When I was preparing to leave Parade College in December of 2005 I was prompted to send a farewell e-mail to the staff and wrote: I believe that the highest intelligence is a capacity to negotiate respectful and inclusive and mutual and authentically loving relationships, and that to enter into such encounters is our human raison d’etre. This, too, is at the heart of our Christian calling, and the first mission of the Parade community. In a world where authentic relational life is in manifest decline, education for this quality of life becomes more and more the primary challenge for educational communities. In speaking recently to the Parade College Board I proposed that the primary role of every teacher is to engage in a respectful mutual relationship with every student (not to teach a subject). I further asserted that the primary mission of Parade College is to build communion.

During my years of counselling I was influenced significantly by the wisdom of Stanley Greenspan through his 1997 work “The Growth of the Mind, and the Endangered Origins of Intelligence” [Addison Wesley]. It offers wise and practical observations and advice on nurturing and educating young people, and on the human challenge of negotiating relationships. Greenspan wrote that “affect and interaction, rather than the acquisition of specific information and skills, are the foundation of learning of every kind” (p. 224). For Greenspan, real intelligence has its foundations and finds its expression in relational engagement, rather than through reason and in the intellect. This certainly informs my thinking, and my assertion that the highest intelligence is exercised in the theatre of human relationships is derived from this belief.

Greenspan noted confrontingly, from his experience in America, that “Half of all husbands and wives are unable to work out their differences and maintain stable families” (p. 239). In my counselling I frequently encountered the consequences for young people of a similar Australian reality of failed relationships and parenting. Participating in making relationships work is perhaps our most challenging human task. The evidence of failure surely confronts us everywhere, within ourselves and in so many of the human encounters that we observe.

Greenspan observed that “the two basic features of families that work … empathetic, sensitive nurturing combined with clear firm limits … create a morally responsible adult. Limit setting without nurturing breeds fear and an amoral desire to beat the system. Nurturing without limits breeds self-absorption and irresponsibility” (p. 195). Here were wise principles for me to act as guides in collaborating with parents and teachers in working with young people whose lives were dysfunctional in some way. Maintaining quality nurture while insisting on negotiated clear boundaries is no easy task in relating to young people. But it is foundational, and I frequently found that it provided the wisdom for advising on challenging relational issues.

Greenspan further advised that “successful settlement of conflicts requires an ability on both sides to understand one’s own and the other person’s needs, to express these needs, and to tolerate feelings of loss and disappointment … Lasting settlements meet enough of both parties’ wants and needs that they see what they give up versus what they get as an equitable trade-off” (p. 245). Here is basic wisdom for negotiating respectful and inclusive and mutual and authentically loving relationships. I believe that this wisdom is less rather than more frequently evident. How difficult it is to know and understand and be able to articulate one’s own basic needs. How much more difficult to recognize the needs of another. And what generous tolerance is required to be able to “give up a bit to get a bit”. But my experience is that this vital wisdom and highest intelligence can be nurtured and taught and learned, and that this task is the primary challenge for educational communities.

On revisiting my statements to the Parade staff and Board I find myself pleased to uphold them. But I now experience a pang of disappointment. In the moment of writing I was thinking anthropocentrically and narrowly. I failed to embrace and articulate a wider conviction, the challenge to also negotiate an authentic and loving relationship with our immediate cosmic home planet earth … with the Master Brother Sun, and Sister Moon, and Brother Wind, and Brother Fire and Mother Earth of Francis of Assisi. And with the “powers beyond powers, depths beneath depths, extending into the infinite depths of our world-home, the cosmos” of Oliver Sachs in his “Awakenings”.

And in thinking about our human raison d’etre I am intrigued to recall a catechism teaching of long ago that: “God made us to know, love, and serve him here in this life, and to be happy with him forever in heaven”. I am satisfied that this catechism teaching translates into a life-long call to negotiate respectful and inclusive and mutual and authentically loving relationships. All else is surely secondary. And I believe that this call is foundational to our 2002 Congregation Chapter recognition that Our distinctive way of living and loving is to take literally the meaning of relating as brothers [The Heart of Being Brother].

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