The Power of Positive People
By Charles Rush
February 5, 2006
Hebrews 12: 1-2 and I Samuel 18: 12-15
[ Audio
(mp3, 3.3Mb) ]
ndid Camera had an episode that featured a guy getting onto a crowded elevator. As soon as the elevator closed, all the people on the elevator turned around turning their backs to the door without saying a word. Nearly 100% of the people looked around at everyone else and turned around with them.
There is
something primal about our desire to conform, a primordial holdover from the
herd mentality in lower mammals. Psychologists have done an experiment with
tests where they had people fill out a written test of 10 questions and then
had another 10 questions that they had to answer out loud. The written
questions were used as a control for the study because the oral questions were
done in a room with a group of other people that answered them before the
person that was being tested without their knowledge that the other people were
in on the experiment. When the others answered the oral questions wrong, a
large percentage of the time people would change their right answer to a wrong
answer because everyone else before them had answered it wrong. Said one person
who fell in that category, "I think I tend to… doubt myself when everyone
else has a [sure] opinion."[i]
Closer to
home, I wished I'd been part of the experiment that was done at a tony Asian restaurant in lower Manhattan. A collection of people were invited
to a posh dinner party, half of them picked their teeth during dinner and
licked their fingers, stretching the bounds of culinary manners. Then came
dessert, a mango fruit served on top of a scoop of sherbet. Half of the people,
without hesitation, lifted the plates to their faces and picked the Mango fruit
up with their teeth. The other half, in various states of hesitation and
confusion, eventually looked sheepishly at their spouses and followed suit.
Only the couple from Canada threw up their hands and called
foul… But then Canadians make it nearly a full-time job to dissent from all
things American.
Interesting
isn't it? About some things, I'm not sure we ever get much beyond High School. Every
high school has cliques. You have the jocks, usually two or three groups of
them. In my day, you had the cheerleaders, now thank goodness we also have a
couple different women's lacrosse team, the women's soccer team. Then you we
had the nerds- mostly guys that scored off the charts on the Math portion of
the SAT's and applied to M.I.T. They were complemented by the greasers- the
guys that were extraordinarily macho, worked on cars, and usually drove pretty
bad ass automobiles. There were two or three different cliques of popular
girls, very attractive, exhibited leadership in the clubs and generally
actually threw the official parties that we went to. And there were the theatre
people that were generally more interesting than other people and usually less
confident socially, that sort of kept to the perimeter of school life until the
lights went up and then they were awesome. Some of these people were also with
the musicians that most of the time were also on the social periphery but they
had incredible talent. And, of course, every high school has the stoners, an
eclectic group of people that tune into alternative reality together and
exhibit various degrees of alienation from self and others. I'm leaving out a
few other subsets, like the writers that put together the school newsletter and
the high school lampoon, all tended to purchase eye glasses whether they needed
them or not and actually read newspapers and had informed opinions.
You recall the
way that every group had a few important leaders that everyone tacitly looked
up to. I played football and generally speaking on Friday night, I never really
made a commitment to which party I was going to or whether I was going at all
unless I checked with our halfback, who sported fairly developed facial hair in
10th grade. There were like three of four guys like that which you would
somehow make contact with. Generally, they went along with the flow, but every
once in a while they would boycott some nice girls party and create a huge
havoc for the weekend.
Every clique
has it's own internal ethos and way of doing things and fitting into that is
the subject of enormous emotional energy for people. You don't really notice it
until you get shunned. There is no feeling quite as bone rattling as dropping a
key pass, heading to the sidelines and watching everyone just look away. There
is nothing quite as nerve racking as the people that usually call you just not
calling for one reason or another.
There is
nothing quite like those silent discussions with the mirror checking yourself
out wondering if you are okay, thinking to yourself, "I'm not a loser, am
I?" "What is wrong with me?" "Oh man, that nose!"
No, we are
always trying to find our place in the group, where we feel comfortable, maybe
it is not exactly in the center of things. But we want the central players in
the group to acknowledge us and give us some signals that we are cool doing
what we are doing and we are in the right place and part of the team.
That is why
our mothers worried about who we hung out with. They know that we are looking
to these people for approval and if we are doing that we are conforming our
behavior to what they are doing. Mothers know that character is laid down like
paint, one coat at a time. They know how we behave slowly, subtly shapes who we
are becoming. Every day we are forming new attitudes in tandem with our
significant peers, we are forming new habits, new disciplines.
Mother's get
worried when you hang around friends that are cynical, manipulative, and mean.
They worry when your friends set other people up and then embarrass them or
reject them in some way. Mother's don't want you to hang around people that are
manipulative socially because they don't want you to think about the world that
way, to see it that way. They don't want you to become that type of person.
They are worried about your character.
I read about a
famous trans-atlantic liner that was in port for a
major inspection and over haul. When the technicians examined the main smoke
stack from the inside, they discovered, lo and behold it was completely
corroded and about to fall down. If you looked at it from the outside, you
would be forgiven for thinking everything was fine because the crew had dutifully
applied paint year after year. But inside that was almost all it was. Mother's
get worried that we will become people that are all show but no substantial
character, people that look fine on the outside but have weak moral fabric. We
fit in well, but with the wrong people.
My mother
always wanted me to date Kay Meehan. Mom would say, 'she is such a wholesome
girl.' And she was. We did date a couple times, but like most seventeen year
old boys, I wasn't much interested in wholesome. I didn't get it. I couldn't
see how much I was being shaped by those around me. Probably you don't either.
I remember in
the 80's when my friends from high school, my friends from college were
starting out on Wall street and it was big era of power- big deals, big money, big
egos… and all that power was fueled along with cocaine. It made people feel
confident, expansive. They would talk about all the important things they were
doing and all the important people that they knew and all the big perq's that swirled around them. I know because they used
to call me up at 2 in the morning too wired to go to bed, never realizing what
time it was. I was standing in my kitchen apartment, in graduate student
poverty, changing a diaper, listening to Mr. Big on the other end of the line
about to conquer everything the little people dream about.
At some point,
that boat started exhibiting stress fractures. I remember one conversation, one
of my good friends, can't sleep even after consuming an enormous amount of
Stolichnaya. I asked him how much coke he was into and he said something like a
gram a day, and added 'everyone I know is doing the same thing.' Like it was
fine if everyone was doing it. I remember saying to him, 'Phil, I think you
need some new friends.' He stopped cold. It was a revelation. That is why they
pay me the big money, for just those sorts of critical insights.
By the way,
Phil finally did just that. He went to rehab, totally changed jobs, changed
acquaintances, now he is straight as an arrow- became a tri-athlete and is much
more interesting to talk to, partly because we talk over coffee in the morning.
People in AA
will tell you that flat. You want to change, you need to change friends. You
cannot hang around those old people that were facilitating your bad habits that
were keeping you damaging yourself and blunting your growth and potential. You
need some new friends.
This single
observation might have been St. Paul's salient observation. He looked at
the Church as the 'new friends' that were going to help you realize the fuller
spiritual and emotional potential that resides in you. You can't become the
best of what you are meant to be by yourself. You need other people to help you
do that. And that is why we are here for each other.
We need this
community, particularly if we can't just change our total surroundings,
particularly if we find ourselves day in and day out in vocations that are
filled with negativity, cynicism, aggression and a cut throat ethos. You know
what I am talking about. That is why so many of us like to follow the pursuits
of New
Jersey's most popular citizen… Tony Soprano. The writers were very
clever. You see Tony engaged with some very rough characters in his work,
violent people that do to others before they get it done to themselves. And then
he comes home to the same suburban house we all have, reads the same
Star-Ledger delivered to our homes, and deals with the same problems his kids
have in school that we have. We identify with him and it is not that hard to
see I don't think.
All you have
to do is read through the e-mail correspondence between the traders at Enron to
realize that day in day out that same cut throat, albeit non-bloody, do unto
others as long as you can get away with it… that is what a whole lot of us are
surrounded by. Cynicism, duplicity, manipulation, negativity… it is all around
us. And we can't entirely escape it unless, we just pack up and with enough
resources, move to Vermont, which is an option.
But we do need
new friends. That is one of the endearing things about Tony Soprano. The
viewers are saying to themselves, that boy needs some new friends. He could be
healed.
So can you. St. Paul said, "seeing as how you are
surrounded by so great a cloud of witnesses." And you too are compassed
about by your balcony people that are cheering for you. The church isn't a
perfect place. It is not magical. But it is intentionally focused on the higher
reasons for which we live. We seek here, what St. Paul used to call the 'renewing of our
minds, the transforming of our Spirits.'
We are
complicated people, parts of us compromised, parts of us small, fearful,
destructive. But when we come through those doors, collectively we re-focus
ourselves for a short while on what is positive, up-lifting, empowering. We are
together, not just to be together, but to help one another become better
people- spiritual, humane, of sturdy character, filled with hope, compassion,
looking to become peaceful, understanding, helpful, informed and insightful. We
want to rub up against nobility. We want to feel that genuine sense of
acceptance that only comes from God, through each other, filled with love,
respect, and reciprocity.
We are
complicated people and there are many dimensions to us that are not entirely
integrated. But, brothers and sisters, let me tell you something. You need new
friends. You need these friends. Amen.
[i]
From an ABC Primetime show. See the text at www.abcnews.go.com/Primetime/Health/story?id=1495038
© 2005
Charles Rush.
All rights reserved.
