Your spiritual maturity is not affirmed by how much you read the Holy Scriptures, sing hymns, pray, clap hands, dance to contemporary religious music. It’s not determined by how much you visit your place of worship or how much money you donate to its causes.

It’s not affirmed by your title (if you have one) or the ornate design of your robe (if you wear one) or your the position in the hierarchy of your faith (if you have one).

It is affirmed by your willingness to take responsibility for your life, your choices, the good use of your skills, talents. It’s measured by how you treat people, especially loved-ones, strangers; how you love your enemies, offer hospitality, respect, regard, love those who reject your beliefs.

Are you generous to a fault? Do you love those who are different from you, whose lives might be in direct conflict with what you believe? Do you love by listening?

If you take full responsibility for yourself, become extraordinarily generous, embrace diversity, and love others by listening, you will fast-forward your “spiritual” growth. It’s not your title, the reach of your authority, or the crowds who respect and adore you. It’s how you respect and love those who don’t.

Our mother died 41 years ago today on the fifth floor of Addington Hospital.

At times I feel I never knew her. There are times it is as if she is still with us. This one of many paradoxes of dying and living. We make our mark then go away. We live on in hearts, memories, values of those who knew and loved us.

Mavis Iona Smith is as alive as ever and has been gone too long to remember. There’s hardly a morning when I dress that I don’t hear her voice telling me anything is possible today but do you really want to wear that shirt. There’s hardly a meal I prepare that I don’t hear her just suggesting I’m adding too much of whatever. I adventure into the city and Mother points out strangers, tells me they’re friends I just don’t know.

I’m making it sound like mother is spending her eternity sitting on my shoulder. Not so. I’m just very aware of her values, commitment to hospitality, some of her cautions, many of which I still ignore. The reality of at least one aspect of eternal life is most tangible when you realize people who loved you unconditionally are living inside you, making their mark, urging you to pass the baton of goodness from generation to generation.

Loss, grief, mourning 

• Grief can go into hiding and emerge months, years later, as something quite unexpected like anger, disappointment or cynicism, and/or kindness, joy, softness, and appreciation. • Time itself doesn’t heal, not usually. Some grief is never “healed” and some losses never find “closure” but the lack of both does not mean survivors cannot live full, productive, beautiful lives. • Replacing a loss with another person “too quickly” may be unwise, unfair, irresponsible. It doesn’t feel that way for the one who has suffered. Insisting on it is usually alienating and counterproductive and can rip already suffering families apart. • Mourning has a wild life of its own, at least initially, and it’s best not tamed by the untrained. • When a person who had suffered loss declares he or she’d rather not talk about “it” the desire is best respected. • Our uniqueness as individuals is also reflected in how people respond to difficulties associated with significant loss. It’s ridiculous to approach a grieving person with a step-by-step generic packaged formula. • Non-possessive warmth, listening ears, and a hot cups of tea may be the most powerful gifts a person can offer one who has suffered.

Congratulations Graduate: Your high school career soon ends. Brace yourself. A new dimension of your education will soon begin. Thank parents, teachers, coaches, especially those who taught you when you were very young since you didn’t get to your cap-and-gown ceremony alone. Your parents are perfectly designed to help shape you so stay with whatever they are trying to teach you. Then, learn about Money. Think of Money as a Being (thus the capital). You can work for Money, or, Money will work for you. Choose. If you let Money know you are in charge you’ll get Money’s respect and it will begin to cooperate. You gain its respect by saving one-third of every dollar you earn. Here’s a rough guide: ⅓ gets saved, ⅓ goes to accomodation, ⅓ goes to everything else. You don’t have to choose the “right” university, apprenticeship, or job. You’ll never get everything right. But, be sincere. Time is not wasted when you are sincere. Before you take “road less traveled” you may, for a while, have to take the road most traveled. “Too much too soon” in any area of your life will almost always hurt and haunt you.

1. May I be a source of healing and not a source of hurt and injury.
2. May I value people more than I value things.
3. May I apologize sincerely and efficiently when I wrong others.
4. May I be immovable about matters of integrity, and flexible, understanding when others do not do what is right and good.
5. May I learn to switch off or ignore my phone when I am face-to-face with others.
6. May I listen more than I speak.
7. May I be generous.
8. May I learn to hold my tongue when tempted to gossip.
9. My I learn to promote others and their strengths, even if it means stepping aside so others may get ahead.
10. May I learn to live in the present and design a great future, rather than dwell upon the way things were and could have been.

• Your High School career is ending; your education is beginning. Brace yourself.

• You didn’t get to cap-and-gown alone. Thank your parents, teachers, coaches, with abandon, even returning to thank your earliest of teachers.

• Your parents are the most important people you’ll ever know. Like it or not, they are perfectly designed to shape you.

• Learn about money and how it works. You will spend your whole life working for money, or, money will work for you. Which would you prefer? If you want money to work for you, save as much as one-third of every dollar you ever earn. Do this and money will see you are in charge. That’s when it will offer you respect and begin to work for you and not against you.

• You don’t have to choose the “right” university, the “right” subjects at tech or the “right” job. You’ll never get everything right. But, it is helpful if you are sincere. There’s no wasted time if you’re sincere.

• Before you can take the long, scenic, “road less traveled” you sometimes have to take the road most traveled. Embrace the ordinary until you are equipped to identify and enjoy the extraordinary.

• Too much too soon in any area of your life will almost always hurt and haunt you.

Emotional wellness, but for the severely unwell, is something you can self-monitor, much like you can take your own blood pressure. Nobody is healthy all the time; few are unhealthy all the time. Most of us have good and not-so-good days. May this column lead you to reflection and a day of joy and greater emotional health. Please don’t use these lists to classify others.

Healthy people: Promote freedom and discovery. They are open and clear about expectations, move on efficiently after disappointment. They forgive others. They are aware that they can be misguided and are open to correction. They are steered, guided from inner values and ambitions. Healthy people are grateful to others and know how much they need others. They try to keep their word and truth is important to them.

Less healthy people: Display jealousy, possessiveness, and revel in secrecy and gossip. They collect scars, wounds, hurts like trophies. They hold onto resentments and anger. They usually have to be right and win arguments and are shaped by outside pressures and others. They want to appear self made, as if they need no help from anyone, or they “leech” off others as if they are the responsibility of their friends. They tell lies quite easily, as if it’s normal.

• Every overreaction, poor attitude, expression of anger will have an equal, opposite reaction no matter how much love there is between or among you.
• People are designed for freedom. Get in the way of someone’s freedom and you will pay for it. It may take years but it will cost you.
• The person who most wants whatever from another person (time, sex, a beach walk, a loan, long intimate chats over coffee) places the other in a position of power. This is why pleading and begging are so unattractive.
• The stronger, more mature person of any two people in a relationship will be the one who seeks forgiveness and reconciliation when a relationship is derailed. While the focus is who is right or wrong and who needs to apologize first and who started whatever, the people are not ready for reconciliation. Reconciliation seeks reconnection not victory.
• Mutual attraction is about matched levels of maturity or immaturity. People of dissimilar levels of maturity will hardly notice each other. Equally needy people will attract each other like powerful magnets and the attraction will feel like a match made in heaven – at least at first.
• Love and control cannot co-exist in the same relationship.

Deep within her person, soul, bosom is the power to nurture, inspire, dream, and bring beautiful and magnificent dreams and plans to fruition. Listen to her voice. Listen and hear what she’s saying and what she is not saying. She has intuition – hindsight, insight, foresight. If you embrace and respect her intuition and allow it to shape and challenge your thinking, you will be wiser for it. You will save yourself considerable conflict, anguish, error, and money.

If you have the guts, backbone, wisdom to offer her unstrained equality, undiluted mutuality, pure respect – all of which God already affords every woman – it is you who will be enriched. It is you who will benefit. It is you who will find yourself more complete. And, when you develop the necessary fortitude to respect all women everywhere, you will find a place of growth and understanding that courageous, insightful men have always known, have always found safety and retreat.

Get out of her way and remove your petty prejudices harbored so long and she will shape a nation, nurture leaders, lead a nation, turn a profit, feed a community, and, if you are available for it, she will teach you to love.

• As much as I am able you have my absolute and complete forgiveness for anything and everything you may have ever done or considered harmful or hurtful or painful to me. As I learn more about forgiveness I will take it to new levels with you whether you are aware of it or not.
• You are free to love anyone you choose in a mutual, equal, adult relationship. I give you my full backing and support. As you develop your most important relationships I will be very willing to also learn to love the people you love.
• People in families have odd ways of holding each other back. It is often done in the name of love. Where you think I may be doing this to you, tell me so I can stop it. I want to clear the way for your greatness, not be a stumbling block in your path.
• You are at least ten generations in the making. These short years I have had to parent you are powerful but not nearly sufficient to unearth all the gold within you. That takes a life-time of discovery which I hope you will enjoy. Even the rough parts of our unique histories can become incredible strengths.