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Voices of Faith

A Father's Day Card From My Son
Brooks Ramsey

Excerpted from "Beyond Nothing But to More Than" - a homily delivered at Calvary Episcopal Church, Memphis, TN, on July 9, 2000.

A few years ago, I received a Father’s Day card from my son Tim. On the front of it was a picture of a little boy sitting up in bed. Terror was written on his face. His hair was standing straight up, and the card said, "Dad, I want to thank you."

Well, I wondered, a Father’s Day card with this boy terrorized, had I done that to my son?

I opened the card up and it said, "I want to thank you for helping me kill all the dragons of my mind so I could go out and fight the real ones."

You know, we all have our dragons of the mind. My old professor, Conrad Sommers, the psychiatrist whom I trained under in St. Louis, said, "There are five drivers that get in the saddle and drive us. They’ve got spurs on their boots and they kick us, and all of our emotional miseries come from being dominated by one of those drivers."

Here are the drivers he listed: Be perfect. Please everybody. Try harder. Be strong. Hurry up. Have you got any of those driving you? At one time, I had them all.

These dragons of the mind keep us from going and fighting the real ones. They keep us from living in our humanity or experiencing God’s grace, and they certainly keep us from the joy of growth. We can’t take time to grow. We have to do it now. We’re driven by pleasing everybody and doing everything perfect. These are dragons of the mind.

There’s a greater dragon though, the dragon that Jesus faced when he went back home--the dragon of unbelief, the dragon of devaluing people.

When Jesus went back home, he could do no mighty works among them because they said, "Is not this the carpenter? Do we not know his family? Are not his brothers and sisters among us? Who is this man that claims to do mighty works? He is really just one of us." They devalued Christ. They made him less than he really was.

The real demon that we have to face is the demon that takes away from us the power to be who we are--those ideologies and philosophies and political views and social and cultural views that reduce us to less than being children of God. These demons tear us down.

Carl Jung, the psychoanalyst, said, "The goal of therapy is to move persons from the nothing buts of life to the more thans of life." That has stuck in my mind.

As a counselor, I have been dominated by that desire to move persons from the nothing but to the more than. You are nothing but a housewife, a businessman. You’re nothing but a consumer. You’re nothing but this or that.

They put a label on you and you become simply a pawn on the chessboard of life, you become dominated by the system.

You let other people control who you are and what you think about yourself, and so to move beyond the nothing but to the more than is a movement of grace.

That’s what God is always doing, moving us from what we are to what we can be.

Copyright ©2000 Brooks Ramsey

Excerpted from "Beyond Nothing But to More Than" - a homily delivered at Calvary Episcopal Church, Memphis, TN, on July 9, 2000.

 


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