ve seen, the characteristics of a conflict. The individual
challenges and makes demands of his family, and the family challenges
and makes demands of the child. Each wrestles with the problems of trust
in relation to the other, each wrestles for autonomy that is equal to
the domination of the other, each strives for the initiative and
industriously competes with the other, and each seeks an identity that
may either exclude or include the other. The quality of the life of the
individual and of the social order depends upon the results of the
dialogue between them.

I am thinking of two families. In one, the parents helped their children
work through their difficulties with each other, thus assuming
dialogical responsibility for what happened between them. In late
teenhood, each child in turn became a person in his own right who had
achieved a relatively mature, congenial, and loving relation with every
other member of the family. In the second family, the parents could not
face the conflicts inevitable to human nature in a growing family, and
pretended a quality of relationship that did not exist between them.
When their children became late teen-agers and older, a smoldering
antagonism existed between them which occasionally broke out in venomous
quarrels. The parents of this second family had not assumed dialogical
responsibility for the content of their family life, with the result
that the interaction between the growing person and his environment was
not creative.

The process of unfolding patterns, of decisions made in response to
crises, of frustrations and achievements in living, are also the human
content for religious development, and provide opportunities for both
conversion and nurture. The development of a person is religiously
significant, and the events in his life have ultimate meaning. We may
think of them in only psychological and sociological dimensions, but
their meaning also is theological and religious. As we weave our
intricate way through the years of our lives, approaching and
withdrawing, attacking and retreating, victorious and beaten, decisive
and uncertain, being loved and being resented, loving and hating, and
sometimes gladly and sometimes reluctantly participating in the dialogue
between ourselves and our environment of influential persons, we may ask
ourselves this question: What contributes to our emergence as
responsible, resourceful persons? As participants in the dialogue
between ou