Remembering Elders and Mentors

Tomorrow I leave to give a weeklong retreat to retired Marianist brothers and priests in a care facility in Dayton, Ohio, my first retreat since the pandemic began. This community of men, who will be joined at the retreat by some younger Marianists who live in the area, have been hit hard in the past 18 months, losing more than 20 members due to COVID-19 and other health issues. I have a deep feeling that I will learn more from them than they will from me. 

One of my talks will be about remembering and honoring those elders and mentors who have helped shape our lives – those who mentored us when we were young, who guided us on our path by their words and their deeds, by their successes and their failures. Sometimes we sought them out or maybe had them given to us. Sometimes they just appeared, as that old saying from Tao Te Ching says: “When the student is ready the teacher will appear.” And the second part of that famous quote is equally telling: “When the student is truly ready…the teacher will disappear.” For very often our mentors are only with us for a little while. 

In Parker Palmer’s book, “On the Brink of Everything: Grace, Gravity and getting Old,” he wrote this about his mentors: “My mentors saw more in me than I saw myself. They evoked that “more” in many ways — challenging me, cheering for me, helping me understand that failure is part of the deal. Then my mentors opened doors for me, or at least pointed me toward them. 

When I was willing to walk through those doors, I found purpose and meaning. My mentors changed my life.”

Mentoring and being mentored is not a one-way street, as anyone who has been on either the giving or receiving end of it will tell you. Rather, it is a “gift exchange, where we get as much as we give,” Palmer says. This mutual sharing evokes the potential in each other. The theologian, professor, feminist activist, and civil rights leader Nelle Morton called this, “hearing one another into speech.” I often think of this as a spiritual director and as a person who receives spiritual direction…so very often I don’t really know what I’m thinking or maybe even what I am feeling or believing until I say it out loud to another person.  

• Mentoring gives us a chance to welcome each other into a relationship that honors our vulnerability and our need for each other. 
• Mentoring allows us to learn from each other’s creative failures, from their “falling down and getting back up.” 

As Palmer describes, “mentors and apprentices are partners in an ancient human dance, and one of teaching and mentoring’s great rewards is the daily chance it gives us to get back the dance floor. It is the dance of the spiraling generations, in which the old empower the young with their experience and the young empower the old with new life, reweaving the fabric of the human community as they touch and turn.”

So we have these people plopped down in our lives somehow. Saints and sinners who fall down and get up and live to tell us about it and show us the way. They are gifts that never leave us, even if we go for years without thinking of the giver. 

So today, ask yourself in this silence:

• Who have been my mentors and guides? 
• Who believed in me when I was young?
• Who changed me?
• Whose words and life struck me somewhere deep and set me on this road?
• Have I thanked them and thanked God for them?