Irony Free Gratitude
By Charles Rush
November 25, 2012
Matthew 11: 28-30 and Phil 4: 3
[ Audio
(mp3, 5.7Mb) ]
st Sunday, the New York Times had a front page editorial by a 30 year old[i] who described the latest iteration of a New York phenomenon that is a century old. She notes that “Irony is the ethos of our age”.
She has in mind
the show “Jackass” from MTV or commercials that spoof themselves like the baby
in the E-trade commercials that deploys advanced sarcasm on financial advice to
his 30 year old father and hoots with other babies like a fratty boy.
She points out
that these ad's ‘preemptively acknowledge their own failure to accomplish
anything meaningful.' They create a kind of cushion around us that allows us to
“dodge responsibility for our choices” by acting like nothing really matters.
So the archetype of the era, because their could be no hero irony dominates, is
the slacker who slides through life “alone in his room and misunderstood.”
It is the
hipster, say, in Williamsburg where my daughter lives, who is relatively well
educated and financially secure, but not quite sure they want to emotionally
engage. Boredom is actually always lurking in the background of their lives.
What does it
look like right now? She says, she noticed that her friends have a hard time
actually giving each other sincere gifts. Mostly she gave kitsch things like
plastic Mexican wrestling figures.
And she noticed
that most of the things in her apartment, she had collected because they were
absurd oddities.
And she noticed
that everyone around her feigned indifference and dressed like they were
perpetually in costume. Her style was becoming a kind of anti-style.
And these days,
more and more of her peers have the ability “to hide in public” because of the
ever-present mobile devices that ‘prioritize the remote over what is immediate
so that we stand around publically all going into our private little spheres.
What is eroding
around us, and here I quote, “the art of conversation, the art of looking at
people… the art of being present. Our conduct is no longer governed by subtlety,
finesse, grace and attention, all qualities more esteemed in earlier decades.
Inwardness and narcissism now hold sway.”
It was
instructive because she acknowledged what we have all witnessed. I would only
say that this temptation to ironic detachment has been a staple of metropolitan
life for several generations now, each with a little different nuance, but it
is a perennial challenge of the urban sophisticates of Gotham. Before I get
hurt by being emotionally vulnerable and real, let me inoculate myself with
indifference and take it off the table as a serious option.
It doesn't work,
of course. But I don't know any generation that hasn't had to grow through this
or isn't tempted to fall back into it, when people and family let us down. “I
told you so” we think to ourselves.
On the other
hand, as she notes, what kind legacy will we leave, “an archive filled with
videos of people doing stupid things”? A legacy of “rampant sarcasm and an
unapologetic cultivation of silliness? Is an ironic legacy a legacy at all?”
At 34 you start
thinking about these things because somewhere around that time your ‘so called
life' starts to become ‘your actual life'. That is a different deal.
How do we shift
gears towards something that is more meaningful and more spiritually real?
Today I would point to one significant example, where science has lately been
confirming the insights that our spiritual tradition has held key for the
millennia.
Martin Seligman,
the head of the psychology department at the University of Pennsylvania, wanted
to find concrete things you could do to lift the malaise and low-grade
depression that he observed all to frequently? Is there anything we can
actually do that can counter it? And he found one sure-fire method that
consistently increased people's sense of well-being for a month after they did
it.
And it is very
simple, I hate to say this, but much like the bible taught us as children. You
close your eyes and I'm going to give you just a moment to close your eyes
right now and do this as we speak. I want you to call up the face of someone,
hopefully who is still alive, that has changed your life for the better in the
past.[ii]
Think of someone who really had a positive impact on you. Call them to mind. Remember what they did for
you, how they blessed you. We are going to take a minute to let you settle on
one person… ( a minute later)… Now thank them in your mind. (another minute of
Mark playing and we'll close).
Seligman found
that if you will now write down what you
were thinking, perhaps adding some concrete details that you might remember
more fully when you actually take pen in hand… If you write that ‘thank you'
and you find that person… if you make an appointment to see them and you do it
somewhere that you can just sit with them and read them what you wrote… if you
spend some time, hopefully, after that just sharing, letting them share…
If you do that,
what our psychologists found, is that you have a measurable uplift in your mood
thirty days after you do it. Furthermore, it is not just a temporary boost like
hitting a lotto ticket or getting a job promotion, it appears that this taps
into something more fundamental in our psyche that has long-term implications
for flourishing and well-being.
We are finally
proving what the religious imagination has intuited all along, that gratitude
is woven through the fabric of meaning in our lives and that we have to access
gratitude to release a fuller sense of fulfillment. It connects us with the
side of us that does pay attention, the real side of us that wants to become
humane and authentic and connected with the world around us and the people that
we want to love. We don't have to be alone in public. We can cut through the
layer of defensive insulation and access the spiritually real that wants to
grow.
[Cue the Video http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nj2ofrX7jAk]
Amen.
