A New Chapter of Life
By Charles Rush
August 11, 2013
2 Corinthians 5: 17, 18
[ Audio
(mp3, 7.5Mb) ]
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 text.
He calls the
publisher and found 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, 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. 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.
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 all of you 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, reflected 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. It is a far better predictor of good
grades than IQ, your SAT score both of which correlate poorly.[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
calm 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 weeks 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 time 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.