Divinity With or Without God

Once upon a time, a young Pygmy boy heard the most beautiful song coming from the forest. The song was so beautiful, he had to go and see who was singing. Deep in the forest he found the bird, and he brought it all the way back to the camp to feed it. This deeply annoyed his father; he didn’t want to give any of their food to the bird. But the boy pleaded and pleaded with him, and the bird was fed. The next day the bird sang again; it sang the most beautiful song, and again the boy went deep into the forest to find it, and again he brought it all the way back to feed it. This time the father was even more angered, but once again he gave in and fed the bird. The third day the same thing happened. But this time the father took the bird from the son and told his son to go away. When his son had left, the father killed the bird, the bird with the most beautiful song, and with the bird he killed the song, and with the song he killed himself and he dropped dead, completely dead, dead forever.

Joseph Campbell once said that the purpose of myth is to tell us—in metaphor and symbol—of “matters fundamental to ourselves, enduring principles about which it would be good to know if our conscious minds are to be kept in touch with our own most secret, motivating depths.” The myth of the boy and the bird and the father is clearly once upon a time, but also here and now. Now, there are songs to be heard which trigger experiences of awe and wonder. Now, there is a young Pygmy boy within us who is ready to be deeply stirred and moved. And there is an angry father as well, now, who wants no part of it.

But how so? What might this all look like, in real life? 

Consider this story from a colleague of mine, the Rev. Dr. Kendyl Gibbons. She says, “As a young Unitarian Universalist in the 1960s, I was educated about human sexuality in a relatively open fashion; human religious experience, in contrast, was a closed book. I discovered my spirituality in much the same way that my peers raised in more conservative faiths discovered their sexuality—accidentally, furtively, without guidance, moved by overwhelming inner tides, and with some sense of shame. I longed for the white organdy First Communion dresses and the menorah candles of my neighbors. I secretly memorized Louisa May Alcott’s ‘My Kingdom’ prayer, written when she was thirteen, and sang myself to sleep with ‘For the Beauty of the Earth.’ I was fascinated by the hidden life of nuns. I yearned for someone, anyone, to take my childish capacity for devotion seriously. But seeds planted in paper cups on the Sunday school windowsill, the dead bird discovered in the backyard, the calligraphic hymns in We Sing of Life, and the annual flower communion were the scant resources my liberal religious education offered. To my parents and teachers—almost all of whom had grown up in other religious traditions—the absence of texts, rote prayers, sacraments, holy objects, and moralistic picture books represented freedom. But without any language for my emerging sense of mystery and wonder, I came to feel the contrary: deprived of the tools with which to understand or express those experiences. I floundered in a kind of guilty yearning until I became intellectually mature enough to claim the rich heritage of humanity’s religious cultures for myself. I did so greedily, with none of the literalism that afflicts fundamentalists, whether orthodox or humanist. As a student of religion in college, I read the Christian women mystics, Zen teachers, Taoist poets. I studied the art and architecture, music and mysteries of the world’s religions, and discovered how each constructed the landscape of spiritual experience. What I sought was some way to bring order to what had always been going on inside of me. And I encountered a whole universe of souls, across every culture and tradition, who knew all about it.”

That’s Kendyl Gibbons’ story, and in it, she is just like the boy ready to be deeply stirred and moved, who goes out far into the forest. As for the bird with the most beautiful song—how about the things to which Kendyl found herself drawn in reverence: initially the white organdy First Communion dresses, the menorah candles of her neighbors, a prayer from Louisa May Alcott, a song with which she would sing herself to sleep. Then, when she got older: the world’s religions, their literature and art and architecture, the whole universe of souls across every culture and nature who had heard the beautiful song. But then there is the religion she grew up in, in which spirituality was seen as regressive, cliché, lowbrow, not progressive enough. In her judgment, this reflects a kind of pridefulness. “There is nothing so petulant,” she says, as to throw away what our ancestors have tried to pass on to us, in stories and stones, in scriptures and songs, in rituals and prayers, because we think that we in our adolescent hubris know better now. Who can stand in the shadow of the great pyramids, or the radiant light and soaring stone of the cathedral at Chartres—who can listen to the deep cadences of the Book of Common Prayer fall sonorous on the ear—and not realize in the very fiber of being that our wonder and our hunger and our terror and even our most valiant ‘yes’ to life are not ours alone, but echo down the ages of the whole human race?” Whatever the reason, people in her congregation did not provide language and symbols of reverence that would have helped her give voice to her emerging sense of awe and wonder. Neglect threatened the bird with the most beautiful song with death—but somehow Kendyl had the resilience to outlast this, only to become one of the leading Religious Humanist ministers in our movement…

This is but one example of the myth unfolding in real life, and here is another, coming to us from Jonathan Haidt, author of our study book for this year, The Happiness Hypothesis. In it, he shares an experience he had while reading The Sacred and the Profane, by the great historian of religion, Mircea Eliade. Jonathan Haidt reads this book, and it tells him that the perception of sacredness is a human universal, and that regardless of their differences, all cultures have had sacred places and sacred times and sacred activities, all meant to allow contact with something that is larger than oneself, something which inspires reverence and awe. The book goes on to tell him that the modern West represents the first culture in all of history that has managed to strip space and time of sacredness and render it completely profane. But then he reads this passage: “Even a person committed to a profane existence has privileged places, qualitatively different from all others—a person’s birthplace, or the scenes of a first love, or certain places in the first foreign city he visited in his youth. Even for the most frankly nonreligious person, all these places still retain an exceptional, a unique quality; they are the ‘holy places’ of his private universe, as if it were in such spots that he had received the revelation of a reality other than that in which he participates through his ordinary daily life.” This is the passage that Jonathan Haidt reads, and as he does, he gasps. The realization is powerful, visceral. “Eliade,” he says, “had perfectly pegged my feeble spirituality, limited as it is to places, books, people, and events that have given me moments of uplift and enlightenment. Even atheists have intimations of sacredness, particularly when in love or in nature. We just don’t infer that God caused those feelings.” In other words: the bird with the most beautiful song never stops singing, though its song can be drowned out or denied by the culture surrounding it. The bird with the most beautiful song never stops singing, though its song may be different from how common stereotypes portray it. 

The myth unfolds in Jonathan Haidt’s life, in Kendyl Gibbons’ life, and perhaps by hearing their stories you are on the way of drawing your own connections with it. For myself, at this point, above all, what I’m trying to figure out is why the father would want to kill the bird. Why a church might make spirituality a “don’t ask, don’t tell” sort of thing. Why an entire culture might try to deny or drown it out the bird’s song.

We’ve already heard one possible theory about this, coming from Kendyl and her musings about the church she grew up in: the father is prideful, arrogant, imagines nothing significant can come from the bird. Or perhaps this: the father wants to kill the bird because he thinks it is a phony and the most beautiful song a fake. Perhaps he refuses to give time to the bird because he imagines himself just too busy. Or perhaps he has never himself found a bird like that—perhaps it reminds him of one he once found but lost—and so, in his shame, he turns into a bully. So many possible reasons for why the father does what he does.

Each reason would take significant time to trace out, so here (in the spirit of this science and spirituality sermon series) I will look at only the second one: the father kills the bird because he thinks it is a phony. A delusion caused by chemical misfiring of nerve cells in the brain, with no positive purpose. Why should I take my precious food and give it to a useless delusion? Ever heard this objection before?

It’s fascinating how neuroscientists Andrew Newberg and Eugene D’Aquili speak to this in their book Why God Won’t Go Away: Brain Science and the Biology of Belief. One of their experiments involved injecting radioactive material into people practiced in meditation as well as in prayer, and using a high-tech imaging tool to scan blood flow patterns in their brains. The radioactive material would be injected only when subjects indicated that they were deep into the flow of their experience and close to a sense of interconnection with all life (or, alternatively, a mingling with God), so that the scientists could see what was happening in their brains at the climax of their meditation or prayer. And what they—Drs. Newberg and D’Aquili—saw was significantly decreased activity in the posterior superior parietal lobe, or the part of the brain responsible for orienting people in physical space—helping people know the difference between up and down, here and there, and above all, “me” and “not me.” Block activity in this part of the brain, through damage for example, and even a simple task like lying down becomes an impossible challenge. You can’t locate yourself. You miss the chair, hit the floor, don’t even know how to lie down. But this was not at all the case with the people meditating or praying. They maintained control of their bodies just fine; it’s just that they had these deep experiences of oneness with the Universe or oneness with God. In this, Drs. Newburg and D’Aquili did not see any nerve cells misfiring or anything manifestedly contrary to what our bodies are meant to do. They did not see anything that would smack of delusion.

Their ultimate conclusion? Our human capacity to hear the bird with the most beautiful song is a valid product of natural selection. It is primal. Evolution put the neurological mechanisms responsible for the experience of self-transcendence in our brains, because when we are able to escape the limited bonds of our narrow selves through love and trust and openness, we become stronger. We become able to accomplish things that otherwise we could never do. This is a “neurobiological need” we see in all living beings, expressed in various degrees of sophistication, from the ritualized behavior of animals to the most sophisticated of human ceremonies. In animals, think headbobbing, think vocalization, think grooming: all these and more enabling members of the same species to recognize eachother as such, enabling communication of various kinds, enabling most importantly mating and reproduction. And as for humans: think this morning: our singing together, our lighting of the chalice, our responsive reading, one event after another unfolding in our midst; and soon, the ringing of the bell, the time of meditation, the offering, the benediction. The rhythm to all of this, so that we can feel opened up, connected to each other and to the larger values we serve. Turn of those cell phones so that we’re not jarred out of our dance together… Underneath all of it is a naturally selected-for neurobiological need to reach out, connect beyond oneself, unite. Underneath is the reality of what poet Rabindranath Tagore spoke when he said, “The same stream of life that runs through my veins night and day runs through the world and dances in rhythmic measures.” 

This is nothing less than divinity, with or without God. Rooted in our biology and in our bodies, it is no wonder that people experience sacredness in some form or fashion regardless of theological belief. “The holy is nothing but the ordinary,” says Kendyl Gibbons, “held up to the light and profoundly seen. It is the awareness of a creativity and a connection that we do not control, in a universe that is always larger, more intricate, and more astonishing than we imagine. It is the acknowledgment that we are formed by the earth from which we arise, and in which we live and move and have our being; and that we are, finally, not alone.” Whether or not God exists, we need this awareness, and we can have it.

And it can happen in surprising ways….. I’ll close with a story from Andrew Newberg and Eugene D’Aquili in their book I mentioned earlier, Why God Won’t Go Away. 

“At midnight, in the shadowy choir loft of a candlelit gothic cathedral of the Calvary Episcopal Church in Pittsburgh, a fifty-four year old businessman named Bill sits in a crowded pew enjoying a concert by the innovative jazz ensemble known as the Paul Winter Consort. It’s a hallmark of Winter’s group to set their stage in unusual and atmospheric venues—canyons, beaches, old stone barns—to reflect the moody, reverent spirit of their music, which often blends their own live performances with the recorded songs of nature. Tonight’s concert … has included a lyrical duet with a school of singing humpback whales and a haunting serenade build around the keening of eagles. Now, as the evening draws to a close, Winter and his group are providing the instrumental accompaniment to the tape-recorded singing of a pack of free-roaming wolves. The rhythmic, otherworldly wolf serenade echoes eerily in the monumental quiet of the cathedral’s soaring spaces. The wolves raise their voices in raw howls of sheer animal power, then let them soften to haunting, melancholy cries. [With Winter’s moody soprano sax in call and response fashion, the effect is] to lift listeners out of their everyday lives, and into another world. And as the wolf serenade reaches its emotional crescendo, that’s exactly what is happening to Bill. […] He feels deeply, serenely at peace. Then, suddenly, he is seized by a surge of excitement. It rushes up from the gut in a burst of joy and energy, and before he can think twice about it, Bill is on his feet, with his head thrown back, and he is howling from the bottom of his soul. Remarkably, at the same moment, other people have begun to howl. At first it’s half a dozen, scattered throughout the church. But in moments others follow their lead and soon the entire cathedral is alive with joyous noise, as hundreds of people joyfully join in the primal song of the wolves.”

Something like that is what I hope for each of you, too. To join in with some primal song. In fact, right now I want you to feel the young Pygmy boy within—feel how he is ready to be deeply stirred and deeply moved. Now, from that, howl!

*** 

It’s the neurobiological need for self-transcendence we sense, as we sing that primal song and feel the shivers run up and down our spines … as we feel wonder. That’s what evolution has done for us. Put a capacity for wonder in our hearts. Divinity—with or without God.

The Uses of Adversity

This morning I want to talk about the uses of adversity, and in doing so, I am mindful of a piece of wisdom that comes from the brilliant rabbi and scholar Adin Steinsaltz. Adversity is good, he says, though “the good is hidden” and “often several levels of excavation are needed to get to it.” Yet he also reminds us of an important teaching that absolutely needs to accompany this insight: “the injunction that we can say this only about our own suffering, and that we are forbidden to say it to someone else who is suffering.” “If you fall and bang your knee,” he says, “my response to you must not be, ‘Well, it’s for the best.’ On the contrary, if I see someone suffering, my one obligation is to try to help relieve that suffering. Telling a suffering person that everything is for the best is called, in the Talmud, ‘the sins of the friends of Job.’ Job suffered greatly, and his friends said to him, ‘Don’t you have faith in God?’ This is not what the friends should have said. … It is not appropriate to speak this theology while a person is struggling with pain and grief.” 

I wish more people knew this. Though I agree with Rabbi Steinsaltz that good can come out of adversity—that what is ultimate is neither tragedy nor failure—still, when I am in the midst of a particular loss or sorrow, and I am with someone else in a personal conversation, the last thing I want is for that person to try to clean things up for me, tell me it’s all for the best. Don’t do that. Don’t theologize. Just acknowledge my feelings about how it hurts, how it feels unfair, how it sucks. Do that for me and do it for everyone. Just give a hug, or hold a hand. Be present. If you don’t know what to say, say THAT. Help them know that they are not alone.

At some point today, I hope you’ll take a moment to look at the purple insert in your order of service. It lists just some of the ways in which this congregation helps people stay encouraged and connected in good times and in bad. We’re a community of care, here at UUCA. Know that this is what you are helping to sustain and grow through your continued gifts of energy and money. It’s so important in times like these. 

But Rabbi Steinsaltz is not done with us. What if the person in the midst of adversity is not someone else, but oneself? Here’s what he says: “If I fall and bang my own knee, I have a choice. I can wallow in my own pain, or I can use the experience to stimulate my faith and prompt me to examine my life more carefully and to grow, in empathy and understanding, from my experience.” That’s what Rabbi Steinsaltz says. Each of us is responsible for making some positive sense out of the reality of our suffering. Perhaps we need to wallow for a bit—we’re only human. But then comes the time to move beyond that and go deeper. Can adversity have positive uses? Is it really true, as psychologist Jonathan Haidt says in his book The Happiness Hypothesis, that “people need adversity, setbacks, and perhaps even trauma to reach the highest levels of strength, fulfillment, and personal development”? And, what does that look like? Rabbi Steinsaltz is saying to each of us today: choose to go deeper. Choose to find the good that is hidden beneath the pain. Seek it out courageously.  

To this end, we’re going to explore the adversity story of a person named George Bailey. We know him better in December than in other months, perhaps, because he’s the main character in the Christmas movie classic It’s A Wonderful Life. Yet George Bailey is nothing less than a modern-day Job-figure, having something to say to us in every month. So much to learn from his story. Starting with an up-close look at his particular struggle. See if any of it resonates with you. I know it does with me.

When George Bailey was a teenager, a fantasy formed in his mind of being a world traveler, going to Tahiti, sailing the Emerald Sea—exploring all these exotic locations and more, far away from Bedford Falls, the boring town of his birth. As he grew older, the hopes only grew more ambitious. In the movie, when he’s 21, we see him buying luggage for his trip to Europe. He’s got his life all figured out. First he’ll go to Europe, and then he’ll go to college, and then he’s going to build things: skyscrapers hundreds of feet high, bridges a mile long. He’s going to be a millionaire.

t’s around this time that his father asks him if he’d be interested in returning home after college to run the family business, the Bailey Brothers Building and Loan Company. Hearing this, George goes quiet. Right before, he was laughing and joking raucously with everyone in the house, but when his father asked him this question point blank, George got real quiet. Said, “I couldn’t face being cooped up for the rest of my life in a stuffy little office. I want to do something big, something important with my life!”

Just imagine how George’s father hears this—what this says about how his son misunderstands him. Parents and children miss each other like this all the time. George isn’t seeing his father’s life with eyes of compassion. He’s too caught up in his own success fantasy of skyscrapers and bridges and lots of money.

But you know what happens next. Even if you’ve never seen It’s A Wonderful Life, I’ll bet you know. George begins living into one of the mysteries of the human condition, which is the reality of limits. As a member of the middle class, naturally he’s been brought up believing that people are free to control their own destinies. No limits. Just do it. The only person stopping you from climbing the success ladder … is you. This is where George is coming from. This forms the core of his youth. But now one event after another is going to expose the lie.

His father dies, and George must give up his trip to Europe so he can settle his father’s business affairs. The long road of missed opportunities and regret begins. Then, just as he’s handing off important papers to the Building and Loan’s Board of Trustees, moments before he’s out the door on the way to college, his father’s arch-enemy, Scrooge-like Henry F. Potter, makes a motion that the Building and Loan dissolve. Potter, who is wealthy beyond measure and could easily afford to give, asks, “Are we running a business or a charity ward?” Hearing this, something snaps in George and he finds himself saying to Potter: “You’re right when you say my father was no business man. I know that. […] But he did help a few people get out of your slums, Mr. Potter. And what’s wrong with that? […] Doesn’t it make them better citizens? Doesn’t it make them better customers? […] Just remember this, Mr. Potter, that this rabble you’re talking about … they do most of the living and dying in this community. Well, is it too much to have them work and pay and live and die in a couple of decent rooms and a bath? Anyway, my father didn’t think so. People were human beings to him, but to you, a warped, frustrated old man, they’re cattle. Well, in my book he died a much richer man than you’ll ever be.”

What a wonderful but ironic speech! This is the same person for whom success in life is equivalent to world travel and skyscrapers and bridges and lots of money. This is the same person who basically told his father that he and his stuffy office were small and unimportant. Yet already we are seeing some of the uses of adversity. One of the benefits is that it challenges us to get clearer about what it is we genuinely value, and we discover that true success and happiness in life can mean something very different from what we think they mean. Only in the moment of facing down Henry F. Potter does George realize in himself a genuine and deep appreciation for what it is his Dad did. Only in the heat of that challenging moment. It was a gift of adversity—although it is not necessarily a gift that makes things simpler. George now has two competing success visions warring away in his heart. One is focused on service to his community and being rooted in that community; the other is focused on an almost Peter Pan-like desire to travel and build things and make lots of money. More on this internal conflict in a bit. For now, it’s enough to acknowledge that George’s speech was a moment of great personal discovery, and inspiring for others as well. The next thing that happens is that Building and Loan Board rejects the motion to dissolve but only if George takes over his father’s job as leader. And he does, but with great ambivalence. Life keeps on throwing him curveballs. Once, he thought he had it all figured out. But now he’s more like the poet Dante, who once said about midlife, “I found myself within a dark woods / where the straight way was lost.” What else can he do, but keep moving? He gives his college funds to his younger brother, Harry, and goes to work.

Circumstances crowd out the fantasies of youth and supersede them. In the end, George finds himself where he thought he’d never be: working in his Dad’s stuffy little office, stuck in Bedford Falls. He gets to continue his father’s work of economic justice in the community, and while this is important to him, still, his heart is at war with itself. Regret upon regret pile up. He’s just a mess of contradictions. He marries a beautiful caring wife, he has wonderful children, he is loved and respected throughout Bedford Falls, but all the wild wonderful energy and humor of his youth gradually go away. He’s cranky. He’s cynical. “I want to do what I want to do,” he complains, but no one’s listening.

The bounce in his soul is gone. And it’s like this with so many people today. The adversity of conflicted selves, heavy with regret. Thinking and feeling they are failures even as they are doing great work in the world. Afraid because of the economy, even as they are surrounded by something far more reliable than money ever could be, which is family and friendship, the beloved community of a place light this, and within: the sustaining and transforming power of the Spirit of Life. As close-up to our individual lives as we are, who are we to judge them wrong, or a failure? Who are we to offer up a global judgment like this, as if we were able to transcend our myopia and see ourselves from a God’s-eye point-of-view?

The bounce is gone. And if it’s gone, how is a person going to bounce back in the face of sudden crisis and change? The problem just escalates.

Here’s what this looks like for George. What happens is that absent-minded Uncle Billy misplaces the $8000 which was supposed to have been deposited in the Building and Loan funds. George faces bankruptcy, scandal, prison…. In complete desperation, he sees no alternative but to turn to his enemy Henry F. Potter for help. Asks for a loan. And Potter, who sits in the cat bird’s seat now, says to George, “Look at you. You used to be so cocky. You were going out to conquer the world! You once called me a warped, frustrated, old man. What are you but a warped, frustrated young man? A miserable little clerk, crawling in here on your hands and knees, begging for help.” 

It’s horrible. I mean, the movie may be called It’s a Wonderful Life, but when it gets down to this part, I’m watching it through my fingers, like I do with the The Exorcist or The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. Especially the scene where George wanders onto the bridge near Bedford Falls. It’s night and snow falls in large sticky flakes. George’s face is screwed up in pain. Potter’s words ring in his mind—“you’re worth more dead than alive.” Below him—the raging torrent of a river. He’s thinking suicide. He’s thinking The End.

But is it? Despite all that has happened, can George bounce back? And we as well? For I know that George is not alone with his outrageous reversals of fortune. Some of us may be on that bridge with George right now, and the rest of us can relate. The past few years have brought reversals of fortune to us all, in some way or another. Bad things happening to good people. It can feel so unfair.  

But what happens next in the story illustrates yet another use of adversity: we learn that we are stronger than we know…..

Picture the scene. There he is, George Bailey, a man who’s lost the bounce in his soul nd it’s so flat, it can’t cope with the loss of $8000. He just can’t take it any more. He finds himself alone, beaten, standing on a snowy bridge in the night, raging river below. Suicide seems the only way. And then—splash! Someone else has taken a dive! And suddenly, instinct takes over. Takes him two seconds to grasp the situation, and he jumps right in to save that person who’s drowning. He risks his life to save another.

Now this is incredible. Adversity has broken him down completely, and yet, in the midst of direst weakness, he discovers that strength still remains. And so can we. You know, often we can find ourselves saying, as we contemplate horrible possibilities, “If such-and-such happened, I could never survive it.” Or, “If such-and-so happened, I wouldn’t know what to do.” And yet when the worst happens, and we go numb with shock, we discover a persistence within us simply to take things one step at a time, one moment at a time. Events rush and swirl past us. The broken pieces of life overwhelm, but for a time we let things be. It is enough just to keep moving, and somehow we do. Somehow we just keep going. “More and more I have come to admire resilience,” writes poet Jane Hirschfield.  “Not the simple resistance of a pillow, / whose foam returns over and over to the same shape, / but the sinuous tenacity of a tree: / finding the light newly blocked on one side, / it turns to another. / A blind intelligence, true. / But out of such persistence arose turtles, rivers, mitochondria, figs / all this resinous, unretractable earth.” Adversity helps us discover this same persistence in ourselves, when the worst happens, and we come to realize we are stronger than we ever thought possible. A confidence in ourselves starts to grow, and we learn that, whatever else the future may bring, we have stood in the fire before, and we can stand in the fire again. We can. We are stronger than we know.   

This is what adversity teaches. In fact, there are times when it lifts us out of ourselves completely, and we find ourselves blessed with a better dream and a healing vision of life that we realize directly, first-hand—one we never could have known otherwise. Adversity can have this use as well.

Here’s how it happens for George. If you’ve seen the movie, you know that the person he saved from drowning is none other than Clarence Oddbody, Angel Second Class. He’s an angel, and he comes to earth to give George a great supernatural gift: direct experience of what Bedford Falls would have become had he never been born.

And it’s terrible. Horrible. Without George Bailey, Bedford Falls turned out to be a hellish place. And it blows his mind. It opens it up. He was living a wonderful life without knowing it. Everything he honestly and truly needed for happiness, he already had. Even with all the bad luck circumstances that seemed, time and again, to prevent him from pursuing his youthful hopes—even though he never became a world traveler, or went to college; even though he never built a skyscraper hundreds of feet high or a bridge a mile long—even so: the worth of his life was diminished not one whit. Worthy dreams can happen, even in a stuffy small office, in boring Bedford Falls. A hero journey, right there in the everyday. Being there for people in need, again and again, even when it put him at risk. Standing up for the little guy against bullies like Henry F. Potter.

Even in Bedford Falls, greatness can happen. And George finally gets it. The big picture pulls all the pieces of his life together, grasps him in his soul, heals his conflicted and regret-filled heart. The greatness he has always longed for—he realizes that he’s already been doing it. His father as well. And now he doesn’t want to give it up. The hero adventure is right here and right now! Who needs to travel to exotic locations like Tahiti, when you can have everything you want in Bedford Falls? Clarence!” he cries, “Clarence! Help me, Clarence. Get me back. Get me back. I don’t care what happens to me. Get me back to my wife and kids. Help me, Clarence, please. Please! I want to live again! I want to live again. I want to live again.”

Change your mind, and life changes. George Bailey wants to live again, and I would have you see clearly how badly he wants it. He wants it despite the fact that, as far as he knows, he’s still out $8000. Despite the fact that coming back to life will mean facing bankruptcy, scandal, prison…. But it no longer matters. How can he give up the life that he’s always wanted, which is the life he’s always been living but only now realizes it? 

Wherever you are this morning—whatever adversity you might be facing—I invite you to consider its uses. It clarifies our values, it teaches us that we are stronger than we know, and it also makes us relentlessly hungry for a transformed vision of who we are. We do not need to be visited by an actual angel to learn how to see our lives through angel eyes. Eyes that see clearly the truth of the preciousness of friendship and community and life even if some version of bankruptcy or scandal awaits us. The preciousness of friendship and community and life… And also this: how the world needs us and doesn’t care that we might never have traveled to that exotic location, or gone to that school, or built that mile long bridge.

Tap into angel vision, and the bounce in our souls comes back.

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.

 

Our Inner Ape

As Unitarian Universalists, we rally around a religious vision of people connecting with the Sacred in life—of being changed and transformed by this, called into acts of compassion and hope, expanding our circle of concern beyond self-interest so that we can be satisfied with nothing less than peace and justice for all. We rally around this vision of spiritual and ethical interdependency, and here at UUCA, we know that one of the essential ways of living the vision and making it real is being healthy in our relationships together: being mindful of how we communicate with and about others, seeking a peaceful and constructive resolution process when conflicts arise, celebrating the diversity within our community, building the common good. This is what we know, and rally around.  

 

Yet my question this morning is one of depth. The religious vision I just outlined, and its corresponding commitment to healthy relationships: how deeply rooted is it in our nature? Deep roots, or shallow? Teach a dog to fetch a newspaper, and that resonates with a basic capacity that is already deeply instilled in him—is this what Unitarian Universalism is trying to accomplish in us? Just cultivating and bringing to fuller expression potentials which are already ours in some way? Or, are we more like cats, and a capacity for fetching is just not part of who we are—and yet our religion foolishly persists in teaching us this anyhow?     

 

Scratch the surface of who we are, and what’s underneath?

 

It’s a question that has been asked with great intensity, especially since the savagery of World War II—the holocaust, the atom bomb, the willful destruction committed in Europe and Asia by otherwise civilized and scientifically enlightened people. Out of this, a dominant answer that emerged firmly rejected the “onward and upward forever” naïve optimism about human nature that so characterized nineteenth century liberal religion. In the harsh light of Nazi atrocities, or Soviet atrocities, this optimism appeared completely ridiculous. What seemed far more realistic was the grim idea that, deep down, humans are basically violent and amoral. And so, for example, a prominent scientist at the time, Konrad Lorenz, argued that aggression was a pressure within the human psyche that builds relentlessly, completely unrelated to frustrated desires and aims, without understandable and reasonable cause. The inexplicable pressure to destroy is within us, and it just builds and builds over time until it bursts through the thin veneer of human decency which religions and ethical systems like ours try so hard to shore up, but always in vain.

 

Then there was the thought of science writer Robert Ardrey. His 1961 book African Genesis argued what has since become known as the “killer ape” theory, which is that the ancient ancestors of humans were distinguished from other primate species by their greater aggressiveness, and that’s what drove their evolution, that’s the prime mover behind human development. It’s the famous scene in the classic movie 2001: A Space Odyssey, where a fight breaks out among a group of our ape ancestors, in which one bludgeons another with a zebra femur, and then that ape ancestor flings the femur triumphantly in the air, where, millennia later, it turns into an orbiting spacecraft. This is what the “killer ape” theory means: we’ve gotten to where we are today through genocide. Says Robert Ardrey, “We were born of killer apes, not fallen angels, and the apes were armed killers besides. And so what shall we wonder at? Our murders and massacres and missiles, and our irreconcilable regiments?” This is who we truly are, says Robert Ardrey. Liberal religion tried to throw away the idea of original sin, but secular science revalidated a version of it. Scratch the surface, rub off the thin veneer of religion and ethics and civilization, and we find something horrible which is nothing less than the secret of our success—which makes it even more horrible. (Not one of our favorite things….)

 

And so where do we go from here, if the horrible vision is true? Another movie scene comes to mind, this time from the classic The African Queen. Surrounded by the jungle, Katherine Hepburn’s character says, “Nature, Mr. Allnut, is what we are put in this world to rise above.” In others words, work even harder to shore up the thin veneer of civilization, so that the jungle within us—the inexplicable pressure to do violence—is kept bottled up, pushed down. Sing hymns louder, perhaps—meditate more—repeat the Purposes and Principles regularly and often, as well as our Congregational Covenant of Healthy Relationships. Face your fate like a plucky and undaunted Katherine Hepburn, and rise above…

 

But this only goes so far. Putting on a brave face won’t take away the dread we’ll never be able to stop feeling about ourselves. The sense that there exists a murderous force within us, so alien to all that we hold sacred and holy, so untrue to the teachings of our greatest prophets, like Jesus and the Buddha. So alien to our hopes for peace and justice for all. So irreconcilable with the idea that people have inherent worth and dignity. No inner light within, but inner seething. Therefore we could never truly relax and trust our instincts; there would have to be constant vigilance to make sure that the thin veneer of sanity is maintained. Not freedom, but authoritarianism, would be the better way in religion and in life. Unitarian Universalism, in short, would cease to make any sense. This is what would happen.

 

All of what I’ve said so far is background for why the question about apes is so crucial, so momentous to our understanding of ourselves. Says Emory University professor Frans de Waal in his fascinating book Our Inner Ape, “If [apes] turn out to be better than brutes—even if only occasionally—the notion of niceness as a human invention begins to wobble. And if true pillars of morality, such as sympathy and intentional altruism can be found in other animals, we will be forced to reject veneer theory altogether.” This is what Franz de Waal says. Take a look at our closest animal kin—great apes like chimpanzees, bonobos, and gorillas—and see what their lives are really like. Perhaps humans can fool themselves and pull the wool over their eyes, but not apes. They are what they are, without deception, without shame. So put all the theorizing to the side. Put “killer ape” theory to the side, and just look at the evidence from the lives of our closest biological kin, with whom we share more than 97% of our DNA.    

 

And what do we find? A fine animal gorilla like Koko. A being who truly and deeply gets what we are doing here today. Blessing our animals companions, our pets—and Koko herself would do the same. Bless her beloved All Ball. Bless Smoky. We hold and rub and play with and talk baby talk to our cats and dogs, and so does Koko. “Koko love Ball. Soft good cat cat.” Stricken when All Ball was killed, as we are when our pets die. Sounding out a long series of high pitched hoots. Saying, “Cry, sad, frown.”

 

Now it is undeniable: when we look at our great ape brothers and sisters, some of the things we find are not nice warm fuzzies. Chimpanzees are notoriously brutal at times, and they are also incorrigibly tribal and xenophobic, fanatically patrolling group borders, viciously charging against strangers, fighting to the death to preserve the group’s territory if necessary. But, this said, the picture grows far more complex once you consider the larger picture: that there is amazing breadth and diversity within our biological family of great apes, and the behavior of chimpanzees cannot possibly represent the final word. Gorillas like Koko shed a very different kind of light on things. And then you have bonobos. Have you ever heard of bonobos? Bonobos make love, not war. Listen to how Frans de Waal compares them to chimpanzees: “One is a gruff-looking, ambitious character with anger-management issues. The other is an egalitarian proponent of a free-spirited lifestyle. [The chimpanzee’s] hierarchical and murderous behavior has inspired the common view of humans as ‘killer apes.’ […] I have witnessed enough bloodshed among chimpanzees to agree that they have a violent streak. But we shouldn’t ignore our other close relative, the bonobo, discovered only last century. Bonobos are a happy-go-lucky bunch with healthy sexual appetites. Peaceful by nature, they belie the notion that ours is a purely bloodthirsty lineage.” That’s what Frans de Waals says. Our human heritage, exemplified in our closest animal relatives, is mixed. Chimpanzees may be tribal and xenophobic, but bonobos, in the best United Nations way, regularly establish peaceful relations with foreigners. Our inner ape is just not one narrow thing, as “killer ape” theory suggests. What’s deep down in human nature is broad: as much love and compassion as it is murder. And our job is to choose wisely, which impulses we draw on.

 

Consider this story about a bonobo called Kidogo, who suffered from a heart condition. “He was feeble, lacking the normal stamina and self-confidence of a grown male bonobo. When first introduced to the colony at the Milwaukee County Zoo, Kidogo was completely confused by the keepers’ shifting commands inside the unfamiliar building. He failed to understand where to go if people urged him to move from one part of the tunnel system to another. After a while, other bonobos stepped in. They approached Kidogo, took him by the hand, and led him to where the keepers wanted him, thus showing they understood both the keepers’ intentions and Kidogo’s problem. Soon Kidogo began to rely on their help. If he felt lost, he would utter distress calls, and others would quickly come over to calm him and act as a guide.” That’s the story. The strong helping the weak. Genuine sympathy, genuine altruism, found in the sacred depths of nature, right there. Sending a message that our job as humans is not so much to follow Katherine Hepburn’s advice and “rise above” nature as it is to bring into fuller expression certain capacities it has gifted us with. To draw on the positive aspects of our inner ape so as make a better world. Hubert Humphrey once said that “the moral test of government is how that government treats those who are in the dawn of life, the children; those who are in the twilight of life, the elderly; and those who are in the shadows of life, the sick, the needy and the handicapped.” Now if in bonobo society we have the strong helping the weak, why not in human society, and MORE of it? Why not?

 

Story after story documents in bonobos—as well as in chimpanzees and gorillas—kindness and empathy, a capacity for peacemaking and reconciliation, creativity, even freedom—this latter part suggested by Koko’s capacity to tells lies and her sense of humor. Blind actors carrying out a pre-set genetic program just can’t do this sort of thing, aren’t capable of the kind of improvisation and imagination that deception and humor require. Story after story opens up our minds to the fact that “our humanness is grounded in social instincts we share with other animals.” Our inner ape is just not a killer ape. Don’t say to me, “scratch an altruist, and watch a hypocrite bleed.” That makes no sense, in light of the facts. Kindness and sympathy and altruism are not veneer-thin but deep. You can’t scratch it away. It is a gift to us from our great ape brothers and sisters. It means we don’t have to be afraid of ourselves. It means we can replace a feeling of dread with a feeling of wonder. It means that to creation, we belong. Unitarian Universalism is real. Our Covenant of Healthy Relationships is realistic. The animals bring us back to our senses. “Fine animal gorilla” teaches us to say—and gives us courage to say—“fine animal human.”  

 

 

Rev. Anthony David

August 23, 2008

UUCA