Agape and Personhood. David L. Goicoechea

concerned about their welfare and their lives

      and she was glad to feed them with the baby bottle

      with all her mother’s and father’s gladness for

      those sweet, bleating, darling little orphaned lambs.

      And they told her about the Good Shepherd who left

      the ninety-nine and went out to find the one lost sheep.

      And Leona Mae and Levaur Paul identified with the lost

      sheep who had been found and mother identified with them.

      Mother felt secure in herself and with others

      in the affection which her parents showered upon her.

      And when mother was four her new baby brother,

      Robert Abbott Coates, was born and mother was already

      helping her mother as a “little mother” with a sensitivity

      that learned the sweet voice and the gentle touch that could

      aid a baby boy as well as bum lambs when they were discontent.

      I.1.5 In the Passion of Positive Emotions

      Gramma Coates had a real feeling for intellectual values.

      Many around her were artists of pleasure who had a feel

      for physical values and many were heroic types,

      full of vitality, who ventured Westward seeking fortune

      much like Abraham who wandered into the unknown.

      But Leona identified with Aunt Sadie’s love of books.

      She subscribed to Lady’s Home Journal and Parent magazines.

      Mother loved hearing Gramma Coates tell and read stories.

      By the time she was five she had her own Bible Story Book

      and her own Mother Goose Nursery Rhyme Book and she

      quickly learned many of the rhymes by heart and she

      loved the picture of Jesus the Good Shepherd most of all.

      She pondered stories of folly and wisdom, of love and hate,

      of joy and sorrow and of fear and courage and she saw

      a network of positive emotions and of negative emotions.

      And if there was love and joy the network was positive.

      And if there was hate and sorrow the network was negative.

      She was impressed by heroes, wise men and saints

      but most of all she loved the saints because their love

      of the holy was a passion for love and joy that let

      her also love the truth of the wise, the good of the heroes,

      and the beauty of the artists in a network of affirmation.

      Of course, as a child she was not aware of all this

      but she did identify with it in the value system

      of her young and buoyant mother who in great joy

      with her young family could love all her sorrow

      and even be confident in the face of any threats.

      By identifying with her mother’s belief in joy and of

      turning sorrow into joy even though it remained sorrow

      mother as a child already began practicing the Stoic ethic

      that flowed into St. Paul and St. Francis and the Anglicans.

      I.1.6 In the Logic of True Thoughts

      When she was six mother finally got to go to school

      in a little one-room school house on the Fish Creek Flats.

      Through the summer high up the Iron Mine Canyon

      she was already learning to read in her two books.

      The anticipation increased through late August

      and they took the sheep down and they moved into

      their fall-winter ranch house and mother’s birthday

      finally arrived and her father drove her to school.

      Already at six mother began practicing the liberal arts

      of reading, writing, speaking and listening in orderly silence.

      She had to learn to concentrate and not be distracted

      as she practiced in her books and notebooks while

      the teacher was talking to others in that same little room.

      She began to reflect on words as she heard new voices.

      She started making the transition into the age of reason.

      Toward the end of that school year she began to lose

      her baby teeth and to get the teeth one by one that

      would lead her along toward the next stage of puberty.

      And she was educated into the very first steps of

      grammar, rhetoric and logic and the age of reason

      into which she took her first steps was the age of logic.

      And she began to learn to connect the dots into

      an orderly whole as she moved from the immediacy

      of emotional identification into reflection on words

      and ideas that began to initiate her in self reflection.

      And her teacher brought a very new voice into her life

      and she would go home and eagerly tell her mother

      about her school work and they already began to do

      homework together as mother moved from the realm

      of preconscious attitude, moods and feelings into

      the realm of conscious thoughts, words and deeds.

      I.1.7 In the Intonation of Incantational Words

      As a little girl mother identified with her mother’s speech

      and its clearly articulated, sweet melodious tone.

      The muscles and nerves of mother’s lips, tongue and throat

      were formed just as were her mother’s as they spoke together

      and worked more and more together doing dishes,

      cleaning house, cooking and baking, washing and ironing.

      Mother wanted to do all with her mother and though mother

      had a child’s voice it was moving ever closer to being exactly

      like her mother’s with its world making song and magic.

      The sing-song reciting of nursery rhymes was almost

      a dance that played forth out of joy and back into joy.

      Leona’s shamanic spiritual exercises that converted

      absence into presence let her become a reader and speaker

      of the word that had a cheering and helping power for any

      who heard the near incantational rhythms of her voice.

      Mother identified with her mother’s power of speech

      which could put a halo of magic around each spoken thing.

      There would be bacon, eggs and toast with choke-cherry jelly.

      They would look so