Wise as Serpents and Innocent As Doves: Repentance and Training the Conscience
Patterns for Life audiobook Chapter 5
Educating the will, in the context of personality, means giving a child the ability to understand themselves as using their will in the service of Christ, to become saints ‘unique in the world.’ We do not want them to see themselves as merely a reductive pattern of personality that has a neat testing label and can accurately predict their inclinations much like an academically dressed-up horoscope. For an Orthodox Christian, the will must be directed explicitly towards the ultimate freedoms of sainthood.
~ Patterns for Life, Chapter 5
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The next step in our philosophical examination of education is to think more about the will, specifically with the training of the conscience in mind. We are all born with a conscience, which has the capacity to grow and be strengthened, but it is not fully mature at birth; rather it grows with us as we mature and grow physically.
As our children develop through the various stages of childhood they are continually testing and exploring their newfound abilities in order to understand boundaries and limits. Often as they do this they make mistakes, and here we find our opportunities for conscience training ready at hand. We can teach them what right behavior and right thinking look like, both through story and through example. We can give them opportunities to practice within the family, and most importantly, when they do mess up, we can show them what repentance looks like and how to get up after a fall.
It’s important to remember that we don’t have to figure out everything on our own — if we hold our thoughts and actions up to the Orthodox phronema which has been preserved and “traditioned” to us over the centuries we have a sure and true guide to correct us and keep us on the path.
Sometimes it is difficult not to be heavy-handed and overbearing in our approach to conscience training. We have found that it is helpful to keep in mind the metaphor of planting seeds and tending a garden as we go about this business, in order to temper our inclinations to control every little action.
So let’s discuss the chapter! Here are a few questions to consider, but once again, don’t feel limited to them:
How does the idea of planting seeds and teaching what we know relieve us of some of the pressure of perfectionism?
Does conscience training as described here differ in any way from books and curricula that focus on character building?
What role does repentance play in all of this? How do we model repentance ourselves?