The achievement of intimacy, general and specific, leads to the development of another capacity essential to integrity; namely, the capacity for generation, whether of offspring or creativity of some other kind. Generative capacity is basic to an individual’s assumption of responsibility, and to his ability to initiate and bring to fulfillment new life or new expressions of life. The power of origination is open to anyone, and we can either affirm the power or deny it. If we deny it, we shall have to find substitutes which usually are subpersonal and which involve us in a kind of superficial but unfulfilling intimacy. On the other hand, the person with integrity is one who can initiate creativity of his own, or consent to and participate in the creativity of others. As Dr. Erikson has pointed out, he can be both a leader and a follower. These are qualities and values needed by all men, and81 the cultivation of them is the task of the church and the purpose of its teaching.
The objectives of love, we see, are not abstract, but specific and concrete. Love calls forth persons and reunites life with life by providing the relationships in which the created needs of men are met. The environment of saving love is needed to produce out of our biological nature and the physical world in which we live the image of God in each of us and the Kingdom of God for all of us.
[17] Man’s Need and God’s Action, Reuel L. Howe, The Seabury Press, Greenwich, Connecticut, 1953, Chapter V.
[18] Growth and Crises of the Healthy Personality, Erik H. Erikson. Pamphlet from Problems of Infancy and Childhood, Josiah Macy, Jr. Foundation, New York, 1950. Used by permission.
[19] Ibid.
[20] Ibid.
V82
THOSE WHO WOULD LOVE
“We know that we have passed out of death into life,