Continuous Personal Change
By Charles Rush
March 13, 2011
2 Corinthians 5: 17-18
[ Audio
(mp3, 7.6Mb) ]
ris Goldovsky[i], who died in 2001, used to do the commentary on Saturday afternoon for the radio broadcasts of the Metropolitan Opera. But he has recently entered the lexicon of academia, not for his insightful commentary, but for a story that he wrote up that is illustrative of human nature.
He was teaching
a piano student one afternoon and he had his student playing a piece by Brahms.
He is walking around the room when he hears the student make a mistake and he
asks her to play it again. She does and makes the same mistake, so he walks
over behind her and looks down at the sheet music and notices that she is
playing the notes on the printed page but someone had made a mistake in the
printed score.
He calls the
publisher and finds out that the same mistake was on all of the editions that
the publisher had produced. So now he is curious. How is it that the composer, the
editor, the proofreader missed it? He
calls back and discovers that he is the first person to report it. So how is it
that scores of other musicians, among them, the most accomplished professionals
in the field of piano, have not noticed this error?
So now he had
some of these very famous people play the piece. He told them that he was
giving them a piece of music and that the music had a misprint in it someplace.
He asked them to play it and to tell him where the misprint was. They could
play the piece several times if they wished. No one ever found the error. “Only
when Goldovsky told his subjects which bar, or
measure, the mistake was in did most of them spot it”. (It is in Brahms's Opus
76, no. 2, 42 measures from the end).
What they
discovered eventually was pianists who sight read music, particularly the
really gifted ones, don't actually read the individual
notes. They see the flow and they anticipate how it should go next. By the way,
this is also part of the reason that you walk into the room and can't remember
what it was that you came there to begin with. You don't actually remember
nearly as much as you think you do because your mind doesn't actually organize
itself that way. You remember it again when you have the context. We focus on
the wider flow, not particular data items.
Goldovsky stumbled on what we will eventually understand
better. If you've ever wondered why it is that the smartest guys in the room,
all have the same data in front of them, listening to a sophisticated Ponzi scheme pitched by a company like Enron… If you've
ever wondered why they couldn't see this Crash happening before it happened,
this is a large part of the answer why. If you've ever wondered, like our
Congressmen wondered, how it could be that guys educated at Yale and Wharton
Business school missed the obvious signs and ran the
banking system straight into the reef, the answer largely is that they don't
see it coming.
Reinhold
Niebuhr once observed that the Christian understanding of human nature as
universally though not inevitably sinful is the only Christian doctrine that is
empirically verifiable. We are unable to edit our own work effectively. We are
not very helpful critics of ourselves. We know about our short-comings but they
don't stand out to us the way that they do to say, our spouse after a couple
years of marriage.
I used to
naively make some throw away remark after church when I was young like, “Oh I
think that sermon went pretty well this morning”. Kate would say, “And it would
have been even better if I were a man but since I'm
not there wasn't so much I needed to hear.” Now I only ask for feed-back if I'm
really ready to receive feedback.
We just don't
get it exactly. We are too close to the material. It takes the veritable child,
someone from outside us, to notice that the Emperor is wearing no clothes. That
is really what Lent is all about. I believe that this is a large part of what
we are seeing across the Middle East. It is the twitter generation all getting
together and noticing the mistake in the music score that the Old Regime has
been playing past for the previous four decades. Those leaders were aware that
they had problems but they were completely clueless at just how great their
problems actually were.
Part of Lent is
simply acknowledging to God and to ourselves that we don't see the extent of
our own hypocrisy and so we pray in all humility, “Create in me a clean heart”.
It is a season for reflection on one thing in our life that needs change, one
thing that needs to be addressed.
We Christians
undoubtedly moved this reflection to this time of the year because fasting and
discipline are so much a part of our natural world in this season. I was up at
dawn last weekend crunching through the remains of the snow near the
Appalachian trail, easing into the Flat brook river,
the snow swirling at the dawn. I saw a fox moving on the banks of the stream.
He hadn't eaten much lately. This is a long season when nature doesn't yield
much, a season
where all of nature is in a fast.
What is the one
thing that you need to do to improve yourself? What is the one thing you would
like to see changed in your family? What one thing would you like to introduce
to your marriage or your family that would move us towards excellence?
St. Paul tells
us that ‘in Christ we are a new creation. Behold everything has become new.'
Our lives are a process of continuing change, hopefully in the direction of
excellence. But we change; we need different things in different seasons of our
lives; we have different challenges. We invoke the Spirit of God in our lives,
and open a new chapter.
Right now, we
are living through what one writer has described as “a democratization of
choice”. He means that an unprecedented percentage of the human race has an
unprecedented range of choices. It is a direct result of the complexity of our
civilization, markets global in reach and communication technology that makes
them immediate and inter-connected.
How will we
make wise choices with it all just out there?
You can simply
go with the flow… of course. Oscar Wilde once said that “the only way to get
rid of temptation is to yield to it.” He calls to mind St. Augustine's
struggles with discipline. When he was about my age, St. Augustine prayed, “O
God, grant me chastity and conscience… but not yet.”
St. Augustine,
who so aptly put the human problem, reflecting on his own inconsistency,. He said, “I have become a problem unto myself”.
But we know
that self-control in an age of wide-open choice is increasingly important and
will continue to be more so. 200 years ago, Edmund Burke observed that “We are
qualified for civil liberty in exact proportion to our disposition to put moral
chains on our appetites.” That dictum has proved truer and truer, and it is
spreading rapidly across the nations.
If we zoom out
for a minute, only in the last few centuries have we evolved from being driven
pretty much by an ethic of survival. Today, we raise our children in a world of
so much choice that we have to instill in them a new ethic of self-control.[ii]
Christians have
long known how important it is to flex the muscles of moral self-control, if
only to find out how weak they actually have become. These days, we have
studies about its virtue in our children. Of the many, many variables that we
have studied to predict how well people will do in college, the only reliable
correlation revolves around self-control, far better predictor of your grades
in college than say, your score on the SAT.[iii]
Delayed
gratification and self-control correlate strongly with self-direction, fewer
hours watching TV and other passive entertainment, self-respect, respect for
social norms, reconciliation skills, and emotional well-being.
Likewise, poor
self-control correlates strongly with crime of every variety, an increased risk
of violence, victimization, truancy, cheating, accidents of various kinds, and
substance abuse.
The anecdotal
evidence at the moment suggests that instilling self-control is getting more
complicated, partly because our families are together as a family group fewer and fewer hours during the week, partly
because the breadth of entertainment movies and videos that are designed around
aggressive behavior and violence that subtly desensitizes our children to
restraint.
So we see it
all the time: we have to deal with children that interrupt or blurt out a question,
children that are quick to blow up, children that have a hard time waiting
their turn (and some of them are 40 years old in Penn Station), children that
hit and shove to resolve disputes, children that need a lot of reminding about
the boundaries and the rules, children that have a hard time bouncing back from
a frustrating situation.
I have good/bad
news for us too. Robert Coles at Harvard
has shown what the Greeks knew to be the case 2500 years ago, that the easiest
way for our children to develop an internal moral compass is by watching us.
Most of us here, in all likelihood do a wonderful job on the base, structural
issues of self-control. We are employed, we've have provided our children with
a safe, clean home and regular food. It is a very solid wider context of
self-control.
In a piece that
I was just reading on developing self-control in this generation, two things
caught my eye, where it gets a little murkier: anger and impulse buying.
We are models
of decorum until we aren't, so it goes. One of my children, modeling the mercurial
man that I was at thirty, chose as their first words: shortly after Mama, Dada,
Wawa… Just as clear as a bell from Dad, the child said, “Damn traffic”. I was
like a skilled like a negotiator in Middle East peace when it came to resolving
play ground disputes. But put me in a packed car with 3-4 kids, a dog on the
Garden State Parkway sitting still in the summer. I had issues of consistency
with my temper. I've grown considerably but not before I'd already modeled poor
impulse control for the next generation to undo.
It could have
been different, as one traveler wrote about recently. “It was a Friday night at
the St. Louis airport a few days before Christmas and I was with dozens of
other passengers trying to get home. We were experiencing every traveler's
nightmare: flight attendants had called a last-minute strike. Every passenger
was somehow affected, everyone was on edge, and tempers were flaring. I stood
in a line that seemed endless, slowing working my way up to the counter.
A man had
finally made it to the counter and was with an agent trying to get tickets how
for himself and his young son standing next to him. The encounter began
amicably enough, but as soon as he was told that there were no flights
available that night, nor for the next few days, he'd had enough. I thought he
might explode: his face turned beet red, and he began taking short shallow
breaths. I could imagine what was in that mind and I thought he might act on
those thoughts. He clenched his fists and looked like he was ready to deliver a
blow. But then he glanced down at his small son. That seemed to stop him
momentarily and he told the agent, “Excuse me. I need a minute to myself, before
I do something I may regret.”
Several
passengers glanced nervously at one another, and the ticket agent turned white-
bracing for the worst. All eyes were tensely glued on the man and we saw him
turn his back to the agent. He paused, took a few deep breaths, apparently to clam down' then slowly he turned back to counter calmly. He
said, “Okay, I'm back in control. Now let's work this out so my son can get
home in time for Santa.”
Everyone in the
line behind him… broke out in applause. Self-control among air passengers these
days is a rarity- more common is incivility, vulgarity and rage- so it was
quite a moment. But the best was from the man's son. The little guy had watched
the whole episode and was beaming from ear to ear, and he was clapping his
hands the loudest.”[iv]
It is said that
the single biggest inducement to getting us to do the right thing is the
knowledge that people are watching us. Alas, with our own children, we can make
them disappear into the deep background. But they are watching us and our
actions speak louder than our words.
We have to commit
ourselves to making our home the incubator that grows in self-control. Michele Borba suggests that we develop a family motto for
self-control, “Think then Act” or “Short temper, longer walk”. Moreover, that
we model calming down and introduce those techniques to children like talking
slowly, taking some deep breaths, making a couple laps around the house,
hitting a pillow. And setting a group rule that when people
start getting out of control, they stop talking until they get back in control.
Another creative
family gave out a red plate every so often at the dinner table, which entitle
the bearer to the ‘royal treatment', even though there was no material reward.
You got the red plate by describing something that you had done during the day
that deserves recognition. Children can lift up what they are working hard on
and parents can distinguish character traits that are virtuous that don't get
as much recognition as they should. The goal is to help the rising generation
learn to motivate themselves. And we can pretty easily prime the pump too.
Instead of just saying, “I'm really proud of how hard you worked today”, you
can say, “you
must be proud of how hard you worked today”. We have to creatively figure out
ways that our kids can learn to name their accomplishments, so they can see
themselves growing and getting stronger. Self-control is a muscle that we just
need to flex so we can build good personal habits and a family flow that
encourages thriving.
And, we
Christians know that we are going to need self-control, because we remember, in
Lent that we do not get to escape this life without experiencing suffering, and
ultimately our own death. Without being morbid, in the season of Lent, we look
towards the suffering and death of Jesus, and we remember the spiritual
challenge that is part and parcel of the second half of life, which is always
about loss and limitation, however fulfilling and precious it might also be.
We know that we
will need this character strength to get through some difficult days that are
out there for all of us.
It is always
difficult. A couple years ago, I was down to visit my grandmother in her 99th
year. She had an accomplished life but the very last week of her life, we had
to put her in a nursing home. My grandmother was the Director of a Cancer
clinic in the 50's and 60's that became a big hospital. That was as high as a
business woman could go in the South back then. I remember her always being in
charge when I was a toddler. She was always put together,
her hair was always put together, crisply dressed and professional.
Now she was in
a wheel chair. The last few months of her life, she let her hair go natural
white. I walked into this nursing home to visit her. She didn't want me to see
her like that. I didn't want to see her like that either.
I tried to make
light of it. I said, “Gramma, what does it feel like
to be closing in on 100?”
Without a hint
of nostalgia, she said, “Charles, I'm afraid I've stayed too long at the
dance.”
“Yes ma'am. I
reckon when you see the sun coming up, you know the party is pretty close to
being over, don't you? Are you ever ready to go really?”
“It's not quite
the same now that almost all of my people are gone.”
“Yes ma'am.” I
said. “I want you to know that I'm going to raise my children like you taught
me to.”
“Darling, I
know you are. Your children bless me.”
I told her a
little something about each one. I could see she was in a lot more pain than
she let on and that she was way more medicated than I realized but she wanted
to hear and she was nothing if not well mannered to the very end. She said, “I
need to close my eyes now. You go on see your brother and let this old lady get
some rest.”
“One more kiss Grandma?”
“Come here and
get some sugar.”
I kissed her on
the head, just like she used to kiss me when I was in diapers. In one short
moment, I knew I was letting go of the end that whole generation, that whole
place in the deep South, that whole era. It has a
scary, shaky, sad quality to it.
I don't know
how much you can really prepare for death but with each one of these you get
closer to your own. So Christians remember that it is out there, that we don't
get to stay around forever, and eventually all of us have to take the turn
towards Jerusalem.
We remember
that a big dimension of life is dealing with loss, set back, frustration. We
know that this tests the character and that self-control will keep us human and
humane in our time of suffering, so we know we simply have to develop it,
whether we want to or not. It is just part of the spiritually rounded life.
And we know,
from watching the life of Jesus, that death can even become redemptive. We know
that even our bleak and absent moments can be taken up in meaning through love.
So, we stand together in hope, knowing that we need each other to get on
through.
We need each
other and we need each other to become sturdy and strong, so we take this
season to focus on self-control in ourselves, in our families, in our
community. What is that you need to do to become stronger,
better rounded, more spiritually whole? For behold, the old is passing away,
everything is becoming new. In Christ, my brothers and sisters, we are a new
creation. Amen.
[i]
This story is practically told verbatim from a piece I read in the New York
Times, Op ed pages. See
Joseph Hallinan, “The Young and the Perceptive”
(Sunday, March 6, 2011).
[ii] I
got this idea from Daniel Akst, We have Met the
Enemy Self-Control in an Age of Excess (New York: Penguin Press, 2011). The
book got a good review in the Wall Street Journal and caught my eye. Akst does a nice job of making use of historical treatments
on self-control from the likes of Aristotle and Homer, while immersing himself
in the current literature from neurology and psychology that emphasize the
importance of self-control in an age of choice.
[iii] Ibid. p.106 and 107. The studies were carried out at the
University of Pennsylvania by Martin Seligman and Angela Duckworth.
[iv] From Building Moral Intelligence by Michele Borba. It is a good book (San Francisco: Jossey Bass, 2001), pp. 92, 93.
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