Stick or
Twist? The Art of Getting the Balance Right! Stick or Twist?
The Art of Getting the Balance Right! Stick or Twist? The
Art of Getting the Balance Right!

Stick or Twist? The Art of Getting the Balance Right!

Last year, during our Newman-Day Hour (our Sixth Form Reflection Space), we were playing that old favourite, “If you were Pope…?” Students pondered what they find useful in religion and the Church and what they would change if they could.  Learning to spot the positives and negatives in things is a key skill for life - discernment, rather than an immature, uncritical acceptance or blanket moaning about individuals or systems! A couple of wise observations from Perry and Lily set us off on an interesting conversation about some of the advantages and disadvantages of the concept of  “tradition”. Drawing on some of the insights they had picked up from Aristotle the previous autumn, we considered the need for balance in life and, applying this to tradition, how we might need to be mindful of having neither too much nor too little change as we go about things. When to stick and when to twist! Both are calculated gambles!

This Sunday, the Church celebrates the Feast (Solemnity) of Saint Peter and Saint Paul, the Apostles of Rome. There are many pieces of wisdom from the lives of these two giants that might prove useful for helping us deal with our own adventures in the world, but building on the VIth-Form discussion outlined above, I would like to draw attention to how both these saints confirm what we have just said. Indeed, this is why we celebrate them on the same feast day (29th June). The fact that two characters who are so different get a single feast day is probably a heavy hint that we need both their temperaments or approaches to life.  Peter, the fisherman who denied Christ three times, became the Church's anchor; Paul, who once persecuted Christians, became its great adventurer across the Mediterranean world.  Peter is often characterised as the more cautious or conservative, while Paul is viewed as the more daring or liberal.  While that is a useful simplification for the purposes of analysis and teaching, it is also an over-simplification, since both men had both qualities in them (as any healthy, sane and balanced person needs to, according to our ND group).

Any functional community, family, business, school, workplace or Church needs both caution and daring.  Both qualities contribute to the group's well-being.  Sometimes the mother (or the father, for that matter) in a family will be the naturally cautious and conservative one. She holds the family together, preserves the family spirit, demands obedience, maintains the longstanding traditions, sorts the meals, makes sure people show up on time to eat them, and makes people accountable when they aren’t doing their bit for the collective!  “Why weren’t you home when I said?  Your dad was out of his mind with worry!”  “Stop picking on your sister!” “Leave the cat alone!” Without this kind of Mum (or, mutatis mutandis, for dads, headteachers, Popes and everyone else who holds a group together), a home becomes a B&B and a family, school, marriage or church dissipates into a number of egos, each just doing their own thing.  In other words, we need Peter in a household, the Petrine principle of the group.

Then again, if a family/school/church/marriage is to survive and flourish, we also need a bit of daring on occasion, “a splash of liberal” from time to time. Any group needs someone who will push boundaries, critically evaluate the common traditions, and show where the family, school, company or ecclesial ethos would be more accurately labelled bias and prejudice!  There is sometimes a need to open the windows and let in a bit of fresh air.  Why don’t we try a few new things, bring in a few new people and attitudes?  Otherwise, we might choke on our idiosyncratic weirdness!  (A group I know well - the Church - has, like any other family the world over, plenty of wonderful people in it. But it also has its fair share of eccentrics, more than enough mad Uncle Alberts!)  Do you have a “Shall we try and do something a bit different?” person in your family, workplace or parish?  Good!  That may be the Paul in your group, the Pauline principle!  We all need Peters - people who conserve life - and we also need Pauls - people who generate life. (By the way, in the same way that in reality Peter and Paul had both conservative and liberal elements in their character, so too, of course, good Mums, Dads, Heads, Popes and leaders are neither just Peter or Paul, but usually combine the best of both, even if one is more dominant.)

One of the patrons of our ND Hour, St. John Henry Newman, offers the same insight in zoological/biological terms.  He famously stated that to live is to change, and to be perfect is to change often. He believed that if something is to stay alive, then it sometimes has to change.  To remain what it is, to stay the same, a thing paradoxically has to change!  He gives the example of an animal changing its location, eating, drinking, breathing, taking things in from its environment - but always carefully. If it doesn’t take things in from outside itself, the animal is going to die!  Newman says that what keeps an animal itself is precisely its capacity to change. This is the daring or Pauline principle.  An animal that can’t adapt, react and engage with its environment and allow itself to be changed in some way, is going to be very quickly a dead animal! Anything that wants to stay alive has to be open to its own ongoing development.  At the same time, of course, if that animal simply and uncritically takes in anything and everything that it comes across in the world, well, once again, it will pretty soon be a dead animal!  The animal needs to have its guard up, its antennae twitching, if it wants to remain what it is!  This is the conservative or Petrine principle.

A bit like with the old glass half-full, half-empty example, I suspect we are all instinctively more Peter or more Paul.  But we do well to remember that the glass is BOTH half full AND half empty, that we need to conserve AND change things.  Here’s to both stickers and twisters!   Peter and Paul, pray for us all!