of my participation.
David G. Horner wrote about distant modeling for himself – meaning the influence on his life by Dag Hammarsjold and Jimmy Carter. (Carter. after his presidency) Horner cited the source of the concepts of mentoring from Homer’s, Odyssey – where Mentor is asked by Odysseus to care for his son, Telemachus. It is from this experience in literature that we gain the mentoring/modeling idea and word mentor. It all comes to us through ancient heroic literature. But Mentor was more than Horner’s distant mentors. I believe that Horner mixed modeling and teaching with mentoring and may muddle a bit the mentoring concept. Even the common reference to the Odyssey mixes the influences to dilute mentoring. In that story, Athene seems more the mentor than is Mentor. It is admitted that modeling is a form of distant mentoring, and so important that God makes a feature of it in Scripture. Poor models will have much to answer for. As models there is no choice to be entered or omitted. Every person is a model of something.
We are in an age in which heroes have fallen in critical evaluations. So Columbus, Jefferson, Lincoln and others are cut down in size. Lindberg was my childhood hero. I later learned his limitations, but the good of his influence had taken root. Sergeant York was a war hero, but his influence was limited to honors after he returned from the battlefield. John Wycliffe, John Hus and Martin Luther were heroes, with Hus martyred. In the space age there has been effort to make the astronauts heroes, but the effort has received mixed success. In my view most of the persons perceived as heroes were not really heroes, but persons of courage, sometimes enormous courage. Most soldiers are not heroes, but most showed courage in battle. Heroes choose personal risks and dangers for good purpose. They are not chosen but choose risk of life. The age of the anti-hero, played out in Hollywood by Marlon Brando, James Dean and Dustin Hoffman, has reduced heroism. Tom Brokaw has tried to revive the whole matter of heroism in his, The Greatest Generation, about the men and women who fought World War II. His emphasis has been on selfless and loving experiences from rather special men and women who served their country with courage. We seldom combine the hero with the mentor, although the combination appears in persons like the Apostle Paul and Mother Teresa. Mentors may appear for evil as Fagin appeared for Oliver Twist. The mentoring enlarged from picking pockets, so well done by the Artful Dodger, to sophisticated break-ins of luxury homes. Not until the kindly old scholar, Mr. Brownlow, arrives and takes charge is mentoring productive for Oliver to good citizenry. The real society is touched by the good and evil in persons who follow the same principles to differing outcomes. Part of the Christian’s warfare is to advance the influences for good and to reduce the influences for evil. It all begins with the individual in modeling, sharing in the values and skills that form a contributing leader. Godparents ought to be mentors. *Mark W. Lee, Sr. — 2016, 2020