 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
||
Signs of the Times Australia / NZ edition — lifestyle, health, relationships, culture, spirituality, people — published since 1886 |
||||||||||
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
||
Signs of the Times Australia / NZ edition — lifestyle, health, relationships, culture, spirituality, people — published since 1886 |
||||||||||
When I was 14, at the end of school holidays, I boarded a DC3 at Henderson airfield on Guadalcanal in the Solomon Islands, heading to Sydney via Rabaul, Lae and Port Moresby. A group of officials were gathered at the airport and among them was a renowned American scientist. He was important—and it was my privilege to be seated next to him. He soon engaged me in conversation. He wrote his name and that of his adopted Papuan son, inviting me to write to him as a penfriend. My new companion questioned me about the books I read. He made out a list of classics, such as Homer’s Iliad and The Odyssey, he said would better assist my intellectual development. “You must read books that are hard to understand,” he said. “That is how your mind improves.” I felt myself inspired by that advice and I’ve never forgotten it.
But then, in the middle of our conversation, this great American scientist suddenly asked if I were circumcised! Caught off guard and a little embarrassed, I told him, yes—like most Pacific islanders.
“Can I look?” he then asked.
Here was an awesome scholar who had taken a great interest in my intellectual welfare asking me a question I can only remember my grandmother putting to me. He must know what he’s about, I thought.
“Don’t be shy,” he said.
Ten years later he was awarded a Nobel Prize. His research over 20 years had ended a mysterious illness that afflicted Pacific peoples.
n At the time, I thought this great man had, in a fatherly way, given me much-needed self-confidence. Then I thought no more of it until I read in a newspaper that he’d pleaded guilty to paedophile abuse of boys in his care. He served a year in jail. His private life and public standing, though perhaps not his intellectual status, were wrecked.
During his years in the Pacific, he had adopted more than 50 island boys and taken them to America. His avowed aim was philanthropic; his effect on them disastrous. I was saddened by the tragedy of it: disappointed that the expression of genius had been undercut by a fatal flaw; that in his effort to make the world a better place for some, he made the lives of at least two individuals a hell.
I have looked at the scientist’s published diaries and journals in an attempt to resolve my questions about how to understand our encounter. His diagnosis of his condition is frank. He said he never expected to find genuine “human relationships” when he was growing up. He praises the “closeness, confidence and loyalty” of his young associates: “It is the realisation that I have not had the lasting love and loyalty, self-sacrifice and devotion from family members or friends in the Western world that these New Guinea highlanders have given me, that in turn provokes similar response to them on my part.”
He did not expect others to understand his preoccupation, but confessed, that his “relationships of love, trust, intimate confidence, and loyalty and warmth, and sharing experiences, is stronger with these adopted boys than were my relationships with either of my parents.”
I’m not sure that I can get inside the skin of the man, but his admission of failed family relationships is telling and sobering. Some of us have, as children, survived the traumas of our own particular families; others have reason to celebrate families that were nurturing and caring. If we are now parents, we must be keenly aware that deep inside every family relationship lies the anvil of personality production.
The core nature of our family ties is the string that holds our precarious identities together. And more, how we are shaped or held together by these relationships determines how our society hangs together.
Families are that critical: God or the devil commands them. And we can tell which it is, by how we relate to each other, how we cherish each other, how we exhibit love to each other. These are the moulds that bring forth flaws or fineness of character.
Extract from Signs of the Times, August 2004.
Home - Archive - Topics - Podcast - Subscribe - Special Offers - About Signs - Contact Us - Links
Copyright © 2006 Seventh-day Adventist Church (SPD) Limited ACN 093 117 689
Unassociated
advertisement:
This article comes from a
regular column in
Signs
of the Times.
