“Five Fours: Life Lessons” Roger Gilkeson Adult Ed, DUMC 2016
The 5 sets of 4 concepts on the back of this page can be seen as simplistic rules of thumb, clichés in a world in which reality is never that simple. They can also be seen as complex, interactive principles with many shades of gray among the blacks and whites. I’m sharing them because over the years they have influenced my happy life in big and little ways.
Religion: The Wesleyan Quadrilateral. I first heard about this in my orthodox Methodist Church in Great Falls, Virginia. “Whew! Maybe I can be an OK person without having to believe things that are so hard for me to take literally. I can use my own experiences (including reading) and reason, while keeping the great wisdom found in tradition and Scripture.” Since then my understanding of the Quadrilateral has become more sophisticated, particularly from reading “Wesley and the Quadrilateral: Renewing the Conversation” by a panel of conservative and liberal theologians.
Masculinity. As a non-athletic teenager in the early 1960s, I felt inadequate as a male. In college, I came upon a book (King, Warrior, Magician, Lover). Here, two psychologists discussed immature and mature aspects of four ancient male “archetypes”: the spoiled prince versus the servant king; the egotistical hero versus the warrior willing to die for a noble cause; the trickster magician versus the healer/scientist; and the oedipal, needy lover versus the agape, generous one. The successful man incorporates all four in their mature manifestations. Women sometimes have slightly different roles and archetypes. A lack of demarcation between immature and mature is a modern source of trouble for boys—gay or straight--who lack guidance into manhood.
The Brain. The brain isn’t really divided into four easy parts, but a chart showing four quadrants that I heard talked about at a humor conference in upstate New York in the 1990’s (“The Humor Project”) has stayed with me for some reason. Security consciousness and empathy, plus logic and thinking outside the box have been simple touchstones as I keep trying to understand the world. I ask myself a lot about empathy—e.g., can it be taught?--and understand the deep, early need to feel secure; I like logic (see Reason above), and in my study of science, I am constantly amazed by the complex and non-intuitive realities that creative scientists have shown us to exist.
Love: My father once told me about a public speaking class at American University. He had given a little talk about “Love,” and the professor suggested afterwards that it lacked a definition of “love.” He suggested that the best one he knew of was “The Spirit of Creative Good Will.” I soon added that definition to my little collection of “Fours,” emphasizing that we need to be more creative in our thinking about our loving spirits, more understanding of long-term and short-term goodness, and certainly more willing to act when we are faced with situations needing creative acts of kindness towards others.
Success: The four principles on the back of this page under E represent simple touchstones that I found useful when feeling discouraged. Usually, I could only remember three of the four, and that fourth one was the thing I needed to work on most!
* Slight modification 6/18/16 ** Original meaning of dilettante: “One who delights.
