Nuancing
The Emotional Labor of Being a Mature Person
Today is the 4th of July, and I’m not sure how to feel about it. I love our country and consider myself a patriotic American. I’m also sad and disappointed by what feels like the death of the form of independence nearest and dearest to my heart: independent thought.
Critical, open-minded, and creative thought are the ends to which we aspire in the field to which I’ve dedicated my career: education, particularly education for Christian ministry. Yet a person need not be formally educated to be able to think independently. Such capacity relates not to schooling but to maturity.
Adult developmental psychologists — notably Bob Kegan to James Fowler — say that the mark of a mature person is that they are capable of allowing more than one thing to be true at the same time. They define the elusive “Stage 5” in their respective frameworks as the cognitive place where a person is whole enough that the existence of other whole persons poses no threat to their identities.
Yesterday’s passage of a sweeping tax-and-spend bill bespoke a government-wide immaturity, reflective of a cultural immaturity that might just be the doing-in of our civilization.
I serve an institution that is embedded in one of the top-tier universities when it comes to the Big, Beautiful Bill’s increased endowment tax. We will have to pay an 8% tax on the proceeds of funds given to us for the purpose of educating clergy and funding future ministers’ tuition. Donor intent? Doesn’t matter. Goodness of our cause? Matters even less.
Do I sound bitter? Angry? Of course I’m both, because I have worked with committed colleagues over many years to raise those endowed funds, I believe in the purposes they serve, and I exert tireless and no-excuses effort on guarding donor intent.
But most of all, I’m disappointed to see yet another casualty of the failure of our country to acknowledge that life is more complicated than those in positions of privilege wish it were.
Consider this series of ways in which a lack of nuance is harming our communities:
- Universities like Yale, which Andover Newton Seminary calls home don’t have an endowment; they have thousands of them. Each serves a different purpose, but all are treated the same way by the new tax bill.
- Universities like Harvard are fragmented enough that the notion of punishing the administration for antisemitism on campus by taking money away from scientific research is like punishing France for Russia’s war on Ukraine.
- People who are in the US illegally occupy dozens of different categories when one takes a nuanced view on immigration. Some are awaiting hearings; some have lived here their whole lives; some have broken laws and should be tried and possibly deported.
Jesus resisted categorizing people, which we know because of the sheer number of times he engaged people to whom he wasn’t supposed to be talking. He embodied a wholeness beyond wholeness: fully human and fully God. Nothing could have shaken him from his love for all creation because he didn’t need anyone to agree with him, which is good, because they didn’t.
A mature person can say, “Immigration requires reform,” without vilifying anyone. A person can challenge the non-profit/for-profit question in research and higher education one day, and express concern for religious minorities on campus the next day, and see the issues as worthy of specific consideration.
These cognitive tasks require maturity in the forms of patience, listening, learning, and — yes — nuancing. And they might just call for more than one bill, more than one category for the things leaders are charged with protecting (whether groups of people or public-serving institutions), and more than the shots called by one demagogue.
For inspiration, I look, and have previously pointed, to my favorite part of the cult classic film Harold and Maude. Maude asks Harold what kind of flower he would be if he were a flower. Harold sweeps his hand toward a field of small, white blossoms and says something like, “Oh, probably just one of those.” Maude then picks one and focuses Harold on each way in which it’s unique, with a stray petal here and a bitten leaf there. She says that the world would be better if we all insisted on being treated like “this” instead of “one of those.”
God’s capacity to love isn’t limited the way ours is. God loves every hair on our heads and requires no shortcuts that would necessitate placing creation into categories. We aren’t God, but as we grow more mature, we take on the markers associated with God’s imagination for us. It’s that kingdom-seeking striving that draws us into greater maturity and, therefore, greater love.
