April 17, 2016 Community Christian Church of Springfield,
MO
Roger Ray, pastor “I’m More Victimized than You Are Competition”
Scott Peck R.L.T. “Sooner or later, if people are to
be healed, they must learn that the entirety of one’s adult life is a series of
personal choices, decisions. If they can accept this totally, then they become
free people. To the extent that they do not accept this they will forever feel
themselves victims.”
This is the DSM, the Diagnostic
and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. It is the reference guide used in
the practice of psychology for diagnostic purposes when you need to be more
specific than just saying that someone is neurotic, or character disordered, or
just plain nuts. My copy is an old version, the one that was in use when I was
in graduate school.
I have not felt a need to
invest in any one of many updated versions because, quite frankly, and this
will be the only time that you will ever hear me say anything that sounds
remotely like sympathy for the Church of Scientology, but psychology is not
really a hard science. I am grateful for my grad school training in counseling
but I have accepted all psychological diagnoses as being approximations and
broad-brush descriptions and almost never absolutes.
There are any number of people
that I would consider to be sociopaths that other people seem to think of as
being excellent candidates for the office of the President of the United
States, so, clearly, diagnosis has a lot to do with the perspective of the person
doing the diagnosing.
There is a reason why there has
never been a definitive book written about how to successfully raise children.
There is no manual for how to have a successful marriage.
There have been hundreds of
attempts at both of those and I will confess to having read a lot of them but
anyone who has raised three or four children can attest to the fact that the
same techniques and methods of child rearing do not work uniformly with all
children. Creating a successful marriage or a happy, productive child is not
like baking chocolate chip cookies by your mom’s recipe that works perfectly
every time.
I studied both psychology and
theology in graduate school and when I had finished all of my graduate degrees
I decided to learn how to fly because after spending a decade studying in
fields that were full of opinion, conjecture, and often unfounded prejudice, I
wanted to do something that was logical, precise, and exacting.
Everything that I do in my
profession is a matter of best guesses and debatable opinions but when it comes
to landing an airplane you turn on the fuel pump, set your flaps, lower the
landing gear, step on the rudder to crab into the wind, set your rate of
descent, and just above the runway, you step on the rudder to straighten the
plane with the direction of flight and flare slightly to set the plane on the
pavement. There really isn’t any other way to do it if you plan to walk away
from the landing.
But people are not airplanes,
and living is much more complicated than landing though, for pilots, there is a
relationship between living and landing.
All that being said, still,
because we seek to lead meaningful and joyful lives, we cannot help trying to
understand ourselves, our relationships, and the quirky, neurotic, and sometimes
character disordered people whom we love.
This book is M. Scott Peck’s The Road Less Traveled. I own a lot of
books but this is the only book at my house that is held together by a rubber
band. It is significant to add that this is not my first, second, third, or
fourth copy of this book. During the author’s lifetime, I spent a good deal of
money and traveled considerable distances to meet him, talk with him, and to
hear him lecture.
There is a fairly common joke
about psychiatrists and psychologists that acknowledges the frequently
confirmed fact that they tend to be the most ill-adjusted, screwed up, and
unhappy people on the planet. In that vein, I can confirm that Scott Peck was
the king of those people. He smoked,
drank too much, had lots of psychosomatic illnesses, and he was not only a
philanderer but he frequently gave himself permission to have sexual
relationships with his patients. He was one of the most deeply flawed geniuses
that you will have ever heard of.
His flaws are such that you would
not be generally inclined to be tolerant of his failings though, in his
defense, the one thing that I genuinely appreciate about this troubled person
is that he was totally honest about his failings and took full personal
responsibility for them. To me, this fact adds to the weight of the genius of
his written insights.
We take our wisdom lesson today
from Peck’s history making bestseller, The
Road Less Traveled, where he says that no one is ever free until they can
fully accept that this life is the sum total of their personal choices. When we
fail to accept that our lives are the result of our own choices then we are
forever victims, at least in our own minds.
Now, that doesn’t mean that you
cannot be hurt by unloving parents, treacherous friends, accidents of birth,
prejudice, discrimination, and the capriciousness of the universe. What it
means is that you can either take responsibility for your life through the
choices you make or you can make yourself miserable by always trying to blame
the universe for why you are unhappy or unfulfilled.
In fact, most of the
substantive meaning of life comes from our willingness to address and overcome
difficulties. Denying and avoiding the challenges of life is the source of
almost all neuroses. As Jung taught, all neuroses are merely a replacement for
legitimate suffering.
The premise of Peck’s book is
that suffering is a part of life. Whether our lives are miserable or joyful
will depend upon how we address the inevitable suffering the universe brings
us…. Literally, scheduling it, managing it, denying it power or authority in
our lives, and transcending it.
He outlines four basic tools
for leading a meaningful life. They are
life practices, disciplines. They are: learning the ability to delay
gratification, the practice of taking responsibility for your own life, making
a fierce dedication to reality, and the ability to balance priorities and time.
These four tools of discipline
are especially vital to younger people who are trying to make their way through
life. We have an amazing number of
seductive hurdles that trip up younger people before they can learn to delay
gratification, all of the way from permissive sex and too available drugs to
credit cards and a false sense of security in the future.
Balancing is also a really
tough one to learn, in making the choices between a more comfortable life-style
in the present moment against rational planning for retirement. Between having
a successful career and being successful with your friendship and your family.
But the two skills that seem to
elude many who are older, who have matured beyond child rearing and even their
working years, are the ability to take responsibility and being dedicated to
reality.
Several years ago, as a part of
a sermon, I put a blank notecard and envelope into all of the bulletins and I
suggested that people think of someone who used to be their friend, or a family
member that they no longer spoke to, and that they take that card and write a
letter that started them on a path of reconciliation.
We say a prayer of confession
in church every Sunday. Everyone knows that no one is innocent, no one is
perfect, we all make mistakes. I just wanted to make the obvious pastoral
suggestion that rather than just generally confessing our sins by reading a
prayer in out of the liturgy that each of us individually think of someone to
whom we owe an apology…. Someone we have alienated by our own misdeeds, through
dishonesty or indifference, through gossip or tretchery… take responsibility,
write out a personal confession and hold out an olive branch to start the
process of reconciliation.
These are all core religious
values, right? Confession, forgiveness, reconciliation, love and all that… but
do you know, there were over three hundred people in church that day, and after
the service, I went through the pews and picked up every single one of those
note cards.
I had worked for that church
for 16 years and I had no idea that they were all entirely innocent of all
wrongs. Not that being their pastor in
any way makes me their boss but, seriously, don’t we all know someone that we
could mend fences with if we were willing to show some humility, some honesty,
to be adult enough to take responsibility and say, “I was wrong. I’m sorry.
Please forgive me.”?
And that ties into the fourth
tool of discipline, being dedicated to reality.
People are never so creative as when they are massaging their life
narrative to convince the world that they have been victimized by others, by
market forces, the capriciousness of nature, or the fact that someone else
always seems to win the lottery.
When Ronald Reagan was
president, he talked about how moved he was when he was a soldier in WWII and
was present for the liberation of the Nazi concentration camps, Ohrdruf and
Buchenwald. He in fact, spent the entire war producing films for the military
in California. Defenders of Reagan’s wrote in the Washington Post, that he had
processed the color film taken at the liberation of Ohrdruf and Buchenwald and
that it affected him so much that he came to believe that he was there. He even
kept a copy of the video to show to his children, telling them that he was
there.
Everyone has a right to their
own opinion but no one has a right to their own facts. Everyone is sometimes
mistaken about their memories but to suggest that someone could be mistaken
about whether they spent the war in sunny California or if they had been
deployed to their European war front is just plain crazy. If you want to look
that up in the DSM, you should try the diagnostic criteria for either
schizophrenia or the more common political malady, pathological liar.
Reagan’s absurd story about
being in Germany at the liberation of Nazi concentration camps is extreme but I
can tell you as someone who has listened to the accounts of marriage conflicts
that lead up to divorce from countless couples over my 35 year history as a parish
pastor, I can tell you, simply placing yourself on the wrong continent is not
the most extreme way to misrepresent reality.
So, my friends, here is the
good news. You do not have to live another day as a victim. That can all end
before you walk out to the parking lot. But here is the price tag…. You have to
be willing to be honest, oriented to reality, responsible and willing to
actually be the spiritual person that you tell other people that you are. It
seems like a high price to pay but I promise you, there is liberation and
health in that way and there are monsters and insanity in the other. That may
be a broad sweeping generalization but you must remember, I am a theologian.
