Surprisingly, not everyone is at the supermarket to get jellybeans.
My four-year-old grandson loves jellybeans. He often comes down the stairs first thing in the morning, leans over the arm of my chair and whispers, “Nanny, can I put jellybeans in my cereal today?”
After I chuckle, the responsible grandmother reminds him that jellybeans are not a nutritious food and points out that we don’t have any left anyway. Then “nanny” suggests, “We could go to the supermarket after breakfast and buy some.” He always smiles, and he never says no.
On our last trip for a refill, we pulled into the crowded supermarket parking lot where he observed, “There’s a lot of cars here today. I guess everyone wants to get jellybeans.”
I had to laugh out loud. That was truly a child’s perspective of seeing the world through their wants. If he wanted jellybeans, surely everyone in the store was there to get jellybeans, and we had to hurry to get in there before they were all gone.
Hopefully, part of maturing will be his growing ability to be flexible in his perspective and learn to expand his focus from himself to others and begin to understand that each person sees things in a different way.
The reality is we see things as we are, and we often expect others to see them the same way. In my family of six sons and a husband, a challenging point of perspective has always been the “I’m always right,” perspective. Family gatherings regularly include a segment of proving a point, promoting an opinion or pushing a favorite agenda. It’s no surprise that, like at an Edwardian dinner, the women, one by one, “retire to the parlour,” by choice, and leave the men to their often-heated conversations.
And yet, these conversations are of great value to my family, as my sons are good and wise men who form, for each other, a much-needed circle of friends whose honest thoughts, observations and principles inevitably help them examine their own perspectives and approach personal and professional decisions with integrity and care – no matter how loud the exchanges get.
How we approach life, how we make decisions, is all about perspective. And perspective is all about seeing life through our own lens, one that is crafted through a lifetime of experiences. Since perspective is lived out in thought and action, it is important for us, as Christians, to examine that lens from time to time and decide if it is allowing us to be all that God wants us to be. Are we learning to see through the eyes of God, or are we limited to the lens of our experience, which includes our baggage and agendas?
As for my grandson, one of the youngest of 10, and for all of our children who must learn to navigate the hopes, joys and challenges of the life they’ve been given, I find wise advice in the words of St. Thomas More, who was martyred for his faith in 1535.
In a letter to his children’s teacher, he described what he thought was most important for his children in developing integrity between thought and action: “The whole fruit of their [educational] endeavours should consist in the testimony of God and a good conscience. Thus, they will be inwardly calm and at peace and neither stirred by praise of flatterers nor stung by the follies of unlearned mockers of learning (…). A mind must be uneasy which ever wavers between joy and sadness because of others’ opinions.”
God first.
Thomas More taught us that by his life, and death. Standing before his executioner on the day of his beheading he said, “I die the king’s good servant, but God’s first.”
Thankfully, seeing through the lens of God doesn’t require our martyrdom, but it does require prayer, introspection and honesty, humility and understanding. After all, someone else might believe that everyone is at the supermarket to get watermelon.
Mary Morrell is editor-in-chief of The Catholic Spirit, the Metuchen Diocesan newspaper.