You Are What You Expect [i] [ii]
By Charles Rush
June 26, 2011
Matthew 6: 33
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(mp3, 6.7Mb) ]
nston Churchill once observed that “A pessimist sees the difficulty in every opportunity; an optimist sees the opportunity in every difficulty.” This was a man well acquainted with this subject matter.
Pessimism seems to abound in certain
fields more than others, economics among them, as most of us here know from
reading their work each and every week. Barry Asmus once said of his colleagues
that economists appear to learn pessimism deeply – after all, "they have predicted eight of the last three
recessions".
The germ for this sermon came from
an article in the New York Times magazine many months ago that relied on a
series of studies on our attitudes towards the future.[iii] We are, of course, an admixture of both
optimism and pessimism. Curiously, people tend to be overly optimistic about
the prospects of their own personal future. That is, they tend to overestimate
their own abilities and they tend to overestimate their own ability to control
the future. We view ourselves as residents of Garrison Keillor's Lake Wobegon,
where "all the men are strong, all the women are good looking and all the
children are above average." The article goes on to suggest that these are
positive illusions that help us to actually venture out to try more than we ever
would if we had a realistic assessment of our situation and our competence.
Others have argued that these
positive illusions persist in our collective attitudes nationally, as suggested
by Nobel Laureate Daniel Kanheman and Jonathon Renshon several months ago in Foreign Policy magazine, to explain how
we got into Iraq and later found ourselves adjudicating a protracted civil war.[iv]
Perhaps you've seen that piece of video feed that has 30 of our politicians
interviewed right at the onset of the invasion of Iraq, answering the question
of where we will be in a year or two, and when will we get out. No one wanted
to answer the question in detail naturally. But, every single one of them was
not only off the mark- but woefully off the mark, on both sides of the aisle. Truth
be told, the rest of us just weren't caught on tape, but we all deserve a big
heaping of humble pie. The authors suggest that this war wasn't so much a
triumph of hawks over doves as it was the triumph of our positive illusions
about our ability to control the future.
Again, curiously, our positive
illusions personally and nationally tend to give way to pessimism when we think
globally. When the lens is opened to zoom out and wide angle, we tend to think
that our best days are behind us and the future portends decline, scarcity, and
controlled chaos. It is almost as if we give voice to our collective
subconscious that we as a species are in the mid-life phase of our evolution,
looking back nostalgically at the warm fuzzy memories, minimizing the struggles
and frustrations, anticipating the dissolution of our collective health and our
eventual terminus.
Apparently the latest round of
research on the general subject of our optimism and pessimism has noted of
'closed-loop feedback mechanisms' that tend to reinforce our basic disposition.
In everyday language, there is a self-fulfilling quality to our outlook on
life. In one interesting study that many of us somewhat acquainted with looked
at gambling comparing pessimists and optimists on their ability to sustain
risk. One presumes that a very similar study could have been done on equity
traders.
Dr. Brian Gibson and Dr. David
Sanbonmatsu[v]
found that optimists tended to remember their victories and minimize their
losses, whereas pessimists were 61% more likely to remember their losses and
minimize their gains at the black jack table. And that way of viewing the world
translates into predictable behavior. In a losing streak, pessimists are more
likely to quit playing earlier and cut their losses before the chips are all
gone. Optimists tend to stay in the game longer, presuming their luck will
turn, even if the odds are stacked against them. It is interesting that we project our disposition onto our behavior
and we also interpret what we actually do in such a way that we refract our
memories to reinforce our disposition to continue to behave that way in the
future.
This is why we have more and more
parents nowadays that reflect on what they are teaching and modeling for their
children because they are aware of the persistence and gravity of our
fundamental dispositions. I once asked my 75 year old mother if she could
summarize in a sentence what she learned from her parents, a tough question to
answer, but often revealing. She said, "The wolf is at the door", reflecting
the experience of those adults that lived through the Great Depression in our
country in the thirties, as well as that reserve and caution so pervasive in my
Dutch ancestors.
It will be interesting to see how
our children answer that question in 4 decades time. Whatever their answer, it
most assuredly will not be 'the wolf is at the door'. But all of us are aware
of the power that we have to shape the next generation and how powerfully we
were shaped by the previous generation.
This is the profound meaning of the
text this morning from Numbers that says "The sins of the Fathers are visited upon the Children unto the third
and fourth generation." For better and worse, the consequences of what
we do, how we live, and the values that we articulate are not only horizontal-
affecting our friends and family around us- they are also vertical, stretching
down the generations in ways that we could not anticipate and perhaps would not
intend.
And one of the important goals of
developing a healthy, responsible sense of self as an adult, is being aware of
how we have been formed, but not letting
that definition exhaustively control our sense of purpose and destiny. The
past is important. It is fundamentally formative. We
cannot entirely escape it. But it needs to be balanced by the pull of our own
future.
This is simply one dimension of what
Jesus suggests in Matthew this morning. "Seek ye first the Kingdom of God and all these other things will be
added to you." In the teaching of Jesus, the Kingdom of God, is the future pull of the Spirit in our lives. It is
the 'not yet', the 'unknown', it is the hope of things not yet seen. It is
promissory in nature. It is collective in nature, so it is bigger than our
personal hopes and dreams, and yet our personal hopes and dreams are part of it
too. Jesus suggests that the pull of the future of God is as powerful and
healing as the push of the past has been controlling and determined.
For most of us this is a gradual
process that works itself out in young adulthood and it continues to be a
challenge throughout our lives.
Kevin Brownson
sat in his car, idling, as he looked up the lawn at this home all a glitter
with the seasonal lights inviting the warmth and peace of winter and perhaps a
fire. He was thinking to himself that it wasn't all that bad, the phrase 'all
that bad' which had been roiling around in his mind like loose change in a
dryer for the past 24 hours.
The previous afternoon, he'd been
sitting with a therapist and his wife, listening to her describe all of his
worst features and some of his best caught in a poor light so as to accentuate
the dimension that even his virtues weren't entirely what they seem. He sat
there in enforced silence- this was the point of the exercise for him to just
listen without being able to respond- getting more and more defensive, thinking
that this description was somewhat unfair and somewhat untrue.
He spent the rest of the evening and
most of the next day coming back to this caricature. Every free moment it
seemed, he would envision this statute of vice that had been depicted for him,
draping it with another adornment of virtue here, an accessory of interesting
characteristic there, so that by the drive home, he could almost envision the
original ugly model and at once the overlay of his redaction so that finally he
had an image of himself that he could recognize as something like who he
actually was.
He kept telling himself that he
really wasn't that bad, that this whole exercise was really unfair and not
helpful. At odd times during the day, he would think of pitching the whole
relationship, pitching his whole life, even though this was not really an
option. Shortly after that thought left him, he would come back to this
dis-ease, this lack of fulfillment, this vague ennui that his wife described.
When he thought about his wife articulating this sentiment, a
defensiveness arose within him, a low-grade rage about the presumption,
the sheer arrogance, the … whole damn exercise was just irritating.
But in a moment, that would pass and
as it did, he was left himself with the unsettling reality that he wasn't
really happy either… And why not? And what constitutes
happiness anyway?
He had driven home that evening past
so many of the landmarks that dotted the scenery of his life, past the hospital
where two of his children were born, passed the elementary school they all
attended, over to the pool to pick one of them up. With each turn, he was
reflecting on how solid and grounded their life was, and that really he'd done
a good job… they'd done a good job.. and life could be a lot worse. And it was good, but… And it
was good, but…
All the time, these images from his own childhood kept bubbling to the surface. They were an
odd collection and occasionally he would try to focus on one of them only to
discover that he couldn't recall many of the details around it anymore. There
he was at St. Leo's school winning an award in 8th grade. There he was walking
out to mid-field with the two other Co-Captains to flip a coin at the beginning
of the football game. There he was camping on what turned out to be a strange
night in Boy Scouts. Good memories really, crisp… at one point, he almost said
out loud to himself, 'a lot of uniforms' and he could see himself as an
Acolyte.
He was remembering how competitive
his brothers all were and the time he broke his brother
Michael's collarbone in a wrestling move that pitched them both off the back
deck.
He was thinking about what he had
achieved, about how he had graduated with honors and how proud his parents
were, the partial scholarship to college, just barely getting into the Big East
law school, and paying for it himself. He could hear the aphorisms that his
father used to extol at the dinner table or after the game- these tidbits of
wisdom on how to succeed, maxims on how to keep a competitive edge.
He nodded his head, half in mirth,
half in derision, at the way that these little maxims to live by almost
completely defined what he knew of his father and how they had been good guides
nevertheless. He was thinking how good he had been at following the rules, how
good he was when everything was defined and you knew what the goal was. And he
was swept with a wave of sorrow that very nearly became a full blown self-pity
thinking of this kid who followed the rules had somehow become this man who
wasn't entirely sure even what the game was around him, full of frustration and
anxiety. Why was this so hard?
He was sitting in his car out in
front of his house, looking up at the lights. It was a nice view. It was a nice
life. He was thinking of himself the way most people thought of himself and he
was thinking of the way his wife viewed him in that therapy session. He looked
up at his neighbors homes
and thought of one image and the other image and suddenly he wanted to cry. The lights were twinkling out of focus when he
said out loud, 'There is so much more… There is so much more to me'.
And there is so much more. You come
to this realization at some point that, without intending it, you have been
living someone else's expectations for you, you've been reading out of someone
else's script. It may be a good script even but it doesn't work because there
is so much more to you than this script asks you to deliver. And there are
these key resources of creativity, there is a sense of being fully engaged and
alive spiritually that you are not accessing. You've been pushed along by the
streams of the past and you have ridden them up to this place but they won't be
enough in and of themselves to unlock that deeper meaning to life that you
hunger for.
Who are you really? What would it
take for you to find that deeper fulfillment? On your best days, in an
imaginative moment, what would you look like if you could really awaken your
spouse so that they were alive and rich in personality, engaged, interesting,…
really alive....Spiritually resonant…. Creative.
The most important dimension to this
challenge comes not from the past but from the future. It is not enough to just
look back on who you were and where you've been. Who are you becoming? Where
are you headed?
That is a much more difficult
question to answer isn't it? And it is not just the unknowing about the future,
it is also the spiritual energy and creative resolve that it takes to paint a
vision. It is much harder to make choices and know deep in your heart that all
this responsibility lies solely with you. It is much easier to beg off this
mission, staying preoccupied with the responsibilities of the challenging present,
as though the present lived day after day, somehow miraculously becomes our
future. It is much easier to give ourselves excuses for why the picture of our
future contains such a stunted and vague cameo by rehearsing family scripts
from the past again and again, giving ourselves a certain well deserved
permission to defer the future until we can resolve the limitations of our
past. This looking back at the past, this focus on the limitations of the past,
it works for a long time, sometimes for a very long time, until you catch
yourself consciously doing it and it becomes painfully evident how banal this
self- justification for mediocrity really is. You realize,
you just have to let it go. True but it can't be definitive.
No, the truth is, that more than
half of the healing of the past actually comes from the healing power of a new
future that pulls you on to where you need to be to realize just how much more
there is of you than the limited script that your well-meaning family had for
you or your dysfunctional family- those myriad layers of constriction they laid
upon you. Jesus taught us "Seek ye first The Kingdom of God". It is
out ahead.
It is true that Jesus gave us quite
a lot of content about the future pull of the Kingdom of God and that content
is an important guide. But part of it you can't define exhaustively because
part of it involves you. Who is it that you are meant to become? That, of
course, can only be answered by you. That question may never be done in
isolation. We are always in relational community and we can't answer that
question maturely or profoundly without some insight and feedback from our
spouse, our loved ones, the beloved community. But
there is important introspection that is required. Who are you essentially? Who
are you becoming?
This is not as simple as defining
your future assets or designing a new home. None of us are entirely sure we
really know who we need to become and most of our significant changes can't
just be bought, leased or employed.
But all of the hope that the future
holds, all of the promise, all of the imagination and creativity… what a
powerful spiritual pull, what a healing spiritual pull.
And all of the realism about seeing
ourselves as we actually are, all of the psychological insight about how we became
who we are in light of the subterranean forces of the past… what a powerful
awareness of self.
Be more… Become more… Read from your
own script…Seek ye first the Kingdom of God, and all these other things will be
added unto you… Amen.
