New Morning, New Man: Poetry of the Male Spirit

Listen to this story from Paul Kivel, from his book Men’s Work: How to Stop the Violence That Tears Our Lives Apart:

It’s Sunday night and my son, Ariel, is supposed to be finishing his week’s homework assignment, due tomorrow. He sits down at the table, looks at the last page and says, “I can’t do this.”

“Why not?” I ask in disbelief.

“I don’t have an encyclopedia.”

“But we went through this last week. You are supposed to check your homework ahead of time to see if you need an encyclopedia. I’ve told you before that’s not an acceptable excuse.” I can feel my anger rise.

“I looked at it. It’s a crossword puzzle on domestic cats. I didn’t think I needed an encyclopedia.”

[At this, Paul Kivel says] I know I’m stuck. There’s no way he can do the assignment. Once again he has managed to postpone some of his work so that when the final hour comes he can’t finish it.

“Can I watch television now?” he asks in all innocence.

“No, you can’t. I told you that you couldn’t watch television until your homework was done; I said that forgetting to bring home the right books isn’t an excuse.”

“But Dad…”

“That’s it. You can just sit there and figure out a way to do your assignment.”

I leave and he starts to cry. We both feel terrible.

That’s the story, from Paul Kivel. A snapshot of a difficult fathering moment, on this day that we honor fathering even as we brave difficult territory and go deeper into what it all means.

As I shared this story, how many of you felt yourself tensing up? You’ve been there, done that. You know what it is like to be that kid, on the receiving end of an authority figure saying angrily, “You can just sit there and figure out a way to do your assignment.” Resenting their power over you, in the face of your own seeming powerlessness. You’ve been there, done that. And perhaps you’ve been the authority figure as well. Your parents said such words to you, and now you say them. You say them, feeling responsible for the wellbeing of your children. You say them, feeling the heavy burden on your shoulders.

And fathers can feel this in a unique way. As a father myself, I can honestly testify to an underlying desperation, linked to a sense of ultimate and absolute responsibility. Behind it is an anxious thought process, running like a broken record, which sounds like this: If you don’t teach your kids now, immediately, they will grow up to be failures. Let them off the hook—cut them some slack—and you are neglecting your responsibility. Make them do what’s best, right now—it’s ridiculous to give them a say in the matter. What do they know? But you know the discipline they need, and they need it if they are going to succeed in this world. Drill it into them. When I say “jump,” they better respond with “how high.” That’s the anxious thought process. That’s the kind of desperation fathers can carry into their fathering. “You can just sit there and figure out a way to do your assignment.” Desperation separating fathers from children and disempowering children even as the fathers are trying to connect with them and care for them. Desperation that even causes some to absent themselves entirely from the process. Too intense. Too overwhelming.

Listen to this dream I had maybe 20 years ago. “I’m in a strange and dark classroom, stuffed into a desk that’s way too small and hurts. My Dad is teaching me how to analyze images. He assigns homework. But I don’t think I need any of this, because I love my Dad. I love him. I tell him how I feel, but he doesn’t believe me. I try my best to prove it, but nothing works. He just continues lecturing, relentlessly.”

Something like this is precisely what happened to Paul Kivel, at the death bed of his own father. “He had few words for anyone during his illness,” he says. “But one week, when the doctors told him his heart was working at only 25 percent capacity, he suddenly wanted to tell me a great deal about what he thought I should know. With sadness, self-pity, and anger … he not only explained to me what he thought was important financially, he also made a final attempt to get me to value the things he had—security, stability, family, and civic responsibility. On his deathbed he was trying to get me to shoulder that role while conveying his anger and despair that he would be unable to do it himself. In his eyes he had failed on two counts. [For myself,] I had romanticized his death and though, Aha, there will yet be a final scene when he confesses his love for me. Then we will cry in each other’s arms and forgive each other. Instead, after unloading all the family business onto my shoulders and criticizing me, he lay back on his bed. My mother said, ‘Why don’t you tell Paul you love him and appreciate what he’s doing?’ My father simply said, ‘No, he doesn’t need that ego-boosting stuff.’”

What tragic, painful irony. And I know that this does not do justice to all the varieties of fathering out there, or experiences of our Dads. I admit this up front. Yet there is enough frustration around fathering to suggest that we are on to something significant. In the hearts of too many of our Dads: strangeness and darkness. Love, felt as desperation, felt as a sense of overwhelming and ultimate responsibility, held anxiously, conveyed through harshness, leading to the tragic, painful irony. “On the days I am not my father,” writes poet Scott Owens,

I don’t yell. I don’t hold inside
the day’s supply of frustrations.
My hands stay open all day.
I don’t wake tired and sore,
dazed from senseless, panicking
dreams. […]

On the days I am not my father …
I listen well.
I let things go unfinished,
in an order I didn’t plan.
My mouth is relaxed. My teeth
don’t hurt. My face stays
a healthy shade of pink all day.
On the days I am not my father
I don’t fill the silence with my own
irrational rants. I don’t resent
the voices of others. I don’t make fun
of you to make myself feel better.

On the days I am not my father…. What’s going on here? The clenched fist, the fatigue, the tense mouth, the gritted teeth, the red face, the irrational rants, the cruelty?

I go back to my dream of the dark classroom. The desk that I am sitting in, that squeezes me with its smallness, that makes my body hurt. Dad drilling his lesson into me, relentlessly. I believe that there are times when dreams communicate a poetry of the soul, and perhaps my soul, 20 or so years ago, was telling me something about my training as a man. How it’s like a Procrustean bed—an arbitrary standard to which exact conformity is enforced. If a part is too big, it gets cut off. Too small, and it is stretched. That’s where the clenched fist comes from, and the fatigue, the tense mouth, the gritted teeth, the red face, the irrational rants, the cruelty. All of it inescapably carried into one’s fathering, to some degree or another, for fathers are men first.

“Be a man,” the entire world says to a boy. The message coming not just from fathers, but mothers too, the media, teachers, and peers. Also from the only kinds of initiation rites that are generally available to men today, centering primarily around team sports, military life, gang life, and prison. All of them, sources of a surprisingly consistent message, which the following scenario tries to convey. (It comes from The Oakland Men’s Project, with which Paul Kivel is associated.) Here it is: imagine a ten-year-old-boy in a chair at home watching television. His Dad walks through the door holding a piece of paper:

DAD: Turn off that set.
SON: Aw Dad….
DAD: Turn it off. Now! This place is a mess; why isn’t it cleaned up?
SON: I was going to do it after this show.
DAD: Excuses. You always have excuses. Do you have an excuse for this? What is this?
SON: My report card.
DAD: Look at this right here: math, D.
SON: I did the best I could.
DAD: Sure you did. You’re just stupid. You know what D stands for? It stands for Dummy.
SON: (Starting to get up) That’s not fair.
DAD: Sit down. I didn’t say you could go anyplace.
SON: (looks down, near tears)
DAD: What’s the matter, you gonna cry about it? Poor little mamma’s boy. You’re just a wimp. (Pushes him off the chair onto floor) When are you gonna grow up and act like a man around here? (Storms off)
SON: (Picks himself off the floor. He’s angry, confused, hurt, says to himself:) “He’s always coming in here yelling, pushing me around, shouting at me to be a man. I hate it! It’s not fair!”

And that’s the scenario. A dark classroom. In other words: numb yourself to your feelings. Stay sitting down when you want to stand up. Be suspicious towards your tears. Ridicule yourself whenever an emotion emerges that registers vulnerability.

“Be a man.” Kill the instinct you have to take your confusion to other people, so you can get clarity about what you are feeling. Kill your need for real friendship and intimacy. Learn to be lonely.

“Be a man.” Of course you can have male friends, but these will only be people you will measure yourself against in competition. Never ever anything else. You can’t turn to them for support—that’s for sure. That’s what a wife is for. You can dump all your intimacy needs on her, and she’ll be your lifeline. You really only need one source of emotional sustenance in life, and that’s her.

“Be a man.” Take responsibility for your success. Control and conquer. There can be no excuses, ever.

That’s the overt training on how to be a man. That’s what it looks like on the outside, if not at home, then on the streets, in the playground, on the Internet and TV, at work, at war. “Be a man.” Success is the goal, but the problem is that what we have here is a perfect recipe for failure. One cannot possibly be strong unless one is whole in oneself and connected to others, but “be a man” means having your feelings cut off and being cut off from others—doubly so if you happen to be gay. “Be a man” is all about power and control, but this makes men (gay and straight) only feel worse about their lives and not better, makes them do desperate things to prove their manhood. Men all their lives wondering, Am I a man yet? Have I finally made the grade? Paul Kivel’s father on his deathbed, conveying his anger and despair at not having lived up to his responsibilities, and not even death can be an excuse. There can be no excuses, ever.

It’s a recipe for failure. It’s why, as Paul Kivel says, “the fabric of men’s lives is interwoven with violence.” When you’ve been bullied, you bully others, you pass the hurt around to counter the feelings of powerlessness. Some aspects of this are clearly visible, as in the case of physical violence. Rape. Gay bashing. Husbands beating up wives, even killing them—no doubt when the wife failed, for one reason or another, to live up to the impossible expectation that she should meet every one of the emotional and intimacy needs that the husband has dumped on her.

“Be a man” ends up being more about passing the hurt around than anything else. If not physical violence, then verbal violence, or violence against oneself: men going overboard drinking, or ignoring their health needs and refusing to take care of themselves. And then there are other kinds of violence, far more subtle: stone cold silence. Paul Kivel’s father, on his deathbed, refusing to bless his son, saying “No, he doesn’t need that ego-boosting stuff.” Subtle violence: the desperation that fathers can feel, when they bring to fathering their “be a man” training—desperation that presses down upon them, makes it impossible for them to let up, ease up, cease from trying to drill the discipline into their kids NOW.

But desperation is not the last word. Men can get up off the Procrustean bed of their “be a man” training and become whole again. Stop passing around the hurt. Grow back the parts that have been cut off. Allow the parts that have been stretched to resume their proper proportion. Father their children from out a more healthy place. Success like this—real success—can absolutely happen.

There can be a new morning. A significant part of this involves consciousness-raising, in which three different kinds of things happen simultaneously. One is a growing awareness of how one has been trained to “be a man”—going right back to all those moments when you were sitting in the chair, and someone said something or did something that did not feel fair, and you were about to stand up in protest, but then you heard the all-powerful voice of Dad saying, “Sit down. I didn’t say you could go anyplace.” So you sat back down. Becoming aware of these kinds of moments, what it felt like for your integrity to be violated. Crying tears that have been so deeply stuffed for so long. It is an awakening, and it hurts. It can make you long to go back to the numbness. Yet the only way out is through.

Which leads to the second aspect of consciousness-raising: male friendship. Safe places in which one can be heard into speech. Encouragement from others who have been there, or are there with you right now. This congregation’s men’s group, for example, meeting on a regular basis—aiming for a different kind of male bonding. Not competition, not hatred of some “other,” but honest sharing, mutuality, respect for others, and emotional risk taking. “The kind,” says Paul Kivel, “we often envy women for, the kind that we each long for ourselves.”

Growing awareness of our “be a man” training, growing friendship, and then this: growing capacity to let go of the desperate need to control. That’s the third aspect of male consciousness-raising, all to the end of learning how to father from a more healthy place.

For Paul Kivel, it happened like this. Go back to the fight he had with his son, over homework. In the days following this, he reflected on what had happened, drew on his awareness of his “be a man” training, talked about it with his men’s group, and came to the realization that things weren’t working precisely because he had all the power and all the responsibility. He says:

I resented my responsibility and Ariel resented my power. It finally occurred to me to sit down and talk about it with him.

I told him I didn’t like playing the enforcer when it came to his completing his homework assignments; I didn’t like yelling. But I was concerned and wanted to know what kind of support he needed from me.

“What I need from you is to back off some, stop yelling at me every day about my assignments.”

“What can I do? Stay out of it completely?”

“No, don’t stay out of it, just lighten up some.”

“What else would help?”

“Ask me when I’m going to do my homework instead of telling me to do it. Then I can plan out the right time.”

“What if you save it till you’re too late and you’re too tired?”

“I just won’t save it all for late.”

[At this point, Paul Kivel says that he bit his tongue. He found this hard to believe, but he didn’t say anything, just this:] “Okay, it sounds good to me.”

“Yeah [his son responded], I need you to answer questions about the assignments and things.”

“Sure.”

And that was the conversation Paul Kivel had with his son. “It was a tremendous relief,” he says, “to both of us. It didn’t completely end the arguments, but it confirmed that we were both on the same side. It also shifted the responsibility from me to him for planning his homework schedule. The next day after school he told me his schedule he had planned. And he followed it. He still forgets his books at times, or loses assignments. But he doesn’t feel like a billiard ball bouncing between the wrath of school and home. He feels in charge of his homework and I feel like his ally.”

Now that’s a father’s blessing. That’s what real success looks like.

Comic Spirituality

Coyote is a key trickster figure in Native American mythology. He’s a shape shifter, part human and part animal, combining within himself all that makes up the human character. In numberless exploits, he is portrayed as greedy and gluttonous, thieving and lecherous. Clever and foolish at the same time. Yet he is the one who created the world, created people, stole sun and moon and the seasons and made them available to the people he created, shaped the very character of the land. 

Here’s one story about this fascinating being: Coyote is sealed up in a hollow log as punishment for some trick he played. Once again, he’s been too smart for his own good. So he’s caught in this log and he tries with all his own personal power to escape but it’s useless, he can’t move an inch, the fit is too tight. He’s stuck.

Which makes what happens next so ironic. There he is, stuck in the log with no way out, and all of a sudden he hears the sound of a woodpecker pecking away at the hollow log. And while you’d think that Coyote would be overjoyed at this possibility of release, he’s cranky instead. “What a racket!” he says to himself. “What an irritating sound,” he says. Doesn’t even occur to him that Woodpecker was going to be his salvation. He just hates all the noise. So he shouts at Woodpecker to get away. “Stop that!” Luckily, Woodpecker keeps on pecking. He can’t hear Coyote shouting from within the log. He keeps on pecking away until he’s drilled a small hole that lets in a bit of the light.

And Coyote sees the light—in more ways than one. Suddenly he’s not at all irritated by the sound. Now he wants more of it! He starts shouting again, but this time, it’s to say, “Hurry up! Get me out of here!”

But now that there’s a hole, Woodpecker can hear Coyote more clearly, and Coyote’s shouting scares him away. He just flies away. It’s only when Coyote begins to appreciate the humor of his situation and disengages from all his anger and irritation and just shuts up that Woodpecker feels safe enough to come back and start pecking at the log again, according to a pace and a rhythm that is natural for him. Coyote just shuts up. Doesn’t say another word. Just waits until enough of the log is pecked away, and he is free, and then … he laughs! 

For me, a story like this suggests some of the central themes of comic spirituality, which is what I want to talk about today. Comic spirituality is about being at home in the world amidst all its conflicts and struggles and dangers. Comic spirituality counters the temptations of the tragic point of view. Comic spirituality also says that, when life is at its worst (or when it just happens to be another round of Daylight Savings), a sense of humor saves. Laughter saves. Asbestos gelos. The person and the community and the world that laughs, lasts.

One of the things I love about Coyote stories is that they give us a behind-the-scenes look at how things came to be and how they are—which is playful. Coyote represents an unquenchable lust for being and life, and he creates and acts out of this lust, but he does not do this like the God of the Hebrew Bible, who always seems to know what he is doing and has everything in control. Coyote acts, but he is vulnerable to the surprising and unexpected consequences of his actions, so he can find himself stuck in a jam, and he’s got to figure a way out, and he does, and this results in yet another close call, leading to yet another burst of creativity, and on and on, and such is the process of the evolution of the world. Not by long-range planning—design established from the very beginning and then executed ideally without flaw—but experimentation, throwing yourself into it, seeing what happens next, facing loose ends and incongruities, experiencing breathtaking beauty and meaning but only to the degree you expose yourself to risk and therefore to pain. Shrugging shoulders at this fact of life; perhaps even laughing at the joy and absurdity of it all….

This is what Coyote stories reveal to us, as they take us behind-the-scenes of our everyday here-and-now. The heart of reality is not serious, but playful. Incongruity and pain are an integral part of the deal; sometimes it’s our fault, sometimes it’s not, and our best bet is to stay cool—to resist nurturing resentments and rage—to go with the flow, stay creative and loose. “One day,” goes another story, “Coyote was walking along. The sun was shining brightly, and Coyote felt very hot. ‘I would like a cloud,’ he said, so a cloud came and made some shade for Coyote. But he was not satisfied. ‘I want more clouds,’ he said, and more clouds came along, and the sky began to look very stormy. But Coyote was still hot. ‘How about some rain?” he said, and the clouds began to sprinkle rain. ‘More rain,’ Coyote demanded. The rain became a downpour. But now Coyote wanted a creek to put his feet in, so a creek sprang up beside him, and Coyote walked in it to cool off his feet.’ It should be deeper, said Coyote, and so the creek became a huge, swirling river, and now Coyote got more than he bargained for. He found himself swept up into the currents, rolled over and over, thrown up on the bank far away, nearly drowned. When he woke up, he saw buzzards circling him, trying to decide if he was dead, and he shooed them off. He looked around him. He had made the Columbia River. This is how that great river began.

I always think of Coyote when I sing “Bring Many Names,” #23 in the grey hymnal. There’s a verse that captures his essential spirit: “Young, growing God, eager still to know, / willing to be changed by what you started, / quick to be delighted, singing as you go: / hail and hosanna, young, growing God!”  This is the only kind of God I could ever believe in, I think. Not a God that somehow stands outside of the natural order of the universe, who intervenes supernaturally in ways that favor one person over another or one tribe over another. Not a God that is locked inside the metaphor of maleness, or the metaphor of the human. Not a God that is all-powerful, with unlimited ability to act and yet appears to remain passive and uncaring when evil in the world is truly excessive, far beyond what seems needful for people to grow strong and wise. Especially not this last part, since then, how could the heart of reality be playful? How could anyone truly feel at home in a world in which a God existed who had the power to prevent evil but held back from using it? Allowed the very worst to occur?

There is a current in contemporary theology, called process theism, that takes very seriously the idea that behind-the-scenes is a playful force like Coyote, or the “young, growing God” of our hymnal. Process theism sees God as the creativity of the universe, and there are two sides to this. One is the body of the universe, the evolving interdependent web of all existence. Process theology tells us that it is sacred: galaxies and stars, trees and animals, you and I. All of it is part of God’s growing body. The world is God’s body. That’s the first side, and here is the second. God is a consciousness over and above the universe, just as you and I have a consciousness that is over and above our own bodies. You and I feel our bodies and think about them; we hope things for them and envision goals and futures; and it’s the same thing with God. God has a conscious side to complement God’s physical side. God is both the world and the consciousness of the world. Put the two together, and this is the kind of God that process theology envisions.  

One of the immediate implications of this picture of things takes us right back to Coyote, and to comedy. God simply cannot force the universe to do whatever God wants. Therefore, things can get tangled up. Slapstick happens. Evil happens. God’s power is not unlimited. The universe has creative independence and freedom, just like your own body when it gets sick. Your mind doesn’t want it to be sick, but it is anyhow, and you have got to deal. Same thing with God. God doesn’t want the world to be sick, and yet the world has creative independence. God simply can’t enter into the world supernaturally, like a bull in a china shop, and stop this and start that. All God can do is influence the world from the inside—and I know this might sound strange, but think of how cancer patients participate in their own healing. Cancer patients visualize their immune system as strong, as powerful, as potent, and the immune system responds. Similarly, God visualizes blessing and healing for this world, and if we are open to it, we can respond and receive. Nothing supernatural here at all. God influences the world from the inside, showers continual blessing up on us, impartially, universally, and does it without us having to ask. But the world has creative independence too, and so the blessing might not be received, we might be so stuck in the log of our fears and angers and resentments that we can’t hear God’s still small voice…. The blessing might not be received. That is simply the reality and risk of freedom.

And by now you may be noticing something about comic spirituality. It’s not frivolous. It’s a way of being in the world richly, in the midst of incongruity of every kind—pain, suffering, death. It says, if the heart of reality is like Coyote, or like the God of process theism, then there’s nothing malicious behind-the-scenes for us to resent and rebel against, like some tragic existential hero. Life is an open adventure. Accidents do happen. We can get firmly stuck in logs of all kinds. But don’t forget about the woodpeckers out there, who are on their way. All we have to do is stay calm, and let them do their work to free us, so we can continue the adventure.   

And this takes us to the next theme of comic spirituality, which has to do with resisting the temptations of the tragic point of view. The temptations are great. Two quick illustrations are in order. One has to do with an observation about kite string. Ever gone kite flying, and (wind being the trickster that it is) your kite takes a nose dive, and in the process of reclaiming your kite, you tangle up the string? If you are like me, trying to untangle it can make you impatient, and then angry, and suddenly you feel like a tragic hero. The world is unfair, the world is against me, the world is doing this to me … and before you know it, you have forgotten that your best bet is to finesse things. You are pulling on the tangles way too hard, jerking and tugging them, making a bad situation worse. What was originally just tangle is now a hard knot, an unredeemable mess. 

Second illustration. Think Achilles, from ancient Greek mythology: his famous rage. Rage is the fundamental emotion that moves Achilles in the Trojan War—rage at being dishonored by the Greek general Agamemnon, so he will not fight; then rage at the Trojans who killed his close friend Patroclus, so now he will fight. Rage has him in its grip, and he is bursting with it, and not once does he question whether the Gods are on his side. He does not think: he acts. His deeds are larger-than-life and always to be remembered, but no one would call Achilles wise. The tragic mindset is not wise. Fundamentally reactive as it is, it simply cannot step back from the righteous heat of the moment and cool off; and this means it has a hard time being self-critical, or empathetic towards a different point of view, or creative. Every problem is a nail, to be solved by hammering. Our world—with all its curves and complexities and behind-the-scenes jitters—is just not a good fit for straight-arrow people like Achilles, and that’s why the traditional ending of a tragic story is not the journey that runs ever on, but the journey stopped short by the death of the hero. Tragic heroes are swept under and destroyed by the very life that they are so ill-equipped to understand and work with.

Succumb to the temptations of the tragic point of view, and the result is disaster. We never get out of the log, in one sense of another. Emotions like anger and sadness and fear sweeping us away, and out of these we react to whatever life sends us; we become so noisy we scare away savior woodpeckers for good. This is the key ingredient of the tragic mindset: stuckness in difficult emotions, endless rumination, which makes it difficult to stay loose and creative in our thinking, keeps things way too serious, causes us to feel discomfort with ambiguity and complexity, prevents us from being able to walk a mile in another’s shoes. In other words, low emotional intelligence. People finding themselves in a tangle, challenged by a diversity of valid perspectives and valid concerns, and before you know it, the tangle, which could have been finessed, has become a hard knot, another Middle East conflict. Well intentioned people wanting to fight for justice and for peace, but somehow they bring the fight to each other, and there is petty bickering and posturing and rigid political correctness and a party line; and suddenly these well-intentioned people, wanting to fight for justice and for peace, find themselves in the middle of a circular firing squad of their own creation. If you have ears to hear, then hear this.

But a comic perspective keeps things sane. It keeps us working together in world that is impure, keeps us hopeful even when the system we can’t extricate ourselves from is compromised and flawed. In this regard, I like what Chinese writer Lin Yutang has to say: “[T]he tremendous importance of humor in politics can be realized only when we picture for ourselves … a world of joking rulers. Send, for instance, five or six of the world’s best humorists to an international conference, and give them the plenipotentiary powers of autocrats, and the world will be saved. As humor necessarily goes with good sense and the reasonable spirit, plus some exceptionally subtle powers of the mind in detecting inconsistencies and follies and bad logic, and as this is the highest form of human intelligence, we may be sure that each nation will thus be represented at the conference by its sanest and soundest mind. […] Can you imagine this bunch of international diplomats starting a war or even plotting for one? The sense of humor forbids it. All people are too serious and half-insane when they declare a war against another people. They are so sure that they are right and that God is on their side. The humorists, gifted with better horse-sense, don’t think so.”

Amen to that. The temptation of the tragic point of view is ultimately a temptation to do violence and war—especially in the name of our highest and noblest ideals. But comic spirituality counters it. A sense of humor saves us. Which leads to the third and last theme of comic spirituality I want to address today: the power of laughter—unquenchable, invincible laughter. Asbestos gelos. The person and the community and the world that laughs, lasts.

Consider the experience of Captain Gerald Coffee, who was a prisoner of war in Vietnam. After three months in captivity, Coffee’s Vietnamese jailor ordered him to wash in a rat-infested shower room littered with rotting things and garbage all around him. As he felt the stream of cold water against his body, he was overcome with despair. There he was in a dismal hole, body broken, totally uncertain of his fate, pressure to do this, do that, hostility his daily fare, men dying every day, the fate of his crewmen unknown. That’s where he was, mind, body, spirit, as the cold water washed over his body. Then he raised his head, and saw something. There at eye level on the wall in front of him, scratched in by some other American who’d been there before him, were these words: “Smile, you’re on Candid Camera!” And he couldn’t help but smile. In that crazy place, woodpecker had come for him, and he laughed out loud. He felt such gratitude for the spunk of that unknown American who was able to rise above his own dejection and pain to inscribe a line of encouragement. And Captain Gerald Coffee, there in captivity in a Vietnam prison, found strength to go on.

Sometimes laughter takes us by surprise, and we find strength to go on. Better yet, though, is a conscious intent to nourish our sense of humor regularly. Never allowing the humor tank in us to go empty. Brush your teeth every day, top off your humor tank every day. Watch John Stewart, or Bill Maher, or South Park. Read The Onion. Whatever. Whatever can puncture our self-righteous pretensions, loosen us up, bring us back down to earth, keep us energized and plucky. We laugh so that we can last.

I want to close with some humor aerobics. It’s just like regular aerobics to get the blood pumping—humor aerobics to get the sense of humor pumping. To do it, you don’t have to feel particularly happy beforehand; although by the end, you might just be laughing like crazy, and it feels so good….

Here’s the exercise. It’s one of my favorites—it’s called The American Bat Face. It’s especially good to do right before you are about to enter into a difficult conversation. Let me describe it first: 

1. Place your hand on top of your head, with the fingers pointing straight forward

2. Reach down with the middle two fingers and touch the tip of your nose—pull the nose up, flaring the nostrils

3. Flap your tongue in and out of your mouth while making a high-pitched squealing noise

4. Think to yourself repeatedly, “This is not stupid, it’s silly.”

If this feels too uncomfortable for you, you absolutely have permission not to do it. But I hope as many of you as possible will try it and see what happens. As you do it, see if you can hear Coyote laughing with you…

Ready? Let’s go on three…..

*

You see, there’s an important difference between “stupid” and “silly” that comedian Steve Allen’s son, Steve Allen Jr., points out. He says that “stupid” means ignorant and uneducated. But having fun and playing is not stupid—it’s “silly,” and “silly” is a word that comes from the Old English, meaning completely happy, completely blessed. Silly was a blessing you wished upon those you loved.

I wish that upon you today, and forever. Be more silly in your life, and be blessed.

 

 

The Elves and the Shoemaker: Exploring the Spirituality of Work

Once upon a time, the country was in a recession, and a shoemaker and his wife fell upon hard times. One day, the cobbler found he had enough leather for only one more pair of shoes. The cobbler did not despair, but sat down, cut the leather carefully, and started to sew. When evening fell, the new shoes were still unfinished; and, as it was time for dinner, he put his work to the side and went home, intending, in the morning, to pick up where he left off.  

What he found on the following day astounded him: the new pair of shoes completed, so expertly made that there was not one bad stitch he could see. Far better made than any of his. Soon enough, the new shoes were sold, and the cobbler had enough money to buy leather for two more pairs. He spent the rest of the day cutting the material. When evening arrived, he put his work to the side and went home for dinner, intending, in the morning, to pick up where he left off.  

Waiting for him this time were four pairs of shoes! The mysterious helper had come again. The shoes were even finer than the first ones. They quickly sold, allowing the cobbler to buy enough leather for eight shoes. As before, he spent the day cutting the material, and when evening came, he put his work to the side and went home. Next day, there were 16 shoes of all varieties and kinds, arranged neatly in his shop.

This kept on for some time. Each night, the cobbler left pieces of leather out in his workshop. Each morning, he found beautiful shoes, in rapidly increasing numbers. Very soon the shoemaker prospered, and his reputation for marvelous shoes spread far and wide.

One day, near Christmastime, the cobbler said to his wife, “We must find out who is helping us, so we can thank them!” His wife agreed. That evening, they hid in the workshop, and waited anxiously. Right around midnight, the shoemaker and his wife heard singing, and saw two elves leap through the open window. The elves were naked as the dawn, barefoot and carefree. They sat down and immediately started making shoes and boots, and the cobbler and his wife were amazed at how joyful they were at their work. Singing constantly—at times suddenly getting up and dancing, or doing a somersault. In no time at all, they finished their work, skipped around the room and vanished on a moonbeam, leaving behind them more than a thousand expertly made shoes.

The shoemaker and his wife could scarcely believe their eyes. They said to one another, “Our mysterious helpers have been elves! We must give them a gift, to thank them for their kindness.” Since it was winter, and the elves were naked, the shoemaker and his wife thought that clothes would be the perfect gift. The shoemaker stitched two tiny pairs of boots, lined with fir, while his wife sewed two tiny jackets and two pairs of pants, fleecy and warm.

On Christmas Eve, they laid out the gifts in the workshop, then hid themselves and watched. At midnight, the two elves leapt through the window, and they looked around in bewilderment. Where was the leather for them to sew? Where were the tools to use? But then they saw the gifts. “Ooh!” exclaimed one elf, as he picked up a tiny shoe and tried it on. “Ahh!” cried the other one, as he squirmed into a shirt and coat. All the clothes fit perfectly. The elves admired each other as they danced with glee, then vanished into the moonlight. The shoemaker and his wife were delighted, and went to bed as happy as they could be.

The next evening, the elves did not return. Nor the night after, or ever again. “What have we done?” cried the shoemaker and his wife. But they were practical people, so the cobbler got right to work. He did not despair. He studied the work of the elves very closely, and with practice, the quality of his shoes got better and better. He also found himself growing into a habit of singing while he worked, just like the elves. In time, he was making shoes as beautiful as theirs. This is how he and his wife lived happily ever after.  

So ends “The Elves and the Shoemaker.” A fairy tale—a piece of fiction—yet like all good fiction, it tells the truth about our lives in a profound and memorable way. “The pitcher cries for water to carry,” says poet Marge Piercy; “the person [cries] for work that is real.” In a language of imagination and symbol, our story today is about this cry. It explores essential issues in the spirituality of work: coming to terms with the realities of everyday life; learning how to tap into inner creativity; fulfilling our deep desire to bless the world. Issues that have everything to do with growing our souls and growing good in the larger world.

It all starts with shoes. Psychiatrist Allan Chinen, in his fascinating book called Once Upon a Midlife: Classic Stories and Mythic Tales to Illuminate the Middle Years, takes special note of the fact that the protagonist of the story is someone who is married and has learned a practical trade. This marks it as very different from tales like Hansel and Gretel, or Tom Thumb, in which the themes are clearly youth-oriented. He calls “The Elves and the Shoemaker” a “middle tale,” one which focuses on the tasks and challenges of growing into maturity. “Behind the divine inspiration of youth,” he says, “lies an image of perfection—the hope of establishing a perfect society, playing a perfect game, finding a perfect love. Innocent and inspired, young men and women assume that perfection is possible. Experience with the real world eventually shatters that dream…. Young men and women surrender the idols and ideals of youth, and settle for doing what is good enough.” We become shoemakers, in other words—but not of the kind that can transport people to distant lands, like seven-league boots, or Dorothy’s ruby red slippers in The Wizard of Oz. Growing up is about making shoes that ground us in the here and now, with all the commitment and hard work that’s required. Comfortable for long hours of standing or walking; durable enough to weather lots of wear and tear. Made to get dirty.

It’s about coming to terms with the realities of everyday life. Real work. That’s what the shoemaker in the story represents. Giving up the fantasy of not having to take responsibility, not having to deal with adversity, not having to show up every day, regularly, to get the job done. And when we can’t give up the fantasy—when the only shoes we can ever be satisfied with are seven-league boots, or Dorothy’s ruby red slippers—we suffer from what’s called the Peter Pan Syndrome. Perpetual immaturity. Relationships that are for good times only, and whenever the commitment gets to a certain point, dropping it and looking for another. Seeing oneself as exempt from the rules and exempt from criticism. Inability to make promises and fulfill them. Withdrawal from the world, bitterness and cynicism, when things turn hard. This is so destructive in our personal lives, in this congregation, and in the larger world. Peter Pans going nowhere. And then there are the Wendys that must exist to support them, the Wendys that burn out in the task of enabling Peter Pans to keep on avoiding their responsibilities.  

But the shoemaker is no Peter Pan. Perhaps the most telling example of this is how he responds, in the story, to economic adversity. With just enough leather to make only one more pair of shoes, you’d think he’d just stop trying, step back, freeze up in despair. Fly up in the air, like a Peter Pan, away from the problem. How is one pair of shoes going to solve anything? But he doesn’t give into the fantasy that life should be easy. He doesn’t give into that. He’s grounded in an acceptance of real life. That’s what being a shoemaker symbolizes. He’s going to keep showing up, no matter what.

The wonderful irony in all of this is that, by refusing to give into fantasy, the shoemaker invites magic into his world. Isn’t that wonderful? Exactly because he does not give up, but gives himself to real work and dutifully starts on that last pair of shoes, the elves come. This reminds me of something that Barbara Sher talks about. Barbara Sher is a therapist and career counselor, widely known for such books as Wishcraft and I Could Do Anything (If I Only Knew What It Was), and one thing she likes to tell people when they are facing adversity in their worklife is this: “good luck happens when you are in action.” Don’t allow Peter Pan fantasies of perfection to make you stop caring about your life here and now. Keep moving, keep going, put yourself out there. She says, “If you go to the library and look up articles, call people, join organizations, go to appointments, [volunteer at your congregation!], something can happen to you. Try it. Set a goal, any goal, and start doing everything you can to think of achieving it. You might not get where you thought you were going, but you could easily wind up somewhere better. You’ll get breaks you never could have planned for because you never knew they existed.” “Good luck happens when you are in action.” The elves will come, if you can accept your life here and now and bring yourself to face, with courage, the last piece of leather you have.

Which takes us directly to the next spirituality of work issue: tapping into inner creativity. When it happens, work is uniquely fulfilling and productive. So how do we do that? How do we tap in?  

The story illustrates that there can definitely be a vital partnership between our conscious selves and our creative depths—and what the conscious self does is paramount. If the shoemaker works hard to prepare the leather each day, then he has something to hand off to the elves, who complete the work at night. If he stops, they stop. All he has to do is get things started in a particular direction, and then hand off.

The picture is true to life—although things are more complex. Lots more drama. I like how writer Anne Lamott suggests this, in her wonderful book entitled Bird By Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life. To the question of how she writes her stories and novels, she says, “you sit down. You try to sit down at approximately the same time every day. This is how you train your unconscious to kick in for you creatively. So you sit down at, say, nine every morning, or ten every night. You put a piece of paper in the typewriter, or you turn on your computer and bring up the right file….” In other words, the process begins with preparation. You have to purchase the leather and cut it, get it ready for sewing. Set the stage the same time every day, invite the elves to get to work, and then let it happen. Don’t force it. The gift must come to you, like grace.

It means that you have to get out of your own way, and this is actually very difficult. Right on the heels of the preparation phase of the creative process comes the frustration and messiness phase. “You are desperate,” says Anne Lamott, “to communicate, to edify or entertain, to preserve moments of grace or joy or transcendence, to make real or imagined events come alive. But you cannot will this to happen.” Desperation must contain itself, desperation must calm itself, yet at the same time it must still want a result, it can’t become complacent—and in this is a kind of insanity. You turn on your computer, says Anne Lamott, “and then you stare at it for an hour or so. You begin rocking, just a little at first, and then like a huge … child. You look at the ceiling, and over at the clock, yawn, and stare at the paper again. Then, with your fingers poised at the keyboard, you squint at an image that is forming in your mind—a scene, a locale, a character, whatever—and you try to quiet your mind so you can hear what the landscape or character has to say above the other voices in your mind. The other voices are banshees and drunken monkeys. They are the voices of anxiety, judgment, doom, guilt. Also hypochondria. […] There is a vague pain at the base of your neck. It crosses your mind that you have meningitis. Then the phone rings and you look up at the ceiling with fury, summon every ounce of noblesse oblige, and answer the call politely, with maybe just the merest hint of irritation. The caller asks if you’re working, and you say yeah, because you are.” Anne Lamott is right. Work infused with creativity is extremely hard. A desire to say something or solve a problem or see something in a new light moves you into a state of uncertainty, and this brings with it voices of anxiety and judgment, perhaps guilt, perhaps even doom. You sense a creative possibility, but you aren’t sure about where to go with it, how to proceed, what approach to take. It’s why another writer, Kurt Vonnegut, would say, “When I write, I feel like an armless, legless man with a crayon in his mouth.”

Oh, the end result is amazing. The shoes the elves finish are amazing. But the process of negotiating between conscious self and creative depth is extremely challenging. Yet another dimension of real work, and it can twist us up like a pretzel. And while this drama is clearly not evident on the surface of the “The Elves and the Shoemaker” story, it’s there between the lines. The shoemaker and his wife giving gifts to the elves can be interpreted as an attempt to domesticate them. To cover up their nakedness, tone down their wildness, even to try remaking the elves in their own image—insofar as they presume to think that what the elves need is similar to what they need. All of this is suggests the very real, very common temptation to try to control things, force a premature result, stop the creative process from following its own inner logic. It’s Peter Pan again diverting us from real work—the ego fantasy that creativity should be easy, and that we should be able to produce poems or papers or projects or solutions effortlessly. Get it right the first time. “People,” say Anne Lamott, “tend to look at successful writers and think that they sit down at their desks every morning feeling like a million dollars, feeling great about who they are and how much talent they have and what a great story they have to tell; that they take in a few deep breaths, push back their sleeves, roll their necks a few times to get all the cricks out, and dive in, typing fully formed passages as fast as a court reporter.” That’s the kind fantasy we can fall into, about anything, and so, when the writing or whatever it happens to be ends up feeling like pulling teeth and the first draft is triple dog drat horrible—what then? The voice of the inner critic, getting louder and louder. Do you know that voice? The voice of anxiety, shame, condemnation. Wow, that sucked. What do you call that? People are gonna think you are an idiot. The end result is paralysis. Or, I should say, the beginning result. Because this is the kind of unhealthy thinking that prevents people from acting in the first place. It is what is behind that ancient complaint in families and businesses and congregations when change comes knocking on the door: If you don’t get it right the first time, people say, or imply, then don’t do it at all. No mistakes allowed. Or the corollary: We’ve never done it like that before.

The Peter Pan fantasy of perfectionism. Creativity puts us face to face with it because it is a journey that moves us through realms of messiness, to the cliff’s edge, and if we are going to go any further, if we are gonna get to the other side, where the inspired solution to an old problem waits for us—beautiful new shoes, in increasing numbers—then we must let go and let God and take the leap of faith and jump.

But I don’t want to be too hard on the shoemaker and his wife. While it is true that, from one angle of vision, we can see the act of gift giving as manipulative, there is yet another, more positive angle of vision to consider. In other fairy tales—youth tales in particular—the protagonists lose the magic because they’ve been greedy or wicked; but here, the shoemaker and his wife are doing a good thing. Maybe there is a shadow side to their motivation, but we can’t ignore their clear generosity and gratitude. So, here we have a puzzle: the shoemaker and his wife doing good things but losing the magic anyway. What can explain it? Above all, what in real life might this be referring to?

This brings us to the last spirituality of work issue that the story speaks to: our deep natural desire to be a blessing to the world. In this respect, psychiatrist Allan Chinen makes the key observation: “Husband and wife lose their magic when they shift from receiving gifts to giving them.” And then he says: “This is a good measure of when youth ends and maturity begins. Modern psychology corroborates these fairy tale insights. Erik Erikson was one of the first psychoanalysts to explore adult development [and he discovered that] the fundamental issue for the middle of life is developing generativity. This is a nurturing attitude directed first toward one’s children, and then towards the whole next generation…” In other words, from this more positive perspective, the shoemaker has not so much lost magic as he is growing into his own magic, and thus we see him at the end of the story, learning to make shoes as fine as any the elves created, singing as he works away, living happily ever after.

That’s what I want for all of us. Growing into our own capacity for magic. Our real work is not just about giving up Peter Pan fantasies and showing up for life, or learning how to be in creative partnership with our inner depths, but also this: paying attention to how our psyches and souls grow over time, paying attention to our steadily increasing hungers to bless the world. “What we do for ourselves dies with us, but what we do for others and the world remains immortal” (Albert Pine). “We have not lived until we have done something for someone who can never repay us” (Anonymous). This is what generativity is all about. It’s the song we sang earlier: “Wake Now My Senses.” And unless we get this, life is misery. We can be on the receiving end of all sorts of pleasures, all sorts of good things, but the restlessness will increase, the pain will only redouble. There’s a story of a man who died and found himself in a beautiful place, surrounded by every conceivable comfort.  A white-jacketed attendant came to him and said, “You may have anything you choose—any food—any pleasure—any kind of entertainment.”  The man was delighted, and for days he sampled all the delicacies and experiences he had dreamed about while alive. But finally one day he grew tired of all this. “I need something to do. What kind of work can you give me?” The attendant sadly shook his head and replied, “I’m sorry, sir. That’s the one thing we can’t do for you. There is no work here for you.” To which the man answered, “Well, that’s just great. I might as well be in hell.” The attendant said softly, “Where do you think you are?”

For you, I hope for heaven, a happy-ever-after of real work. Finding a place to serve out of your strengths and talents in this place and elsewhere. Being a shoemaker. Growing into the magic that is your own.

Only Connect: The Power of Touch

“As a pediatric intern,” says medical doctor and holistic health pioneer Rachel Naomi Remen, “I was a secret baby kisser. This was so flagrantly ‘unprofessional’ I was careful not to be discovered. Late at night under the guise of checking a surgical dressing or an I.V. I would make solo rounds on the ward and kiss the children good night. If there was a favorite toy or blanket, I would be sure it was close and if someone were crying I would even sing a little. I never mentioned this dimension of my health care to anyone. I felt the other residents, mostly men, might think less of me for it.

One evening as I was talking to a patient’s father in the corridor, I glanced over his shoulder and saw Stan, my chief resident, bend over the crib of a little girl with leukemia and kiss her on the forehead. In that moment, I realized that others too might be struggling to extend themselves beyond an accepted professionalism to express a natural caring. Perhaps there was a way to talk about these things, even to support one another. 

One night when we were waiting to be called to the operating room for a C-Section, I told Stan what I had seen and that it had meant something important to me. Although we were alone in the doctor’s lounge, Stan denied the whole thing. We dropped the subject in embarrassment. For the rest of the year we worked together, thirty-six hours on call and twelve hours off. We became trusted colleagues, good friends and even occasional drinking buddies, but we never mentioned the incident again. 

Stan’s integrity was almost legendary. He would never have fudged a piece of lab data or said he had read an article when he hadn’t. But he would have had to step past our entire professional image and training to admit his heartfelt reaction to that little girl. It was impossible then. It is barely possible now. Expressing caring directly rather than through a willingness to work a thirty-six hour day or spend long evenings keeping up with the medical literature and the newest treatments transgresses a strong professional code. It was just not professional behavior. I stopped kissing the babies then. It did not seem worth the risk. 

In some ways, a medical training is like a disease. It would be years before I would fully recover from mine.” 

That’s the story from Rachel Naomi Remen, and it’s heartbreaking. The complete opposite of happy. Healers, wanting to obey a natural impulse to extend a caring touch, blocked by an ideology of professionalism. Don’t kiss the babies. Don’t sing to them. It’s shameful. Unmentionable. Against code.    

Meanwhile the children in hospital wards are touch deprived. The lonely and crying, uncomforted. Babies needing kisses, unkissed. 

As for the healers themselves—the doctors and nurses and other medical personnel, women and men—touch deprived as well. Hugs not given are hugs not received. Human beings denying their physical and spiritual wholeness in, as Rachel Naomi Remen says, “the mistaken belief that this would enable them to be of greatest service to others.”      

Today we are going to take a look at the struggle in medical science to recognize and affirm the role of physical touch in human wellness. Through this, we will be reminded of the larger struggle we all share, in one way or another. Touch deprivation is a reality in American culture as a whole. It’s just not babies needing to be touched in caring ways, or the sick. It’s not just doctors and nurses needing to extend it. It’s all of us, needing connection, needing to receive it, needing to give it, with genuine happiness at stake.   

Perhaps one of the most suggestive evidences of the basic human need for affectionate touch comes from the work of psychologist Harry Harlow in the 1960s and 1970s. Fellow psychologist Robert Hatfield describes it as follows: “Harry Harlow’s studies involved taking newborn monkeys from their mothers and raising them in isolation. The young monkeys were deprived of maternal and social touch…. In every other way the monkeys were very well cared for. They were well fed, their cages kept clean, and their medical needs attended to. They were “merely” isolated from any physical contact with their mother or other monkeys. Even physical contact with the researchers was severely limited. [Now, in one classic study, which has come to be known as his "wire mother" study,] Harlow placed the touch deprived monkeys in a large cage that contained two crude dummy monkeys constructed of wood and chicken-wire. One dummy was bare wire with a full baby bottle attached. The monkeys had been regularly nursed from similar bottles. The other dummy was the same as the first except that it contained no bottle and the chicken wire was wrapped with terry cloth. Placed in this strange environment, the anxious young monkey very quickly attached itself to the cloth wrapped dummy and continued to cling to it as the hours passed by. The infant monkey could easily see the familiar baby bottle no more than a few feet away on the other dummy. Many hours passed. Although growing increasingly distraught and hungry, the infants in these studies would not release their hold on the soft cloth of the food-less dummy. It was soon apparent that the young monkeys would likely dehydrate and starve before abandoning the terry cloth surrogate mother.” That’s what Harry Harlow discovered, and from this he concluded that, in infant and young monkeys at least—in all human beings, by implication—there appears to be a hunger more powerful than the craving for food: a craving for skin contact with something that feels comfortable and soft, something you can nuzzle and cuddle up to, something to hold and be held by.   

It’s hunger for touch—“touch hunger”—and Harlow’s findings helped shift the official scientific paradigm regarding basic human needs. Science’s eyes were just beginning to be opened. But it took a lot to get things to this point. Science’s eyes were firmly shut back in the 1930s, for example, to the work that Dr. Joseph Brennemann was doing in Bellevue Hospital in New York. He saw how the mortality rate of infants under one year of age was way too high. He acknowledged that ensuring sanitary conditions, plenty of food, and careful attention just wasn’t enough. What was missing was loving physical contact. So Dr. Brennemann established the rule that every baby should be picked up, carried around, and hugged and nuzzled and cuddled several times a day. The result? A mortality rate that fell from 35% to less than 10%. He had found a way to heal a disease that had been hounding American hospitals throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, called “marasmus,” which means “wasting away”—infants dying for no apparent reason, dying in the best of hospitals, dying under sanitary conditions, dying with all the food they could ever want. Dr Brennemann had done something of staggering importance, yet it didn’t fit in with the official scientific paradigm of the time. It didn’t translate. 

It’s because science in the 1930s was still very much in the grip of a perspective that had no room for something like “touch hunger.” This perspective (called “behaviorism”) said that the best way to understand human beings is to pay attention only to what can be observed by one’s five senses—which means that you ignore wishes, you ignore needs, you ignore feelings. You ignore all that and focus instead on creating environments which condition people to behave in optimal ways. Humans are like all other physical objects, and the art of happiness is reduced to a kind of hypermasculine physics. Thus it was that one of the key figures of the behaviorist movement, John B. Watson, dreamed that one day children would be taken away from the chaotic environments of their parents and raised in carefully regulated baby farms. Until that utopian day came, parents and all others responsible for the care of children needed to follow behaviorist principles. Avoid anything that smacks of unconditional love—don’t hold children or cuddle them or nuzzle them for no reason, because if you do that, you are ruining their training. Affection will make them lazy, spoiled, and weak. It’s unscientific. Stick with the training regimen. Take a hint from the “Dog Whisperer”… Sentimentality is to be avoided at all costs. Maintain a sophisticated aloofness. Keep them at arms length. Feed them by the clock, not on demand. All for their own good. 

This was the prevailing paradigm when Dr. Brennemann was working at Bellevue Hospital in New York, and this paradigm was still influential when Rachel Naomi Remen was a pediatric intern, being a secret kisser, wanting to talk about the power of touch with fellow colleagues but facing denial, even by those who were secret kissers themselves. Official scientific paradigms take a long time to fade away. At this point I am reminded of a quote by Max Plank—someone who witnessed the twentieth-century revolution in physics and saw, first hand, how such things happen. The messiness involved. He said, “a new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it.” Perhaps it has been exactly this way where “touch hunger” is concerned. Passionate commitment to particular theories drive scientists to do the work they do, and they are as subject to group dynamics as the rest of us. In science as in religion and other fields of inquiry, facts and evidence only go so far. Sometimes progress takes the turning of many seasons, and new generations are required to get to the tipping point. 

Rachel Naomi Remen was and is part of this new generation. So was Harry Harlow with his primate studies. The tipping point is now. Now, scientific studies of touch hunger are on overdrive. Let me share a just a few main findings, and then we’ll turn to the practical question of what to do with all of this in our own lives. 

One finding has to do with the long-term effects of touch hunger. What Harry Harlow saw in his isolated and touch-deprived monkeys was truly disturbing. Fellow psychologist Robert Hatfield reports some of the findings: “Harlow’s primates over-reacted to most situations and engaged in a depressive withdrawal to the others. Almost none of their responses to common stimulation and situations were normal. These pathetic touch deprived primates demonstrated a high level of aversion to any form of touch from others. Their usual response to appropriate touch by other monkeys vacillated between fearful and aggressive. They were hyperaggressive and unable to form adequate relations with other monkeys when reintroduced to their group. Highly unusual sexual responses were typical. They were unable to perform sexually and found it exceedingly difficult to locate a receptive partner for their inadequate attempts at quieting their sexual impulses and drives.” Robert Hatfield goes on to summarize the findings by saying, “The review of all touch research to date leads to the inescapable conclusion that Harlow’s primate research has provided us with a highly useful human model of the behavioral impact of touch deprivation.” 

Couple this with the particular lack of touch in American society, and the implications are sobering. In one study, American, French and Puerto Rican friends were observed in a coffee shop over the course of an hour to determine how frequently physical contact occurs. American friends tended to touch each other an average of only twice an hour, whereas French friends touched 110 times, and Puerto Rican friends touched 180 times. Add to this the sharp observation of anthropologist Ashley Montague of Americans waiting for a bus: “Americans will space themselves like sparrows on a telephone wire, in contrast to Mediterranean peoples who will push and crowd together.” 

One scientist who has put two and two together is neuropsychologist James W. Prescott. Looking in particular at the aggressiveness of Harlow’s touch-deprived monkeys, Prescott hypothesized that cultures which lavish touch on their infants and children should be the least violent societies on earth. Conversely, societies that are most touch-deprived should be the most violent. After analyzing data collected from over 400 world cultures, he discovered that his hypothesis has great predictive value. The evidence supports it. And guess where America comes out? Our country, which has less than five percent of the world’s population but almost a quarter of the world’s prison population…. You can fill in that blank yourself. 

It’s disturbing. 

You know, today is Superbowl Sunday. Some of us could care less, others of us can’t wait. But I’ll tell you, the real “unofficial” national holiday we should be mindful of happened back on January 21. National Hugging Day. Created twenty years ago by an Episcopalian pastor, it’s all about permission to give free expression to our basic human need for warm fuzzies. “We need four hugs a day for survival,” says family therapist Virginia Satir. “We need eight hugs a day for maintenance. We need twelve hugs a day for growth.” National Hugging Day is meant to help us remember this. Bring us back to our senses. 

Which takes us to three things I’d like to recommend. Three invitations, as you and I hold our touch hunger with compassion and learn better ways of meeting it. 

One is to be on the lookout for lingering behaviorism. The message still lingers in our cultural atmosphere, despite all the current science that has flat-out debunked it. Worries about holding people (or being held) too often or too long. Worries about how hugging and cuddling will make people lazy and spoiled and weak. Not just regarding children, but people of all ages. The message is still out there, though it is wrong. Be on the lookout. 

That’s the first invitation, and here is the second: embrace the hug. Make it a habit. See it as fundamental justice work. See it as a central part of your spiritual practice. Consider the top ten benefits involved:   

Costs nothing

Boosts your immune system

Builds self-esteem

Fosters self-acceptance

Alleviates tension

Reduces aggression and social violence

Saves heat

Is portable

Requires no special setting or equipment

Feels incredibly good! 

Having said all this, I do want to add one caveat. Hugging is not as easy as it sounds. So many of us have experienced touch deprivation and, as Harlow’s primate studies suggest, the long-lasting result is a discomfort with touch. It’s so ironic. Touch being a basic human need, and yet, we can find ourselves uneasy with the hunger, we can find ourselves struggling with it, we can sometimes even find ourselves misunderstanding it and giving it the wrong name. Hungering for touch, but thinking that this necessarily means sex. The wish to be cuddled legitimated only if it is accompanied by sex. 

A lot more could be said here, but the basic point is this: to feed our touch hungers, we may have to first build up a tolerance for it, get used to it. And then there’s the need to be appropriate. Make sure the person you desire to touch gives their consent first. Ask, Can I give you a hug? A hug, a handshake, a hand on the shoulder, a comforting rub on the back are all examples of appropriate touch. 

Finally, there is this. My third and last invitation to you today. It’s about anticipating miracles when we extend love through a caring touch. Sometimes the people we hug—because of that hug, because of a connection through which, somehow, all the lost parts come together and we experience a wholeness and a knowing that transcends language—sometimes those people stay with you forever, and you are never the same again. You can never underestimate the power of a hug to change lives. “Reflections of grace in every embrace.” The Spirit of Life in all its fullness coming through. 

Go back with me to another hospital. Not the one where Rachel Naomi Remen was doing her pediatric internship, where she wandered about as a secret kisser. This other hospital is in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada, and the medical professional in question was a young nurse who was not a secret kisser, but openly affectionate. Unafraid. One day, she spotted a young boy, miserable-looking, anxious and fretful because he was scheduled for surgery, and it was coming up soon. She just came and sat down beside him, quietly comforted him. Took him in her arms and loved him. His name was Anthony. The experience was so powerful for this young nurse that she walked away thinking to herself, “If I ever have another son, I’m going to call him Anthony.” 

That young nurse was my mother. This is the story of how I got my name. 

Never underestimate the power of touch. 

Diligent Joy

I want to begin this morning by sharing a personal story that I am not particularly proud of. As with every personal story I share in this pulpit, it’s meant to invite you to reflect on similar stories that you may have in your own life, and to know that you are not alone, that we’re in this thing together.

The story has to do with graduate school. By sheer luck, I found myself in a program that specialized in classical American philosophers like William James, John Dewey, Charles Peirce, and George Santayana. I call it luck because it was not by any genuine forethought whatsoever that I went to Texas A&M University as an undergraduate, and it was desperation borne of restlessness that drove me to change my major time after time until, with philosophy, the restlessness became curiosity and even enthusiasm. But it was an enthusiasm for everything, and I really struggled with this—particularly after I was accepted into the graduate program and found myself facing the daunting task of writing a thesis. I needed to identify a specific topic to focus on, and quick. What was it going to be?

This is where I confess the part that I’m not proud of. I got way ahead of myself. I allowed ambition to solve the problem for me, rather than taking the more difficult route of listening to my life and discerning my genuine interests. I had aspirations of doing a Ph. D. at Vanderbilt University—I was told it was a prestigious department, and I had stars in my eyes about this—and it just so happened that the Head of the Texas A&M Philosophy Department at the time had strong links to Vanderbilt. The brilliant plan that unfolded in my prestige-addled brain was therefore this: I would choose a topic that would require me to work with the Head (which turned out to be George Santayana’s ethical theory), and this would be my ticket into the school of my dreams.

It did not work out. I ended up hating the topic I chose, and by the time I finished that thesis, I was smoking two packs of cigarettes a day. As for my relationship with the Head of the Department: not good. We were just not temperamentally suited for each other. Rather than moving me forward into my career as a philosopher, it set me back. Worst of all is the 20/20 hindsight I have now, many years later, about the treasure that was right there before me, all along, which I did not claim. This treasure: the world-renowned William James scholar who also taught in my department. William James, who has turned out to be one of my absolutely favorite thinkers—and I could have done my thesis on him. The thought had actually crossed my mind, but among other things, I suspected that the world-renowned scholar was too busy for me. Yet I never even inquired to find out if this were so. I missed my chance.

How easily it can happen. Ambition can put stars in our eyes, and we lose touch with who we are. Fixation on some end goal can cause us to stop paying attention to the journey, never mind enjoying it. Fear of being turned down can keep us simply from asking. Treasure is within our grasp, but we don’t go ahead and grasp it.

Why is this?

One of the things I value about Jonathan Haidt’s book The Happiness Hypothesis is that, through its unique blend of science and spirituality, it’s helping me better understand my own human heart , as well as to become a better student of happiness. Three of its insights—all from chapter five—come to mind.

The first is this: how it’s natural to care about such things as prestige. Desire for Vanderbilts of every kind reflect a deep impulse shaped by millions of years of natural selection, directed towards winning at the game of life; and it involves impressing others, gaining their admiration, and rising in relative rank. We all feel tempted to do this even when greater authentic happiness can be found elsewhere. Political philosopher Niccolo Machiavelli recognized this hundreds of years ago when he said, “the great majority of mankind are satisfied with appearances, as though they were realities, and are often more influenced by the things that seem than by those that are.”

Conspicuous consumption is an obvious example of this—the zero-sum game of “keeping up with the Joneses” that anchors the very real phenomenon of middle-class poverty—but I am particularly struck by the results of a recent experiment a group of economists set up using a beverage called SoBe Adrenaline Rush—a beverage that claims to increase mental acuity. The story here is told by Ori and Rom Brafman in their recent book, Sway: The Irresistible Pull of Irrational Behavior: “To test acuity, the researchers developed a thirty-minute word jumble challenge that was administered to three groups of students. The first group, a control group, took the test without drinking any SoBe. The second group was told about the intelligence-enhancing properties of SoBe, given the drink, and asked to watch a video while the tonic had time to take effect. These students also were required to sign an authorization form allowing the researchers to charge $2.89 to their university account…. We’ll call this second group of students the ‘fancy-schmancy SoBe’ drinkers. Finally, a third group of students was given the same spiel about SoBe but was told that the university had gotten a discount and that they would be charged eighty-nine cents for the drink. We’ll call them the ‘cheapo SoBe’ drinkers. Now, the results of the experiment were surprising. The group that drank the fancy-schmancy SoBe performed slightly better in the test than did the group that received no SoBe at all. But before we rush out to buy SoBe, with its acuity-enhancing powers, it’s important to note that the students who drank the cheapo SoBe performed significantly worse than either the fancy-schmancy group or the SoBe-free control group. Given that exactly the same SoBe beverage was served to both groups, we can only conclude that it was the value the students attributed to the SoBe that made the difference in their test scores. Strange as it may sound, fancy-schmancy SoBe made the students smarter, while cheapo SoBe hindered their performance.” And that’s the story that Ori and Rom Brafman tell. Humans are deeply susceptible to the power of prestige—so much so that we unconsciously, instinctively respond to fancy-shmancy SoBe by getting smarter and to cheapo SoBe by getting dumber. This is how vulnerable we are to the lure of prestige.

Again and again, we learn that the human heart is a complicated thing, and may we embrace this with compassion. We learn that each of us is many different selves all buzzing about like a committee—sometimes on the same page, and sometimes not. Where prestige is concerned, we can often find ourselves internally divided; and we can feel a great pull towards what is fancy-schmancy even though it may come at the expense of our true happiness.

But now, let’s turn to the second happiness insight: how people are generally inaccurate predictors of the ultimate impact of life changes, whether bad or good. In my own case, I anticipated going to Vanderbilt for my Ph.D. as a change that would bring about perfect happiness; but life would be over if I didn’t get in. This is what I predicted, and on this basis, I acted. All of us do something like this, as we face the future. Yet Jonathan Haidt asks us to consider the “adaptation principle,” which describes something we have all experienced—that people get used to conditions in their life that are constant. It becomes like wallpaper: taken for granted, just there. While people are extraordinarily sensitive to changes in conditions, after a time things settle down, and we are back to our usual state of happiness.

Jonathan Haidt explores this in an interesting way. He asks, “If I gave you ten seconds to name the very best and very worst things that could ever happen to you, you might well come up with these: winning a 20-million dollar lottery jackpot and becoming paralyzed from the neck down. Winning the lottery would bring freedom from so many cares and limitations; it would enable you to pursue your dreams, help others, and live in comfort…. Losing the use of your body, on the other hand, would bring more limitations than life in prison. You’d have to give up on nearly all your goals and dreams, forget about sex, and depend on other people for help with eating and bathroom functions. Many people think they would rather be dead than paraplegic. But they are mistaken.” They are mistaken, Jonathan Haidt says, because of the adaptation principle. “The [lottery] winner’s pleasure comes from rising in wealth, not from standing still at a high level, and after a few months the new comforts have become the new baseline of daily life. The winner takes them for granted and has no way to rise even further. Even worse: the money might damage her relationships. Friends, relatives, swindlers, and sobbing strangers swarm around lottery winners, suing them, sucking up to them, demanding a share of the wealth. […] At the other extreme, the quadriplegic takes a huge happiness loss up front. He thinks his life is over, and it hurts to give up everything he once hoped for. But like the lottery winner, his mind is sensitive more to changes than to absolute levels, so after a few months he has begun adapting to his new situation and is setting more modest goals. He discovers that physical therapy can expand his abilities. He has nowhere to go but up.”

This is the adaptation principle at work. Life changes can definitely bring pleasure or pain, but the pain or pleasure never lasts as long as you think it will, and we return to our natural and usual state of mind. I didn’t get in to Vanderbilt; OK, there was some weeping and gnashing of the teeth for a time; but then I got on with my life. My prediction about the impact of not getting in was way off base. I adapted, and moved on.

Which leads us to the next happiness insight to consider: that most environmental and demographic factors influence happiness very little. “Try to imagine yourself,” says Jonathan Haidt, “changing places with either Bob or Mary. Bob is thirty-five years old, single, white, attractive, and athletic. He earns $100,000 a year and lives in sunny California. He is highly intellectual, and he spends his free time reading and going to museums. Mary and her husband live in snowy Buffalo, New York, where they earn a combined income of $40,000. Mary is sixty-five years old, black, overweight, and plain in appearance. She is highly sociable, and she spends her free time mostly in activities related to her church. She is on dialysis for kidney problems.” Now, the question: who do you think is happier? Bob or Mary? On the surface of things, Bob, since he enjoys a string of what many would consider markers of power and privilege: he’s white, he’s male, he’s young, he lives in a beautiful climate, he’s attractive, and he’s wealthy. Yet it’s intriguing to get beneath the surface and take a look at what the research says. “White Americans are freed from many of the hassles and indignities that affect black Americans, yet, on the average, they are only very slightly happier.” “Men have more freedom and power than women, yet they are not on average any happier.” The old are generally happier than the young. “People who live in colder climates expect people who live in California to be happier, but they are wrong.” “People believe that attractive people are happier than unattractive people, but they, too, are wrong.” As for wealth—research shows that once people have sufficient money to pay for basic needs of food and shelter, the relationship between wealth and happiness grows smaller. At this point, more money definitely does not mean more happiness. Consider how it is that “as the level of wealth has doubled or tripled in the last fifty years in many industrialized nations, the levels of happiness and satisfaction in life that people report have not changed, and depression has actually become more common.” For all of this, chalk things up to the adaptation principle. All of these markers of power and privilege are life conditions that you either can’t change or which are constant for significant periods of time. And we get used to them. They become wallpaper in our lives. They disappear from our awareness. We take them for granted. 

And there they are: the three insights. (1) Natural selection attunes us to prestige even at the expense of genuine, long-lasting happiness; ( 2) people are inaccurate predictors of the impact of life changes to happiness; and (3) most environmental and demographic factors influence happiness very little. Happiness is not so simple a thing. The human heart is not so simple to figure out.

But now, putting these insights together: where does it take us, especially as we consider the new year ahead of us, with all its new possibilities?

One thing does stand out. Go back to Mary. We met her a moment ago; she and her husband live in snowy Buffalo, New York, where they earn a combined income of $40,000. By now, we know that all such factors are fairly equivalent to Bob’s, in terms of their power to influence happiness in life. This includes the fact of her being sixty-five years old, black, overweight, being plain in appearance, and being on dialysis for kidney problems. All such factors are constants in her life, and she has adapted to them.

Yet there are two advantages she has which Bob does not, which give her the clear  happiness edge, and here is the clue we are looking for. She is highly sociable, and she spends her free time mostly in activities related to her church. Research has shown both factors to have great impact on a person’s level of happiness, and part of the reason for this is that they are not so much constant conditions of life as voluntary activities that people choose to engage in. Because of this—because they take effort and attention—they aren’t susceptible to the adaptation effect.

One of the main things we can do, in other words, if we want to increase our happiness, is to invest time and energy in activities that lead to genuine gratification in some form or fashion. Sometimes, we are talking about activities which allow us to lose self-consciousness, connect with and express our strengths, and get into the flow of things. Other times, it can be activities that require some effort and yet the result is wonderful, as in exercise, or learning a new skill, or kindness and gratitude activities, or volunteer service. Such activities can make you feel vulnerable—you are putting yourself out there, after all—but once you do them, the good feelings last a long time.

In my case, what happened after the Vanderbilt disaster was this. Three kinds of activities that came together for me and ultimately helped me find myself again.

After I finished my thesis and defended it successfully, a week before I was to have graduated, I got a call from the community college across town, Blinn College. Would I like to teach a logic class? All my future plans were up in smoke, so why not? I took to that field, and like the sons in the Sufi wisdom story we heard earlier, I gave myself to daily labor, and to the round of the seasons. One class grew into three; three grew into five and a full-time permanent position; but most importantly, I discovered my passion for public speaking and teaching, and I realized that, for me, philosophy of religion was the bomb. 

I was discovering the treasure of the field, my happiness; and it was also happening at the Unitarian Universalist congregation I started going to, with Laura, once our daughter was born. I took to that field, and I gave myself to various opportunities that arose. I served as President of the Board of Trustees; I led some fundraising programs; I led some worship and taught a few religious education courses. Through volunteerism, I was discovering talents that I didn’t know I had. And, I was also making friends.

Which leads me to the third activity which helped me recover after the Vanderbilt disaster. Figure skating. Down in College Station, Texas, at the Unitarian Church, I met my future ice-dancing partner. It all came as quite a shock. Part of this has to do with the fact that, when I met Diane in 1996, I hadn’t skated since I was a boy of 13, and last I knew, serious figure skating was just for children and teenagers. Yet what I did not know was that, during my many years away from the sport, a significant adult skating program had developed, including regional, national, and international competitions. Diane knew all about it—and did I want to go skating with her? At first I resisted—one excuse after another came to mind—but Diane and then Laura kept on prodding me, and so, eventually, I went.

As it turns out, this was the final ingredient. I took to the field of teaching, I took to the field of church volunteerism, I took to the field of adult figure skating; and as I gave myself to all three activities, some kind of weird alchemy happened, and I found a clarity within me which I had never had before. I found a yearning to combine passion for public speaking and teaching and community building and leadership and artistry and spirituality all in one thing, and that thing was ministry. I would become a minister. That was the treasure in the field that I found, but only after giving myself to years of hard work, day to day and season to season.

“I prayed for twenty years,” Frederick Douglass once said, “but received no answer until I prayed with my legs.” The treasure is out there, in the field, and it’s not about prestige, it’s not about the things we can’t control, it’s not about the constant conditions to which we inevitably adapt. It’s about activity, action, praying with your legs.

And this time, I did not let fear stop me from talking to the people I needed to talk to, and doing the things I needed to do. I even turned down an offer to attend fancy-schmancy Harvard Divinity School—with funding—to go to one that was better suited to my family and me. 

When one of my friends heard this, he sent me a funny postcard featuring an orangutan wearing one of those square academic caps, with the tassel on the side. And this was the caption: WHAT? You haven’t been to HARVARD?” I laughed. OK by me.

 

Story Before the Sermon

There once was a farmer who lay on his deathbed in despair over the fate of his lazy sons. When he was almost gone, an inspiration came to him. He called his sons to his bedside and drew them in close. “I am soon to leave this world,” he whispered. “I want you to know that I have left a treasure of gold for you. I have hidden it out in the field. Dig carefully and well and you will find it. I ask only that you share it among yourselves evenly.”

The sons begged him to tell them exactly where he had buried it, but the father breathed his last and said no more.

As soon as their father was buried, the sons took up their shovels and began to turn over the soil in their father’s field. They dug and dug until they had turned over the whole field twice. Nothing–no treasure anywhere. But they decided that since the field was so well prepared, they might as well plant some grain just as their father had done. The crop grew well for them. After the harvest they decided to dig again in hopes of finally finding the hidden treasure. Again they found nothing, and once again prepared the field for sowing. That year’s crop was even better than the one before.

This went on for years until the sons had grown accustomed to the cycles of the seasons and the rewards of working together in daily labor. By that time their disciplined farming earned them enough money to live very comfortable lives. They grew very close and content. They had everything they could ever want or need. It was then and only then, that they realized what a great treasure their father had left for them out in that field.

 

When Difficult Relatives Happen to Good People: Navigating Religious Disagreements in the Family

The holiday season is now fully upon us, and with it comes time spent with family. Seeing the relatives. Some combination of grandparents and parents, uncles and aunts, cousins, brothers, sisters, brothers-in-law, sisters-in-law, nephews, nieces, children, grandchildren, great grandchildren. Traveling over there to see them, or them traveling over here.

 

Consider some quotes about family:

 

“The family: that dear octopus from whose tentacles we never quite escape, nor, in our inmost hearts, ever quite wish to” (Dodie Smith).

 

“The family. We were a strange little band of characters trudging through life sharing diseases and toothpaste, coveting one another’s desserts, hiding shampoo, borrowing money, locking each other out of our rooms, inflicting pain and kissing to heal it in the same instant, loving, laughing, defending, and trying to figure out the common thread that bound us all together” (Erma Bombeck).

 

Those are the quotes, and let’s pause for a moment to notice some of the central images: family as “that dear octopus”; family as “a strange little band of characters trudging through life; family “trying to figure out the common thread binding us together.” All such images speak directly to our topic this morning: navigating religious disagreements with our relatives, especially those involving our born-again fundamentalist relatives. How difficult this can be. The stories abound:

 

An aunt whose born-again niece and nephew specifically pray for the welfare of her soul during the dinnertime grace while she is visiting—although the aunt’s soul feels just fine….

 

A brother who, out of the blue, asks, “Are you an evolutionist?” and then goes on a huge diatribe about how evolution is not good science but superstition….

 

A mother who insists on the entire family attending her fundamentalist church’s Christmas Eve service, even though her son and daughter-in-law clearly squirm at what her church teaches….  

 

Any of these remind you of your own stories? It’s the “strange little band of characters trudging through life, trying to figure out the common thread binding us together.” It’s “the dear octopus.”

 

Let’s take a look at the varieties of religious disagreements in families, and then explore options for dealing with them effectively.

 

Starting with this insight: that religious disagreements are sometimes not on-the-level; they mask something deeper. The argument may sound like it is all and only about religion: whether or not the Christian scriptures are the literal word of God; whether or not there is such a thing as eternal hell; whether or not all religions possess some truth. That’s what the argument sounds like, and we can get so focused on that, we miss out on the deeper factors that, in truth, energize and intensify what’s going on: historical factors, social factors, interpersonal factors, psychological factors, and so on. Invisibly fueling the fire—so if we ignore them, solutions at the surface level can only be temporary. The spite will never end. Religion is a multi-layered venture; as we experience religious conflict in our families, we need to be listening for the deeper layers as well.

 

One of these layers we have already heard about, in our reading from earlier. The author, Unitarian Universalist Doug Muder, talked about the anxiety towards social change that underlies the Religious Right’s loyalty to “absolute values,” or the non-negotiable system of roles and obligations they aspire to live within. When we religious liberals call this a valid spiritual choice, just one among others, we relativize what is for them absolute. They feel disrespected and misunderstood. We remind them exactly of what they are fighting against. “Religious conservatives are not being busybodies,” says Doug Muder, “when they worry about moral breakdown: Fundamentalists worry about moral breakdown because they see their own lives, families, and communities breaking down.” That’s what Doug Muder says, and he follows up with a quote from a study of conservative Christian families which says, “Whether the issue is divorce, materialism, sexual promiscuity, racism, physical abuse in marriage, or neglect of a biblical worldview, the polling data point to widespread, blatant disobedience of clear biblical moral demands on the part of people who allegedly are evangelical, born-again Christians. The statistics are devastating.”

 

This is one of the deeper layers that we need to listen for, beneath the surface arguments. Basic compassion requires it. Anxiety about what the world is coming to; fear and confusion about how it is that traditional families are fraying apart. As for a second deeper layer to listen for: it’s something more basic. I’m talking about communication skills. Or, rather, the lack of them. Consider, for example, the bad habit of focusing on intentions and ignoring the impact of words. As when a well-meaning relative insists, “I’m not disrespecting you; I’m trying to save your soul. Can’t you see that?” The words have explicitly religious content, but the real problem is the underlying communication pattern, which we see occurring in non-religious contexts all the time. As in, “I didn’t mean to hurt your feelings; I was only trying to say that you’ve gained twenty pounds and your favorite dress no longer fits.” The assumption is that because the intentions were all innocent and good, you should not feel hurt. In fact, now that the intentions have been clarified, all your hurt feelings should instantly disappear. But this is ridiculous. People have a right to feel their feelings, whether one’s religion or one’s body image has just been insulted. You just can’t focus on intentions and dismiss the impact of one’s words. You just can’t have one without the other. HOW one says something is just as important as WHAT one says.

 

Beneath the surface disagreements: layers and layers. Anxiety about social change, poor communication skills; and also this: family dynamics. For example, the sibling rivalry that simmers beneath the relationship between two sisters, which gives their religious disagreement particular intensity since one of the sisters has “fallen away” from the family faith while the other has stayed with it. On the surface, the argument sounds like it’s about religion between two mature adults; but at a deeper level the sisters are just like pre-teens competing for attention from Mom and Dad. A variant of this is the spouse of the sister who has stayed close to home, who champions his wife against his errant sister-in-law even as his wife pretends ignorance and says not a word.

 

It’s family dynamics. And there are so many varieties. The son who uses religion as a means of winning independence from his family; the more obnoxiously he asserts his differences and, as a result, calls the family wrath down upon himself, the more independent he feels. Or this pattern: parents trying to preserve family identity and continuity through time, which they see as inextricably connected to a particular denomination or system of beliefs; and this is what inspires their unceasing and seemingly endless efforts to convert you back into the fold. Or this: the aunt who follows the beat of a different spiritual drummer and takes severe heat from everyone else—but it’s really not so much about her spiritual choices as it is the fact that the family needs a collective punching bag, and the person who stands out too much gets to be the scapegoat.

 

All is not necessarily as it seems. Appearance can hide reality. Arguments about religion can serve to express deeper tensions even as they conceal what’s really going on. For this reason, in the face of family disagreements, it can be so helpful to take a curiosity stance towards what is going on. Not to allow yourself to get caught up in all the sturm und drang, but to step back and wonder: what’s really going on here?

 

On the other hand, sometimes appearance IS reality. Religion IS what the arguments are about. Here’s at least two examples of this.

 

One has to do with what it means to have a public religious identity. To what degree is this a matter of sharing specific beliefs? Maybe this Thanksgiving you found yourself with a relative, talking about your Unitarian Universalism, and this is a person for whom being a Christian is all about accepting official church doctrines about God, salvation, Jesus, and so on. For them, without right beliefs, you can’t be a part of a church. This is what they know. So you go ahead and share your Unitarian Universalism, saying that there are no official church doctrines about any of those things. There ARE shared beliefs—for example, that there are many ways to religious truth and not just one, or that human nature has an inherent positivity and value to it—but these are all general, not specific. About specific things, Unitarian Universalism allows you to believe what reason, conscience, and intuition declare as truth. Beyond this, you talk about the spiritual practices and disciplines that unite Unitarian Universalists, such as communal worship; leadership and service; lifespan religious education; good stewardship of time, talent, and money; and commitment to healthy relationships. Disciplines like these. This is what you say: and your relative looks at you like you are a Martian. That’s not religion! Religion, for them, starts and ends with believing the right things.

 

This is a genuine disagreement, a genuine argument. In fact, it might lead you directly into a second disagreement, over what it takes to be religiously sincere. Sincerity, for religious conservatives, is tied to their absolute value paradigm. You are sincere only if you give up your right to choose your social roles, your obligations, your beliefs. You are sincere only if you submit. Thus their rejection of the religiously liberal way, as Doug Muder points out: “[Religious conservatives],” he says, “understand us to be advocating a superficial and nihilistic way of life. They think we want to choose our own moral codes so that we can pick easy ones that rationalize our every whim. They believe that we want the freedom to define our relationships so that we can walk away from anything that looks difficult.” That’s what Doug Muder says. The argument is about sincerity, and whereas we will object that the conservative has misunderstood us completely, they will reply that they understand us better than we understand ourselves. And it goes from there. Back and forth, objection and reply….

 

And there you have it. The variety of religious disagreements in families. Sometimes perfectly straightforward and on the level, and sometimes not. It’s all part and parcel of the family as “dear octopus,” the family as that “strange little band of characters trudging through life.” But now the question is, Where to go from here? How to stand up for ourselves even as we do our best to stay in healthy relationship with the other?

 

I think it begins with the basics. Don’t allow yourself to be treated like a doormat. You have the right to say no to anything when you feel you are not ready, it is unsafe, or it violates your values. You have the right to be treated with dignity and respect. You have the right to be in a non-abusive environment. You have all these rights, and more, and so to stand up for them, you set compassionate limits. You can be compassionate but firm as you say, “I care about you and I know you care about me. But do you remember my last visit, when, at dinnertime, your children openly prayed for the sake of my soul? That made me feel very uncomfortable and unwelcome. I know that the intentions were all good, but I still felt like my spirituality was being disrespected. Can we talk about this? What can we each do to make the next visit more satisfying for both of us?” This is setting compassionate limits. It’s a strategy that comes from Leonard Felder, Ph. D., author of the fantastic book When Difficult Relatives Happen to Good People, and he goes on to say, “Instead of your reacting like a frustrated child, I’ve found with hundreds of counseling clients that when you take charge and offer these ‘compassionate limits’ you will sound and feel like a competent manager and a worthwhile adult. You will be preventing the usual power-struggle with this negative relative and instead turning your conversation with this person into a creative brainstorming session that uncovers positive alternatives.” That’s what Dr. Felder says.

 

“I care about you, and you care about me. How our next time together be more satisfying for both of us?” Such directness, very often, can make all the difference. But what about that extra-grace-required relative whose communication skills are null and void? What if the dysfunctional family dynamics are seemingly set in stone? (This brings to mind the old Yiddish saying that goes, “If you’re waiting for your relatives to change … you should live so long.”) Again, Dr. Felder’s advice is solid: “Don’t set up an unrealistic expectation that the situation is going to be easy. Instead, set for yourself a realistic small goal that will allow you to feel successful. For example, if a ten minute phone call or a two hour visit is the most you can handle with a particularly unpleasant relative, don’t volunteer for a sixty minute phone call or a seven day visit that is bound to turn out badly. Or if your relative has a habit of giving you too much advice, set a new realistic goal for your interactions, such as: ‘I’ll listen to one piece of advice and say, ‘That’s interesting. I’ll consider it,’ without getting into a big debate or war this time.’ When it comes to difficult family members, it’s good enough to just keep your interactions brief and civil, while remembering to say to yourself, ‘I don’t need to change this person’s basic personality—I just need to stay healthy, calm and relaxed no matter what he or she does.’” That’s what Dr. Felder recommends.

 

There is, finally, a third strategy to keep in mind, and this one is especially relevant when the religious disagreement is more on-the-level and less rooted in subterranean factors and forces. It’s this: Figuring out the common thread that binds us all together. Perhaps you and your relative disagree vehemently on the nature of religious identity. For you, the word that sums up the religious life is “commitment;” for them, “commandment.” For you, freedom is at the core; for them, obedience. For you, religion is mostly about right behavior; for them, religion is mostly about right belief. All these differences; but in the midst of them, is there truly no common ground?

 

This is where it becomes critical for religious liberals like ourselves to articulate why freedom and choice are spiritually central to us, and not some cop out. After all, we don’t want to be guilty of bad communication habits ourselves, as in requiring our relatives to read our minds. We need to say who we are. Say, along with Doug Muder, that “We give our members the freedom to doubt and encourage them to question their beliefs not so they will see all beliefs as whimsical and contingent, but quite the opposite: We find that hard-tested and hard-won beliefs are more likely to withstand the challenges of modern life. A marriage whose every assumption and duty has been freely negotiated is not a house of straw, but rather a house whose every brick has been carefully laid. The freedom of liberal religion is an invitation to engage with the most significant issues of human life and society, not an excuse to fall into a shiftless and vacant hedonism.” In other words, what we share with our fundamentalist relatives is exactly this sense of the religious life as rigorous and not easy. We share with them “loyalties that go beyond self and the convenience of the moment. [We share with them a rejection of] the materialism of popular culture. [We both] seek something more substantial than the momentary satisfaction of desire or the endless striving after status” (Muder).

 

All these things represent common ground upon which to build, at the very least, a respectful agreement to disagree. In the end, your relative may never budge, and neither may you, but at least you will sense in each other an overriding seriousness about the quest for meaning and truth in life. And that can represent a start to dialogue that’s mutually civil. A very good start.  

 

**

Our reading today is an excerpt from an article by Unitarian Universalist Doug Muder called “Who’s Afraid of Freedom and Tolerance.”

 

Like most religious liberals, we Unitarian Universalists imagine ourselves to be nice people. It is those in the Christian Right, we believe, who want to force their moral code on everyone else and use public resources to proselytize for their faith. We, on the other hand, believe in tolerance, free choice, and letting people be what they have to be. What’s so scary about that? If the rank-and-file of organizations like Focus on the Family or the Christian Coalition feel threatened by us, we think, it can only be because they have been duped by their unscrupulous leaders.

 

Not necessarily.

 

True, preachers of the Christian Right have said a lot of unfair things about liberals, both religious and political. But conservative Christian fears have not been created ex nihilo. As overstated as those fears may at times become, they have a basis, and we would do well to understand it.

 

Many books have been written recently about the Christian Right. One that does a particularly good job of getting inside the movement’s worldview, particularly that of its working-class members, is Spirit and Flesh: Life Inside a Fundamentalist Baptist Church by James M. Ault Jr…. Ault, like George Lakoff and several other authors, locates the heart of the Christian Right worldview in its overall vision of family life—not just in the positions it takes on a handful of specific “family values” issues like abortion or same-sex marriage.

 

[According to this overall vision of family life,] a child … is born into a network of mutual obligations and depends for its survival on the fulfillment of those obligations. As it grows, the child takes an ever more active role in upholding that network. At no point in the process is the individual in a position to stand outside the network and choose whether or not its obligations apply to him or her. The only choice the individual has is whether to fulfill his/her obligations or to renege on them. This is what fundamentalists mean when they say that moral values are “absolute” rather than “relative.”

 

We may think that we’re being tolerant when we grant that the Christian Right lifestyle is a valid choice. But merely by describing it as a choice, we move the discussion onto our turf. Ault explains: “Liberally minded people often do not realize . . . that rather than respecting fundamentalists’ views, they are denying them by insisting that religious beliefs or ethical standards be seen as personal, private [commitments] we must all tolerate in one another…. “

 

In one sense, fundamentalists have every right to fear and resent religious liberals. […] Every person who defects from the regime of timeless roles and obligations makes life more difficult for those who try to keep it going. From their point of view, freedom is a kind of plague we carry….

 

But (as the Billy Joel song puts it) we didn’t start this fire. The medieval extended family—rooted in a particular place with inherited, inflexible roles—has been slowly coming apart since the advent of modern capitalism…. It is a trying time, and the anger of the Christian Right is understandable. “Whenever an old order dies,” writes the liberal Episcopal bishop John Shelby Spong, “anger is always loosed upon the whole society.”

 

Here ends the reading for today…