Our Communal Strength
By Charles Rush
January 29, 2012
Rm. 12: 3-18, 1st Thessalonians 5: 11-23ANCHOR_EDNREF1
[ Audio
(mp3, 8.3Mb) ]
got a YouTube video from one of my outdoorsmen taken out in Colorado or Wyoming. This rancher had a hole in his back pasture and a baby fawn had fallen into the hole. His wife had filmed the Doe trying to reach her fawn to no avail and when the rancher got home, he got the fawn out of the hole but the fawn had injured itself in the fall, so the rancher mended her leg and put her in a straight jacket so that she couldn't move around either.
They tried to
feed the fawn milk of some kind but that wasn't working. So in the morning, the
rancher's wife left the fawn out back in the harness. And the video is the
mother checking the place for safety. Slowly by slowly, she wends her way
through the evergreens, and lays down next to her fawn
to nurse. This goes on day after day for about a week and then the rancher one
evening takes off the straight jacket and releases the fawn. The fawn runs a
few steps out into the clearing and stops. At this point the mother is waiting
in the cover of the evergreens but when the fawn takes a bit too long, the mother
comes out and starts preening the fawn. Eventually they all disappear into the
cover of the evergreens.
The humans walk
away back into the ranch house with the film still running. They notice that
the mother has come back into the clearing and is standing there alone, looking
straight ahead at the house. The humans aren't sure what to make of it.
Finally, the rancher opens the back door and walks out towards the mother,
right up close to her. She looks up at the rancher, turns and walks away. Like mothers the world over, she was saying ‘thanks' to the man who
saved the life of her child.
All higher
mammals, deer included, share enough of the same brain structure for the
emotional make up of their psyches, that we can
communicate with them, even without using words. Fear, happiness, joy, anxiety,
and gratitude we all express in pretty much the same way, so that we can
understand enough of what the other is trying to communicate that we get it.
I use this
example of kindness and gratitude because it is one of those morals that we
probably share almost completely with all higher primate. We don't know this
for sure, of course, but what we do know is that kindness and gratitude are
fundamental for human happiness. Mark Twain once said that “kindness is a language
which the deaf can hear and the blind can see” and he was right about that.
You've seen
those hippie bumper stickers that say, “Practice random acts of kindness and
senseless acts of beauty.” And what a great movement those bumper sticker
started. My favorite from the Christmas season is the Philadelphia Opera
company showing up at Macy's in Philadelphia, the store that is home to one of
the world's biggest and best organs. Right in the middle of a shopping day, the
organist starts in on the “Halelujah Chorus” from
Handel's “Messiah” and professional singers dressed for shopping throughout the
store start belting out “The Lord God omnipotent reigneth”.
It is interesting that about 10% of the other shoppers join in and almost all
of the children start twirling around in some form of dance, practically
everyone is smiling a deep smile. It has an infectious quality to it.
Those early
Christians who first inspired this way of thinking, idealists they were. But
who would have known that they were also onto something pragmatically. You want
to dramatically boost your happiness factor in the world? It turns out that
initiating some kindness doesn't just help others, it
boosts your personal esteem and self-worth too.
I was with my
son back in his old neighborhood in Manhattan, standing in a line that goes out
the door and down the street to the little baking shop that serves fresh croissants
and coffee to the locals, incredibly cheap. No décor, just great food, and the
place is jammed with cab drivers, delivery people,
stock men that run our fair city. Just before Christmas, a typical Saturday
morning, lot of grumpy people in a hurry in a long line. Suddenly it starts to
move quickly. You get inside, and the owner points to a guy walking out of the
shop and says, ‘take what you want, he paid for it.'
What happened
next was interesting. A bunch of people hollered ‘thanks' to the guy or ‘Merry
Christmas to you'. And he nodded back. The owner pulled the pastry rack from
behind the counter and people were politely waiting for others to take one. No
pushing, no shoving. Suddenly everyone was relaxed a bit, not in so much of a
hurry, and they started talking to each other. I leaned over to my son and
said, “A party wants to break out here.” What a change in mood.
Occasionally,
if you are really blessed, you might be able to do something like that with
people that you love. Last week, my sons and son-in-law met at Madison Square
Garden to see the Knicks play, a Christmas present to each other. Two came from
work, one from campus and my niece and nephews were in town as well, all just
out of college or about to be. We invited them all over for appetizers and beer
before the game. My daughter found out about it and came over from Art School
with a friend. They are all bubbling with chatter, so grown up. I've almost
forgotten about those times chasing them down the beach when they were supposed
to be in bed on vacation, the attitude from an earlier phase. Now they are
sharing their plans and I'm watching them, remembering sitting with their
parents when we were the same age, with all our dreams and hopes.
I'm broke from
Christmas, from college, from the Knicks, but the waitress comes around and it
is a privilege to be able to be present for this, pick up the tab- college kids
just love free beer- and I'm thinking that I only get to go round once and what
a blessing to be me.
Who could say
what a multiplying effect that such an act could have but it could be
considerable. St. Paul taught us to “do good for one
another and give thanks”. It turns out that when the Psychology department at
the University of Pennsylvania started to isolate out the factors in our life
that make us genuinely, deeply fulfilled, high among them is doing something
kind for others.
Perhaps you've
seen the articles in popular magazines that have social scientists wondering if
we have an ‘altruism gene' because we have so many examples of people doing
acts of kindness that they couldn't possibly expect to get anything back from.
Why in the world would they do it? Part of the answer is that we find it
deeply, personally fulfilling.
Psychologists
figured out a way to measure the difference and they tested their hypothesis on
that never ending legion of laboratory rats, our college freshmen. In one class
they had to design a random act of kindness, go and do it, and then report to
the class what they had done and how it went. To the professors' surprise, the
challenge became quickly subscribed and they had more people wanting to tell
their story in class than they could accommodate, so they set up extra classes
to let people describe how their experiments went. As it turns out both pieces
were important, being able to exercise kindness and being able to share that
with other people.
One of the
professors in the project noted that this is probably indirect confirmation of
what they've generally noted in the study that our happiness comes from having
significant people in our lives that we can share with. We all need someone
that we can talk to. In fact, if you have someone that you could call up at
midnight if you needed to in order to share something that is really important
to you. I read one article that showed that if you are lucky like that you will
live longer than people who don't because we are so rooted
socially like that. You need your people. We are just wired like this.
A couple weeks
ago, I turned on my phone and the baby in Art School had called me and left
like 4 messages on my phone. She's only left me 5 messages in her whole life,
so four in one day. I'm like most Dads. Generally when college kids call me,
they need to speak to their banker, so I was prepared, called her back, walking
outside the house so I didn't wake up Kate at the late hour.
She picks up
right away and starts in on this story about waking up to smoke in the middle
of the night, flames in the apartment next to hers. She had to wake people up.
The fire fighters came right in through her windows and glass is everywhere.
She had to get dogs and cats out of locked apartments. The two boys that lived
next door were good friends. One of them fell trying to escape and died. One of
the animals didn't make it. I'm standing outside in my boxer shorts just kind
of speechless, knowing the trauma of trying to rescue when not everyone will
make it out.
In the middle
of this tale, she kind of blurted out, “I just needed to call my Dad.” I had
one of those parental moments, when it all comes crystal clear for a moment.
“I'm just grateful to hear from you.” Doesn't matter what kind of condition you
are in, we'll deal with it. And, I guess, more than that, I suppose I'm
grateful that I'm on someone's short list of sturdy people you call when you
are scared to death. It has the savor of appreciation. Paul said, ‘encourage
one another, build one another up' and ‘give thanks'. They go together when we
are in positive mode, when we evolve into our appreciative selves. Those
positive relationships are what bring us fulfillment. Our fuller, spiritual
selves bloom in the social experiment that is the church.
The
psychiatrist George Vaillant studied 268 men from Harvard College, classes of
31-33 across their entire lives. It remains one of the most detailed
longitudinal studies of its kind. There were a lot of people that were
incredibly successful, among them Ben Bradlee of the
Washington Post and President John F. Kennedy. Some of the men led very
integrated lives, one of them literally died falling down drunk.
As the study
went along, Vaillant found himself drawn more and more to the question of what
it is the makes for a richer, more meaningful life? He concluded, in short
hand, it is the capacity to be loved, to allow other people to love you.
He came to this
conclusion towards the end of his study, after most the men that he studied had
died and he was able to look back over the course of their entire lives. The
longer that he actually did the study, his perspective shifted.
Psychologists
are fond of developing their insights in percentages, and Professor Vaillant
quantified quadrants of influence on our well-being in life and that changed as
he studied people in relationship to their whole life. Something like 10% of
things that affect your well being are just beyond your control (events of the
world), something like 10% are related to health, 40% are more or less under
your control (what you do with your life, what disposition you bring to the
day), but a very large percentage, which doesn't manifest itself so prominently
until the second half of life, is how you respond to tragedy and misfortune.
When you throw
that into the mixture and you zoom out on the whole picture, how we respond to
tragedy is largely shaped by how we let people into our lives, as Professor
Vaillant noticed, whether we have the capacity to allow ourselves to be loved.
It is, in all likelihood, a good window into our core being.
You may recall
from college that Jean Paul Sartre once quipped that “Hell is other people” and
in his play “No Exit”, he depicts hell as being in a French parlor for an evening
with people that you absolutely cannot stand and there is nowhere to go.
Such a tame,
cosmopolitan view of this world and the next… But the inverse is probably close
to the truth, heaven is pretty close to connecting
with people that you really want to be with. We humans seem to be hard wired
for connection like that. Professor John Cacioppo at
the University of Chicago has studied the phenomenon of loneliness and written
an entire book on how deeply it motivates us to make connections as we go through
our lives and how we are driven to sublimate our selfish drives as we age
towards altruistic goals in order to tend to relationships because it is in
these relationships that we experience our deeper fulfillment and meaning.
I was reading
that chapter on the train coming home from New York and I noticed the guy
across from me reading a magazine that featured a picture of two college kids
on a bench in front of a storied Ivy library. The boy is looking at his ipod with his ear buds in place and the girl next to him is
absorbed in her lap top. The Title for the article was ‘The Courage to Date'
undoubtedly reflecting on the particular challenges that we have put up for the
rising generation.
And it is not
that it isn't true. About eight years ago, when they offered the first course
on “Happiness” at Harvard University a quarter of the student body signed up to
take the course. When the Psychology department actually polled the student
they found that, despite the fact that they were incredibly successful, the
student body was not happy in the least.
A number of
observations came out of the study but one huge underlying reason was that the
students were so absorbed in their academic work that they didn't develop a
network of meaningful friendships. In fact, arriving on campus and finding out
they weren't going to be at the top any more contributed to their
self-isolation from other people through increased effort,
that actually caused a slight atrophying of their normal social life.
What they discovered was a kind of self-feeding mechanism where increased
performance led to increased isolation which led to a decrease in fulfillment.
“Reach out and
touch, somebody else,” sang Diana Ross. Or as St. Paul says, “Encourage one
another, build one another up, show respect for each other, help one another to
flourish, help the weak, strengthen those that fear, be patient with everyone…
and may peace sanctify your home.”
I want to thank
our hosts from last night, many of whom are not here today, cleaning up from a
good time on Saturday night. There are days when I worry about the state of the
Church in the future, but when I look over a list of groups of you eating
dinner together and having a conversation, it is very inspiring. Literally, I
would like to be at every table because we have so many interesting and
engaging people in the congregation.
It is said that
we are only as strong as the web of people that are around us and the moral of
the morning is find some substantive folks, share yourself, open yourself to
others with the potential for heartbreak and all the rest because it is the deeper, better way. And it is not just sharing your
life with anyone but hopefully with people that make your morally stronger,
people that develop beauty, people with spiritual gravitas. It is out of that
hope that we include in our inner circle, some of the people sitting to your
left and to your right.
For we are all
on a pilgrimage together, meandering in the direction of the Promised Land,
learning from each other such profundity and wonder that this life has to
offer. May God bless us and keep us and may we stumble upon the abundant life
together. Amen.
