Sermon: Spiritual Discipline

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Spiritual Discipline

By Charles Rush

February 10, 2008

[ Audio (mp3, 7Mb) ]

ring the season of Lent, we Christians take some time to do some personal exploration. Remembering that Jesus spent 40 days fasting and praying at the beginning of his ministry for strength and clarification, we too make a self-conscious inventory to see how we are doing.

It might have been helpful for us to also have developed some disciplines early in life that we could draw on later like Jesus did. But this is not the American way. We don't have time for all of that. We have to get into college, get into law school, get a decent job, and get moving up the ladder as fast as we can. We don't usually get a sense of the importance of these things until we reach a point where we realize that we are lacking a skill set we could really, really use.

Almost all of us have a wake-up call like that in early mid-life. Shortly after we moved to Summit, I got invited to one of those Coffees that President Clinton had at the White House. We were asked to tell the President one thing the new administration should work on. Wow… Democracy at work. What is not to like about that?

I took the train down. My brother dropped me off at the White House, just a few blocks from where he lives. It is bigger in real life than it looks on TV. They put you through some security clearance and take you into a room where you network with all the other people. It turns out there were only a dozen of us. Some of the people I was introduced to, I recognized from Time magazine. I think there was a second or two when I was wondering what I was doing there, but mostly I was concerned about whether I had food in my teeth.

Shortly we were ushered into the Map room. I wrote my dissertation on World War 2, so the gravitas of the place really settled on me. They call it the Map Room because that is where President Roosevelt directed most of the War effort and they still have those maps on the wall that show the position of our troops and the Germans all across Europe. I remember feeling a little faint just thinking about the Ghosts of the great men Roosevelt here on the phone with Churchill in London.

They had set placements for us with these little placards to show us where to sit, heavy little cards with the White House seal. Mine said “Dr. Rush”… Wow… looks impressive, prestigious.

Then a staffer comes in, explains the drill and after a minute a Secret Service guy with that microphone in his ear, walks through the door and says, “Ladies and Gentlemen, the President of the United States.” This brings out the hibernating Boy Scout in me and everyone else as we all immediately stand up. The President comes in, says hello to every person, as a photographer snaps a shot of the two of you shaking hands.

You sit down and then you go around the room and every person gets like 90 seconds to tell the President what he should be thinking about. I don't actually remember much of this to tell the truth. It was very engaging, very interesting. I made a joking comment and everyone laughed. Shortly after that, I was just buoyed along with elation. At that moment, I was just in it. Only later could I see that it was the euphoria of power. I just had this sense that I was getting smarter, wittier and confident that I could accomplish some really big stuff.

Then it's over. You shake hands with all these people again, swap cards. You walk out of the front of the White House, past a group of photographers that are checking to see if you are somebody. I was probably trying to walk like I was somebody, you get past the security gate, hail a cab. I'm feeling heady and I'm like “Take me to the Kremlin or the Hague wherever…

I called my wife, told her all about it, which undoubtedly covered more detail than she wanted to hear. She finally said, “Honey, sounds like a great day but it also sounds like big dog better get home and back on his porch before he gets in trouble.” Spiritually, how right she was. I had an existential appreciation of the reality that politicians and top business leaders have to traverse day in and day out. I could understand how easy to make foolish choices when you are pumped up, particularly when temptation comes at you all of the time, and people around you are routinely telling you that you are exempted from a strict interpretation of the rules. It takes a lot of character to negotiate this world and keep your balance. It takes a lot of internal discipline.

It is a very important issue and I realized that I had been through rigorous academic discipline in my years at the university but not through nearly enough discipline that I could make constructive use of power. Problem…

Moral and spiritual character are not really developed as a matter of intellect. The biggest challenge in morals is not a question of ‘knowing' what is right and wrong. The biggest challenge is actually ‘doing' what is right rather than wrong.

Aristotle used to say that morals are a question of having good habits, of doing ‘excellent' or ‘virtuous' things as a matter of routine. The Athenians understood that the only way to really teach this is to develop excellent habits in very young people and rehearse them over and over and over again until they become second nature.

You know that this is the case with a tennis serve, with a fly fishing cast, with playing your violin. You do it over and over and over again until it is in your deep memory and you don't actually think about it anymore. Any hack golfer knows that the greatness of golf is not watching the pros make those incredible shots through the trees and on to the green. It is going to watch them on the driving range hit 30 shots in a row right where they want to put them.

I was watching Roger Federer, probably one of the greatest tennis players ever, make gravity defying shot after shot in the Australian Open last week. It is just stunning to watch. It reminded me of an interview I heard with the mother of Bjorn Borg, another of the greatest tennis players ever. The interviewer asked her at what point she knew her son might be great? Did he show any interest in the game as a child? Mrs. Borg dropped her gaze, peered over her glasses incredulously and said, “Even in first grade, he played tennis hour after hour, hitting the ball against our garage door. It almost drove me insane.” I bet it did. And he drove a lot of competitors insane as an adult, one shot after another, after another, after another. He was like a machine.

Moral character is developed the same way. Moral character is not principally about making some heroic action in an emergency and it is not principally about having exceptional insight in an ambiguous situation. It is about doing the right thing over and over and over again until it becomes second nature.

This model, for better and worse, comes to us from the military. The Athenians who prided themselves on their intellectual pursuits and their cultural sophistication and their humanitarian approach to political life, acknowledged that when it came to moral character and moral discipline, the Spartans were superior. They were superior because they had a rigorous- some would now say Draconian and cruel- approach to turning boys into soldiers. How do you teach men to overcome the fear of pain unto death? How do you instill discipline to follow orders when you are being overwhelmed by the anarchy that happens in the midst of battle? It is not a question of the mind, nor is that virtue one exceptional act of heroism.

No, it is about drilling over and over and over again until the discipline of teamwork is second nature and you are able to do it whatever the reward or risk. Unfortunately, this insight has been best learned in the service of training to kill but that is because the very real fear in battle is about as debilitating as any challenge men are given to know. It is the hardest part of our character to master.

Parents of teenagers still get this… Discipline to overcome fear of death, hell, we would settle for someone that picks up their room. We have a structural lacuna in our educational model that everyone recognizes at some level. At 17, what our sons really need the most for their holistic development is a rigorous structure with no exceptions, so that they really develop habits that they need for independent living and responsible adulthood. What we give them is a paid trip to college with probably more choices, more freedom, and less accountability than they will ever have at any time in their life. We leave it up to them to develop disciplines of responsibility on their own. And we scratch our heads wondering how our boys make such foolish decisions as the Duke Lacrosse teams decision to hire strippers for their team party when they are all drunk. But they come from such good families? Left to their own, given a very generous stipend, allowed the freedom to do so, I think this is pretty much what you get every single time.

I don't mean to pick on Duke Lacrosse as one of my sons would have been on that team if he had made the grades. He would have been the drunkest one at the party and probably would have escorted the strippers around. But instead of his first 9 weeks being at college, he spent 9 weeks at Army Basic Training- no alcohol, no money, no free time, no exceptions to the rules for any reason whatsoever.

I remember him standing at attention for an extra 10 minutes, as I was detained, when he was given a short leave after Basic training was done. We got in the car and he said, “Dad you're driving 32”. I said “So what?” He said, “The speed limit is 30”. Ft. Benning, Georgia, they don't drive 36 or 31. They drive 30. Period. We got some lunch, he told me that it was time to get back by 13:30. This is a kid that probably had 25-30 detentions for tardiness his senior year… Now I'm the indolent one who needs to take the rules seriously.

I hardly ever meet teenage boys who wouldn't be better off for spending a year in a Boot camp world with strong structure, definite lines of authority, and a focus entirely on responsibility and team-work.

We do not have any system in place that can teach them the inherent value of discipline as a society, so we either develop them on our own in limited fashion or we don't and suddenly realize the value of them mid-life when we aren't hitting our potential because of their lack.

In its profound meaning, Lent is a check-up, so to speak, from the soul up. It is an honest look into the mirror. It starts with taking stock of how you are doing in growing towards becoming the person you are intended to become. By now, you have a pretty good inkling of who that woman is, who that man is becoming. You have a pretty good idea of your strengths and your weaknesses.

There is the wonderful episode in the movie Field of Dreams where Kevin Costner and James Earl Jones, go looking for Archie Graham. Archie Graham was a real life minor league baseball player for Charlotte in the old North Carolina baseball league. He got called up to the New York Giants on June 29, 1905. He got to play one inning as an outfielder but he never actually got to bat in the major leagues.

Archie Graham lived out the rest of his life as a doctor in a small town in the Midwest. Most of us weekend warriors consider his life a tragedy of sorts- to get all the way to Ebbets field but not be able to bat. So Kevin Costner and James Earl Jones expect to find a guy that is wistful, perhaps bitter when they finally find him, now a very old man with not much longer to live.

They ask him, looking back on his life, ‘wasn't it a tragedy that you only got to play the game for 5 minutes?' He smiles at the, thinking about that day when he was twenty, reflecting back on the 60 something years after that day and he says, “Son, if I'd only gotten to be a doctor for five minutes, now that would have been a tragedy.”

He had hopes and dreams, but at some point, it started to dawn on him what his ‘vocation' really was -- not just his job, his calling. Baseball was a love, but he started to figure out exactly who it was that he was becoming. He was meant to become a doctor, a husband, a grandfather, a community leader in a small town. You have a pretty good idea of what you are shaping up to become.

What is standing in your way from becoming excellent in your calling to become who you are meant to become? What is it that you need to focus on? What discipline do you now need that you never learned? Patience? Discernment? Becoming a consensus builder? Getting past vengeance? Dealing with anger? What is one issue that you could stand some real work on in order to develop the character that will help you become an excellent leader? Parent?

We are told that Jesus retreated for 40 days and fasted with prayer. Scripture tells the story of the life of Jesus like he had a sense of his destiny and what he needed to do. The Bible suggests that he knew it would be very difficult and require spiritual fitness. I suspect that he did.

You don't have to be the Son of God to know that if you stand up to the Roman authorities, you will be tortured and probably die. No more than Dr. King had a pretty good idea that marching for Civil Rights would likely get him shot. Jesus probably didn't need an inner connection with God to figure that his destiny was going to be difficult. And you don't need some penetrating moral or psychological insight to figure out what your issue is that is keeping you from excellence.

What can you devise for yourself that will bring this issue to your mind, front and center, for the next 40 days? What can you devise for yourself that will allow you to work on it in some concrete way, just a few minutes each day, so that you are getting stronger and have a sense that you are mastering your character? What can you do to improve you?

I hope you will take 40 days to apply some spiritual discipline in this one area. You will be better for it. Your family will be better for it. We will all be better for it. Carpe Diem. Amen.