{"id":209,"date":"2000-12-25T17:51:10","date_gmt":"2000-12-25T16:51:10","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.alice-miller.com\/en\/?p=209"},"modified":"2015-09-12T17:52:00","modified_gmt":"2015-09-12T16:52:00","slug":"mary-and-joseph-parents-to-emulate","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.alice-miller.com\/en\/mary-and-joseph-parents-to-emulate\/","title":{"rendered":"Mary and Joseph – Parents to emulate"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n

by Alice Miller<\/b><\/p>\n

Mary and Joseph – Parents to emulate
\nMonday December 25, 2000<\/span><\/h1>\n

The figure of Jesus confounds all those principles of Poisonous Pedagogy
\nstill upheld by the Church, notably the use of punishment to make children
\nobedient and the emotional blindness such treatment inevitably entails. Jesus
\nwas respected, admired, loved and protected, his parents saw themselves as
\nhis servants and it would never have occurred to them to lay a finger on him.
\nDid that make him selfish, arrogant, covetous, high-handed or conceited?
\nQuite the contrary.<\/p>\n

Jesus grew into a strong, aware, empathic and wise person able to
\nexperience and sustain strong emotions without being engulfed by them. He
\ncould see through hypocrisy and mendacity and he had the courage to pillory
\nthem for what they were. He had no need of power over others because he was
\nentirely at one with himself.<\/p>\n

Yet for all that, no representative of the Church has ever, to my
\nknowledge, admitted to the patent connection between the character of Jesus
\nand the way he was brought up. Would it not make eminently good sense to
\nencourage believers to follow the example of Mary and Joseph and regard their
\nchildren as the children of God (which they are) rather than treating them as
\ntheir own personal property ?<\/p>\n

It is time to relinquish destructive models and to mistrust the principle
\nof obedience. We have no need of obedient children brainwashed by their
\nupbringing to be the ideal victims for the empty verbiage and the
\nblandishments of terrorists and lunatic ideologists and ready to fall in with
\ntheir commands, even to the extent of killing others. We need children with
\nopen eyes and ears, children prepared to protest against injustice, stupidity
\nand ignorance with arguments and constructive action. Jesus was able to do
\nthis when he was twelve years old and the scene in the temple demonstrates
\neloquently that he could refuse the obedience asked of him by his parents
\nwithout hurting their feelings.<\/p>\n

With the best will in the world we cannot truly emulate the example of
\nJesus. To do that we would need to have been through an entirely different
\nkind of personal history. What we can do, as long as we really want to and
\nare not thwarted by external authority, is to learn from the attitude
\ndisplayed by Joseph and Mary. They did not need their son’s obedience and
\nthey felt no urge to punish him. Only if we fear the confrontation with our
\nown histories will we need to have power over others, and if we do that we
\nwill need more and more of it all the time. Parents want power and obedient
\nchildren because they feel too weak to be true to themselves and their own
\nfeelings, too weak to admit those feelings to their children. But it is
\nprecisely this kind of honesty with our children that makes us strong.
\nTo tell the truth we do not need to have power over others.<\/p>\n

Power is
\nsomething we need to spread lies, to mouth empty words and pretend they are
\ntrue. It is for this that we require mindless gullibility from our children
\nor from whole nations. And because such power can never be a substitute for
\nthe real strength of the truth, the insane logic of such a development is
\nbound to culminate in wars and the dreadful toll of human life they
\ninvariably exact.<\/p>\n

It is entirely realistic to imagine that if the wisdom of well-informed
\nexperts (like Fr\u00e9d\u00e9ric Leboyer, Michel Odent, Bessem van der Kolk and many
\nothers) were to reach a large number of parents and those parents had the
\nsupport of religious authorities in following the example of Mary and Joseph,
\nthe world would be a much more peaceful, honest and rational place for our
\nchildren than it is today.<\/p><\/div>\n

\n