The power of a great mentor

Last week I ran the six-day creative reading and writing women’s seminar on “Identity and (Dis)Belonging” that I’ve been teaching each summer for four years now. Usually, we gather for the week on the grounds of St John’s Abbey, a Benedictine monastic community situated on the shores of a lake in central Minnesota; this year, it all took place virtually. Course participants do close readings and analysis of the personal essays of writers across cultures, and dig deep into their own individual, family and communal narrative histories, workshopping a short piece of creative writing.

Each year, it proves to be an emotionally and physically draining week. As we closed on Saturday, someone remarked that part of what made the seminar so meaningful was the unexpected element of mentoring: how, by my words and actions, I showed them how to bring their full presence to the work, to each other and to challenge themselves. I wasn’t consciously aware of doing that, but it did leave me thinking over the next few days about what makes a good mentor.

In Homer’s epic poem The Odyssey, Mentor was the old man whom Odysseus asked to look after his son Telemachus when he went to war. But in the story, it’s the work of the Greek goddess Athena that lends the meaning to how we understand the word “mentor” today. She disguises herself as the old man and goes to Telemachus to advise him on what to do for his family.

These days, mentoring takes so many forms — from formal corporate programs established in the US in the 1970s to global training facilities for coaching and mentoring accreditation. But regardless of how one is mentored, it seems to be a much-needed and age-old human relationship, expressed in literature, religious texts and popular culture.

The work of advising, guiding and teaching someone along any stretch of their life’s journey has an element of sacredness

Life hasn’t always put me directly in the line of the exact mentor I needed at any given time. But from as early as 13 years old, when a favourite friend of my mother’s pulled me aside and gave me a little book about transitioning from childhood to girlhood, I can name the people who have markedly affected the way I see the world, taught me rules about life, nurtured my potential, and believed in me more than I was able to believe in myself. These are names and faces I could never forget. Every mentoring relationship is different, and yet I think mentoring, when honoured and taken seriously, is always a mutually beneficial and enlightening experience.

One of my favourite paintings on the topic is “The Childhood of Christ” (c1620) by 17th-century Dutch painter Gerrit van Honthorst. It is a scene of the boy Jesus with his father Joseph, the carpenter who taught him the trade. It is the dark of night and Jesus, dressed in a bright red robe, leans on the table and holds a lighted candle so the elderly Joseph can work. Two whispering angels, who look like children themselves, stand in the background and point at the father and son, apprentice and master. The painting is rich in religious symbolism and implications. But it also illuminates some often underplayed aspects of the mentor-mentee relationship.

The candle creates a chiaroscuro effect, casting a brilliant glow on both Joseph’s and Jesus’s faces. It reveals several things: that the young boy is focused on the older man’s face rather than on his work, and that he gazes at him with admiration and adoration. There is more to mentoring than a passing on of skills or ideas. There is also a degree of gazing at the mentor’s face, symbolic of their character. The mentors who have had the most profound effect in my own life have been those whose character traits I respected and wanted to emulate, beyond whatever advice they bestowed.

Joseph, for his part, uses Jesus’s light to continue to concentrate on his craftsmanship. I think part of the mutual gift in the mentor-mentee relationship is that the presence of the mentee in our lives holds a light to our work and to our own presence, inviting us to peer more intently at what we are doing and how we are doing it — perhaps even surpassing what we imagine is the limit of our own growth and development. In this sense mentoring is a mutual calling. Knowing the fuller narrative within the Christian tradition, I’m aware that both characters in the painting contain the role of the one who teaches and the one who is taught. But these roles manifest in their lives at different times.

The angels in the background remind me of the role of the goddess Athena in the classical mentoring role. The work of advising, guiding and teaching someone along any stretch of their life’s journey does have an element of sacredness to it. To be entrusted and invited into someone’s life is an intimate act that we often take for granted, focused sometimes more on the status that enables us to be the mentor, rather than on the transformative power that mentoring holds for another life.

I look at the late 19th-century oil work “The Women’s Life Class” (c1879) by American illustrator Alice Barber Stephens. It was her first published image, and came about as a result of her petitioning — along with other female artists — for women to be allowed to attend life-drawing classes, at a time when it was considered an inappropriate activity for respectable women. In this image, a classroom of female artists are seated or standing, gathered around a female model on a stage. The women are crowded into the room and yet at ease with one another, concentrating on painting or gazing from behind at another’s canvas. They have fought for a space in which to develop their skills. By their presence alone, they encourage one another.

It makes me consider again the class of women I met last week. They ranged in age from mid-twenties to mid-sixties, across cultures, ethnicities, race and sexual orientation. I consider how within the short span of six days they quickly bonded, how they listened patiently and intently to each other’s stories and workshopped each other’s writing, challenging one another to acknowledge their fears, to be courageous in their work and, in parallel, in their lives.

I am reminded that mentoring can happen in all directions, horizontally as well as vertically, across age gaps and cultures and socio-economic status, because no matter how much we have “arrived,” we never outgrow our ability to learn from one another. I am reminded that you never know who can journey alongside you, offering you both what you know you need and what you haven’t yet been able to see you need. After all, in this life, aren’t we all sojourners invited to help each other on our way?

Enuma Okoro is a columnist for FT Life & Arts

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