This story, found in our Tapestry of Faith religious education series published by the Unitarian Universalist Association exemplifies this month's Touchstone Ministry Theme - Emotional Intellegence.  In principle, it is also demonstrative of a truth described by the psychologist Rollo May who once quipped, "Human freedom involves our capacity to pause between the stimulus and response and, in that pause, to choose the one response toward which we wish to throw our weight. The capacity to create ourselves, based upon this freedom, is inseparable from consciousness or self-awareness. (Rollo May, The Courage to Create, p.100)

      

It is in that pause that we move from a state of reaction, a term that comes to us from the middle Latin term for "done again" to a state of response, which also finds its origin in Latin, in the term for "something offered in return."  It is in the state of conscious awareness that we have the capacity to "offer" something; a state that is based on human agency instead of reflex.

      

In his essay on this month's theme in the Touchstone Journal, my colleague and friend, Rev. Kirk Loadman-Copeland writes, "While the concept of emotional intelligence first appeared in a 1964 paper by Michael Beldoch, it was foreshadowed in 350 BCE in The Nicomachaen Ethics by Aristotle. In Book IV in the section on temperament Aristotle wrote, 'Anyone can become angry-that is easy. But to be angry with the right person, to the right degree, at the right time, for the right purpose, and in the right way-this is not easy.' Thomas Buckley writes that, 'The 'sinfulness' of anger may not lie in anger itself but in prolonged attachment to it; in the refusal, out of fear, to let ourselves back into the impermanent world of interrelationship, across the bridge of sadness.' The difference between these two observations about the anger is emotional intelligence. It is emotional intelligence that allows us to cross the bridge of sadness."

                 

Words worth pondering!

 

Blessings,

Aaron