Sermon: The Darkness has Not Overcome It

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The Darkness has Not Overcome It

By Charles Rush

March 4, 2012

[ Audio (mp3, 6.9Mb) ]

e Gospel of John opens with this majestic hymn that we usually read on Christmas Eve in the dark, “the light shines in the darkness and the darkness has not overcome it” and “He dwelt among us full of Grace and Truth”. It is a reminder that the very telos of our lives is that we embody grace and truth.

Perhaps you saw Karen Grouse's piece in the Friday sports section on Tiger Woods. It is interesting that the press cannot let go of “Tiger Wood, the Morality Tale”. It is true that golf is one of those games that that is determined as much by your head as your skill set. How much truer that is with an audience. Anyone can hit a great shot, strolling alone. With a hundred people watching you, that is quite a different thing. It is also true that sports at the top level is so much about confidence and getting your mojo going and keeping it going.

Tiger Woods, still a stunning success by any imaginable standard, just cannot seem to win. The guy that couldn't lose, just cannot quite put it together for four rounds anymore. The putts just aren't falling. The guy who has 71 tournament victories, winner of 14 major championships, at the peak years of his career, hasn't won a single tournament since his text messages gave us way more graphic detail about his sex life than any of us needed to know. What is it that is missing here? What gives?

Apparently, this week, his swing coach is about to release a new book in which he speculates a bit on what has gone wrong. Some reporter asked him about it and when he didn't answer the guy kept on with the question until Tiger cut him the glare. Apparently, when Woods was the undisputed champion of the world, he would offer that same glare which backed everyone down because he was such a big item that no one could really afford to make him mad. That exchange set off all the reporters. Ms. Grouse titled her piece, “Humbled, but still short of Humility”. Ms. Grouse wrote, “With Woods not playing his best golf, his air of entitlement comes across less regal than when he was golf's sovereign ruler.” Ouch.

Then she calls a Public relations expert, seeking some comment on how this interview should have been handled. This is what the guy says, “Tiger's team missed a prime opportunity to take the high road with a more dignified public response; Team Tiger has done little in three years' time to effectively reassure the oft-forgiving public that their hero has learned the lessons of being justifiably humbled.”

And when they asked him what Tiger should have done? “Bottom line” writes the public relations expert, “Team Tiger needs a life coach.”

I suspect secretly, most of us are hoping that the correlation between character and success in life is not too tight because we are a lot more confident about our ability to become successful in our careers than we are at developing substantive character in our lives. Character is an elusive thing. Certainly it is one of those things that you don't realize how important it is until you realize that you don't have it or until someone really close to you tells you that you don't have it. Forgiveness is critical for our spiritual quest because almost all of us, at some point in our lives, do really stupid things. I love the line that reporters often use at the end of these tales of incredibly boneheaded mistakes made by young men. One little line at the end, “Alcohol was involved.” Alcohol does have a way of clarifying, concentrating the ‘essence of stupid' in boys and men alike. But it is not entirely the cause. It simply magnifies our character flaws and gives the worst part of us a vent since the control panel has been temporarily disabled.

It is probably harder to hear that we lack character for the serious mistakes we make sober, the parts of our character that just don't show up in the clutch and let our loved ones down. But, we don't usually actually stop and even think about this until we absolutely have to because our loved ones are making us take a look at it. It reminds me of my grandfather talking to us when we were boys. He would say, “A very few men learn from reading. Some men learn from watching others. But the vast majority have to pee on the electric fence.” Only decades later did I understand that there are some things that you just don't get until you are of a certain age, have failed, and have to start again.

I stumbled on the importance of character through probably half a dozen different examples of divorce in the middle of life. Like one weekend when I was asked to fill in for a charity golf outing back when you used to get invited to charity golf outings. I was playing with a couple guys that I would never see again. I was in my mid-forties and these guys were right at forty.

My partner for the day had great presentation. Firm handshake, look you dead in the eye. He graduated from some place like Amherst and had played sports in college, had a varsity letter and the whole bit. MBA from one of the premier programs, married a very cute girl. They had three or four children, also all very handsome. He had worked his way through the programs at one of the major banks, had left with other guys in his group to start their own private equity group. He was very interesting to talk to because they were doing a lot of investment in bio-technology. He knew a lot about a lot.

But he was clearly distracted, either talking on the phone the whole time or emailing on his blackberry. We were getting crushed out of the gate, by hole three, I couldn't resist and I walked over near him and said, “Crappy week?” He looked back and me and said, “Crappy life”. At first, he rehearsed the well known litany of drama's that comes from having teenagers with an attitude, understandable enough.

Eventually, he mentioned that he'd been up since before dawn because of his wife. Now I know the round is toast unless I can carry our team all alone, so I decide to do the compassionate thing and ask a follow up question, a huge mistake in my profession. Who knows whether it was because of my role or because he knew we would probably never run into each other again, he started giving me the unvarnished appraisal of his marriage of fifteen years.

They had been gradually growing independent from one another for a while. A lot of it he attributed to simply being away so much of the time, working the mad hours when he was younger and then traveling more and more as he became more successful. He felt like he was popping in on his children's life, even though he had a fair amount of phone contact and email contact with his family, what he missed was being able to just be home and be with them more than he had. This was clearly a big frustration.

But then his wife got off on a journey to kind of find herself. A few years earlier, the two of them had decided to make a commitment to giving back, and his wife had taken the lead on finding a charity to support. She found a charity that was doing some really interesting self-development work in a little country like Malawi in Africa. They gave some money for a clean water project over there. I think she took one or two of their children with her at some point for stage two of this development project and started getting more and more involved.

Eventually they had a fund-raiser for this charity out in Westchester where they lived and they were big donors for this cause. Somewhere in here, they meet the executive director of this charity group. He is from Europe, speaks great English. He has traveled the world over doing all kinds of interesting stuff and has spent the last decade working with this project in Africa. Way leads to way, the guys wife gets more involved in this project and decides to go over there for a couple three weeks to get more deeply into the work and the context, so she does.

Somewhere along the way, she is spending more and more time with the executive director who is over there quite often himself. And then she starts telling her husband about the sterling qualities that this Executive Director possesses which makes her husband all the more defensive. Distance gets increased, not surprisingly, between the two of them. And it seems like their personal quarreling with each other increases at the same time.

At one point, his wife has an encounter with this charity director guy, in which they somehow exchanged their mutual affection for one another, the blush of desire that wells up, seemingly out of nowhere. But they were both professional, talked the encounter through, identified what was happening and went on as before. She shares this with her husband, presumably, to keep this from going nowhere with the Executive Director but now here husband is in personal knots over the situation.

I think, to make matters even worse, she had told her husband that she sometimes wondered if she might be falling in love with this executive director, like she wanted to explain a possible affair to her best friend. Why? You've got me. At any rate, her husband has turned this into a kind of competition between him and this rival and has managed to really start to obsess over the situation as you might imagine. So they find themselves caught in this kind of high school drama, both of them, no doubt, reminding the other of their deficiencies and their shortcomings. Neither of them able to take the first step towards the other with an olive branch because their pride is wounded. Ironically, neither of them able to really tell the other one that they love them, despite the fact that I bet they both do, because defensiveness has trumped everything else.

This husband is still very handsome as a man. He is very successful. He is educated. And he absolutely doesn't get what is happening around him. “So why have you been up half the night?” I ask, another compassionate question I shouldn't have asked. “Because”, he tells me, his wife is at some conference with and the executive director is going to be there too and his wife is going to use this event as a time of discernment, I suppose. So he is communicating with her obsessively, really just completely absorbed by this understandably.

Why did he buy her the ticket to the event? I don't know. Those questions only get answered for $250/hour in therapy. At one point, probably walking up #14 he turns to me, face to face, and says, “what should I do? What would you do?”

I didn't say anything for quite a while. I rarely ever do this, but I went out on a limb, simply because I've seen some version of this too many times, and he was asking an oracle that he would never see again and I could only muster an oracle's insight because I don't know this couple at all. I said, “I can't tell you what to do, but… I'm willing to guess that your wife has gradually lost respect for your character. And she didn't actually realize that respect was as important to her as it became because it became more important as she grew through motherhood into a mature woman and it is getting more important every year. And if you can't figure out what that is in you and do something substantive about it, your inner-connectedness will keep fraying until it just shreds. I doubt that she is just on a romantic adventure exactly, although I am sure that Africa feels exotic. At some level, she thinks that the total vision and purpose that this charity work is about and this director represents, just puts to shame the limited vision of success that Rye has to offer. She needs something more than that. She needs a fuller reason to live and she may not even entirely realize that this is her deeper motivation.

All around me during those years of my life, I watched these marriages crash and burn for many different reasons. But what really stayed with me was how often, one of the basic issues that couples came back to, so basic that it was very difficult for them to actually discuss, was the issue of integrity and respect. It is one of those things that creeps up on us because it grows in importance the older that we get. At some point, we simply aren't swimming ahead of the tide and it starts to engulf us.

It is almost as though God has designed us so that charm, good looks, success will carry us up to a point. The gene pool will go on, the next generation will get born that way. But to make it through the second half of life, if we are lucky enough to live that long, we have to grow more. To unlock the intimacy and trust of a profounder love, we have to become fathers and husbands with substance. We have to be people they respect and trust. We weren't taught to appreciate this when we younger and integrity is not something that you can just take for granted. It doesn't just happen as you age. I suspect that growing integrity is a symptom that you are still evolving, still crafting your character.

I didn't get it when I was younger and I'm certainly no oracle today. But I had a moment a couple years after my father died at the too young age of 75. My mother had Alzheimer's disease, so we had to get her some assisted care. We sold the house, I went down and cleaned up the final two dozen runs to the dump after the movers had taken my mother's furniture. My mother, even at that time, couldn't dial a phone or read anymore. I walked around the house, completely empty, and for a moment I was almost dizzy. Just like that the generations roll over and such wisdom as the younger generations will have, must now come from me. Such lore as the younger generations will hear are the stories that I will remember. For just a second, I wished like hell that my grandfathers could go over things one more time.

We don't have to be perfect but we do have to keep growing and becoming. And this is the real meaning of Lent, to reflect for a moment on where we are headed and who we are becoming. Are you realizing the fullness of the character that God wants for you to become? Are you headed in the direction that will bring you the deeper fulfillment? No one can do this work for you and no one will. Don't settle for too little out of this life. You are more important than that. Keep growing and if you are lucky, you will be able to see the fruit of that growth in the rising generations. For integrity, we pray. Amen.