Living Largely

Who were my mentors?  My mother was not only my parent, but something of a mentor as well – in several ways.  That mentoring was not full blown, but was more than useful in my development.  The publisher, Pat Zondervan, and his wife, Mary, were mentors to me for publishing and completing a doctoral degree.  The effort was tied to spiritual expectations we all had, as well as professional.  Dominic LaRusso became a mentor for me in becoming chairman of my doctoral committee at the University of Washington.  I had related, on a personal basis, to several professors at both Nyack and Wheaton before the intense experience in education with LaRusso.  We even talked about educational achievement and spiritual meaning in the secular context.  It turned out that he accepted the relationship, in part, to share my Christian experience with him.  LaRusso died on Thanksgiving Day, 2000.  We had maintained our friendship over the decades after we concluded my significant professional degree and began personal life contributions to each other.

Erasmus had great influence upon the world of his time, especially through his classic writing, IN PRAISE OF FOLLY.  Why did Erasmus take his direction, and Luther take another to achieve similar purpose?  Erasmus was cultivated through the ideas and mentoring of John Colet so decided to take the route of the intellectual rather than the activist.  Luther chose activism.  Luther was inspired by the Apostle Paul, as the Apostle was perceived through Augustine.  Erasmus was inspired by the Apostle Paul and Jerome through Colet.  The prism of a mentor can mean a wide difference in results, even in relating to the Apostle Paul and his ideas in variant interpretations.  A major way in which persons share their systems of thought, skills, faith and conduct is through friend relationships that may be more than friendship.

Literature and history compete with stories of mentors and mentored.  In Kipling’s, CAPTAIN’S COURAGEOUS, the spoiled Harvey Cheyne is mentored by the skipper Disko Troop, a stern man of high moral character.  Harvey is put to work on shipboard until he becomes a young fellow worthy of the expense of preparing him for influential life.  When Harvey is ultimately united with his father, the father rewards Disko by mentoring Disko’s son.  There is a secret here in that mentoring is related to good parenting and life modeling.  Jesus parable is shepherding (mentoring).  In the modern world the concept seems to have lost some of its meaning and force.  The loss is significant to youthful generations.

In real life Tycho Brahe (1546-1601) was encouraged by his family to develop his mind – and he did.  His passion was for astronomy which he had to pursue secretly because his father wanted a more practical direction than studying the skies.  Brahe ultimately succeeded in his own choices, and reached out to others so they would not have to go through the kind of personal resistance he encountered.  One protege was named Johannes Kepler, a man who changed the world.  Kepler was a devout Christian who wanted to be a theologian, but the man who mentored him was an astronomer.  Kepler would have preferred to have followed in the long steps of Luther.  What might the Church have gained if a Christian theological scholar had mentored Kepler?  This tells us something about what we might do in our Churches to cultivate the young men and women who may be missing lives of ministry.  (I admit that God likely meant for Kepler to become what he did, indeed, become.  The exception doesn’t change the point, that we mentor persons to follow the direction we followed, perhaps to a different conclusion.  I have mentored one of my great-grandsons to pick up a ministry/teaching pattern and excel beyond my own biography in the context I followed.)  He has his selection of anything of mine in that he aspires to do.  He may go another route. We ought to advance serious mentoring as part of Christian ministry.  We currently help in various ways, like giving money to projects, but many of us have more to give of ourselves to interested persons, persons who can get by generational differentials to become what they would not likely become without mentoring.  Many make it on their own, but mentoring speeds a process along, and enlarges the number who take on the responsibility for building their futures as effective Christians in a troubled world.