The experiences we have in our lives make us who we are. We saw with Father Berrigan that his early experiences, how he was raised and taught to believe as a child, greatly affected who he became as an adult and he believed and stood for later on. How would things have been different had some factors in his life been changed? If his mother was not been an immigrant, had he had 6 sisters instead of brothers, had his family not been poor, but middle-class or wealthy, would he have changed? I think the obvious answer is yes, but how drastically would it have changed him? When do we stop thinking as children and following our parents every belief, and begin thinking for ourselves? Do we ever really lose all of our beginning beliefs? Should we want those beliefs to change? How we are raised and what we go through in our early lives will shape how we grow and learn and interact with others when we are older. Isolated experiences as well can change our whole being in the blink of an eye. We saw with Stewart Parker that what he experienced here in America is what based the character of Peter in “Pentecost”. How would the play have changed had Parker not gone through what he did in America? He seemed to draw connections between the struggles in America and Ireland at the time, so it is evident that his experiences in America were important to his writing. The experiences one has can also veer them off onto a completely different path with no warning. Maybe a college student studying business gets into or witnesses a terrible car crash. Suddenly, they realize they don’t want to study business anymore, but instead want to be involved in the medical field. Experiences can change us that quickly, and this changes our whole lives in the process. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
The idea of being directly connected to something can also affect how experiences change us as people. We can be part of a group, organization, job, whatever it is, and not be directly connected if we don’t get involved. Once we become involved though, and go through the experiences that these groups are going through, our minds, values, beliefs may change. When we see things happening in first-person, right in front of us, our perspective changes and we are seeing the issues from a different angle. It is more personal to us because we are right there. Take the college student from before. Instead of being there when the crash occurred, if they had instead read about it or seen it on the news, would it have affected them so strongly that they decided to change their major? The answer is probably not, but potentially. Everybody experiences things differently and are affected differently, so we can never know how someone will react or change when they experience something. They may even experience the same things as us, and have completely different reactions and thoughts about what happened. We need to remember this when having discussions and debates with people who have different beliefs than us. They may have had completely opposite experiences from our own, which made them who they are, and we need to respect that. Our experiences make us who are, and can change who we become. The question we must ask ourselves is how are these experiences going to change us? For better, or for worse? <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The experiences we have in our lives make us who we are. We saw with Father Berrigan that his early experiences, how he was raised and taught to believe as a child, greatly affected who he became as an adult and he believed and stood for later on. How would things have been different had … <\/p>\n