“Living a Life Worth Living”

“Living a Life Worth Living”    Roger Ray, pastor     Oct. 15, 2017

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M. Scott Peck, The Road Less Traveled, p. 18

What are these tools, these techniques of suffering, these means of experiencing the pain of problems constructively that I call discipline? There are four: delaying of gratification, acceptance of responsibility, dedication to truth, and balancing. As will be evident, these are not complex tools whose application demands extensive training. To the contrary, they are simple tools, and almost all children are adept in their use by the age of ten. Yet presidents and kings will often forget to use them, to their own downfall. The problem lies not in the complexity of these tools but in the will to use them.

It probably goes without saying . . . but when has that ever stopped me?  Seriously, there is nothing in the world that comes close to rivaling the affection and devotion that I feel for my only child. 

I have found, in recent years, that even though I have always said that the lottery was just a form of punishment for those who didn’t do well in math class, because the probability of winning is so absurdly small, I have lately started buying a ticket now and then. And, honestly, not for myself. If there is one thing I would really like to do that my modest salary and retirement will not afford me, I would really like for my daughter to not have to work. I would like for her to be free to choose to go back to school, or to travel, or to just settle down and have a small flock of children.

Valerie was just 8 years old when Paul Simon released the song that we have since called “our song,” “Father and Daughter.” The line we quote to one another most often is, “as long as one and one is two, there will never be a father who loved his daughter more than I love you.”

But there is a verse that says,

But you don't need to waste your time Worryin' about the marketplace
Trying to help the human race Struggling to survive It's as harsh as night

I always feel internal conflict when that verse comes up because, though I have spent my whole life fighting poverty, defending minority rights, trying to promote peace and justice, especially in the places that are the most violent and unjust . . . but I don’t want her to have to do that. I don’t want her to have to worry about the people in prison, the poor in the jungles of Nicaragua, or those who are struggling to survive life’s harshest moments.

I feel conflicted about this because I know in my heart that it is wrong. I would like to remove the obstacles of life from her path, I would like for her future to be free of problems and pain and yet, I know, as the Buddha famously said, “Life is suffering.” The meaning, the joy, the real pleasure and satisfaction that life has to offer comes, not from having a carefree life but from having disciplined oneself to solve your problems, to overcome them, to rise above them, to learn from them, to grow strong from facing adversity.

Look, in the old days, when you planted a new tree in your yard, the gardening center told you to put stakes in the ground and tie supports to the trunk to hold it up right for a year or so. What we learned is that if a tree is artificially supported early in life, its trunk doesn’t grow strong enough to support it when the ropes are removed.

The only self-help book that I have ever recommended to anyone is Scott Peck’s classic work, The Road Less Traveled. Most self-help books are based on junk science and pseudo-psychology and, given the perspective of some years, I would say about a third of The Road Less Traveled is on pretty thin ice but the first section of the book I still take as being almost too insightful for a mere mortal to have written it.

In that first section he describes the four tools of disciplined living that make it possible to lead a problem solving life that becomes genuinely meaningful, satisfying, even joyful and loving. Not always fun . . . life isn’t always fun and, I would argue, it shouldn’t be.

Peck says that meaning is derived, not by avoiding problems but by meeting them head on and solving them. Avoiding problems leads, inescapably, not only to sorrow, depression, and perpetual suffering, but it can, in fact, lead to mental illness. No less a thinker than Carl Jung said that all neuroses are a replacement for legitimate suffering. Having problems or facing a crisis is not what gives us emotional issues, it is not facing those problems with properly disciplined problem solving techniques that makes the difference.

Peck identifies 4 tools of discipline that empower us to become problem solvers rather than problem avoiders or problem deniers. They are: delaying of gratification, acceptance of responsibility, dedication to truth, and balancing. I don’t often do sermons in two parts but I am going to take this week and next Sunday to talk about these four habits of meaningful living.

40 years ago, when Peck wrote The Road Less Traveled the whole credit card phenomenon was relatively new. But the old practice of putting things we wanted on “lay away” and making regular small payments until we would liberate the item we wanted and take it home was replaced by credit cards and finance companies that did what mafia loans used to do.

They allowed people to indulge their whims immediately, and unlike layaway, they added interest charges, late fees, and annual dues that for generations have become the bars behind which many young people have become imprisoned.

Buddhism’s four noble truths teach that life is suffering and that suffering is caused by unfulfilled desires. The way out of suffering is to give up desire. Which, I suppose you say, was easy for the Buddha to say since Buddha wasn’t exposed to constant commercials, billboards, and catalogues constantly tempting him with more stylish orange robes and floating lotus soaps.

I’m especially irritated by the advertisements of for-profit colleges that say to young people, “If you don’t have time for a four year degree . . .” What young person doesn’t have time for a four year degree? Are they only advertising to kids who have cancer?

My father was the youngest of 9 children, born to a farming family in southern Kentucky that never recovered from the financial devastation of the Civil War. Even in the early years of the 20^th century, those kids knew that they couldn’t just live on the farm. They couldn’t feed that many people and so they had to go out into the world and make a living for themselves. Most of those nine children went to college and became teachers, nurses, or businessmen.

My dad was the only one who had to go fight in WWII. I grew up hearing him insist that his four children had to go to college and he would always add that he didn’t get a chance to go. After one of those long speeches, when we were alone, my oldest brother made the observation that dad came back from the war with the GI bill and he could have gone to college much more easily than his siblings who worked their way through college or any of his four children, because we all had to work our way through college.

Obviously, I wasn’t there, I never fought in a war, and my dad had a number of emotional challenges as a result of the war, but still, most of the life suffering that we modern people complain about is traceable to our unwillingness to delay gratification, to choose to suffer now in order to attain to a greater goal in the future.

Missouri is one of the worst state’s in the union for harboring the miserable and morally bankrupt industry of PayDay and Title loan companies. These small loan vendors start customers out on a loan of more than 400% and when they can’t pay back that loan and they have to keep borrowing again and again to keep up their payments, they end up paying over 2000% interest.

I know that a lot of the people who take out these loans are desperate. They are trying to not get evicted or they are paying medical expenses or just trying to feed their children and that is a problem of poverty and that is a part of the whole victimization of this corrupt business. However, I have known several people who have gotten in PayDay loan trouble feeding their gambling, drinking, or drug use. Others are just trying to avoid working.

We get lots of requests from people who are asking for help with their rent, or their utilities, or with groceries, and obviously, we are a very small church that cannot afford to be handing out a lot of cash, but one of the most disappointing calls that I ever fielded was from a woman who had gotten into credit trouble because of her obsession with shopping.

Her wife was a physician. They had a good family income, but this young woman had bought hundreds of pairs of designer shoes, closets full of expensive clothes and other indulgences and she was asking me if the church could help her to pay down this huge debt before her wife, in disgust, left her. And I said, “You know that we sacrifice to feed the homeless and to send material aid to the poor of Nicaragua and you want me to raise $100,000 to pay for your shoes?” And, folks, she said, “Yes, will you?”

Which ties into the second of Peck’s list of disciplines necessary to living a meaningful life: accepting responsibility. Albert Camus said it succinctly, “Your life is the sum total of your choices.” No one ever makes any progress against the suffering of life by blaming others for their pain or circumstances.

I don’t say that to be in denial of the fact that there are wars, diseases, corrupt governments, abusive families, and treacherously false friends. We live in a capricious universe with all kinds of unjust and unfair circumstances but the more you invest yourself in blaming others or outside circumstances, the deeper you dig the hole of your own suffering. It is in accepting responsibility for the outcomes of your life that you can overcome them.

Listen, I can give you a list of examples of absolutely unforgivable injustices that have happened to me through institutional and personal dishonesty but only I get to choose how much space inside of my skull that I am going to give to those people and those past incidents.

Viktor Frankl, a Jewish psychiatrist was captured and put into a Nazi concentration camp during WWII. And, you talk about unfair and unjust treatment . . . they not only took his freedom, but in the camps they burned the manuscript of his life’s work, they then killed his wife and his children and formed him into slave labor in starvation and inhumane circumstances. In the midst of that outrageous injustice he wrote, “Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms—to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.”

Accepting responsibility for your life is not a blanket denial of everything that has ever been done to you or every unfair circumstance that has been placed as a hurdle in front of you. Accepting responsibility is the choice to face life’s challenges and to find the best possible solution that you can manage.

Which circles back to my beginning point about my daughter. I love her so much that I would really love to be able to remove at least any financial hurdle to her self-actualization though, if you think about the people you know who were trust fund babies, those born with a silver spoon in their mouths, I can think of very few examples where that turned out to be more of a blessing than it was a curse. The most miserably unhappy people I personally know are often the most financially well healed.

I sat having dinner a few years ago with a friend at a local country club. We looked out across the golf course at houses the size of hotels and I said, “Why would anyone want a house that big.” My friend, a long time attorney in Springfield, pointed at a five-story home and told me, “Sam lives in the top two floors, Betty has the lower three. They hate each other so much that they have not even spoken to one another for years.”

The world of merchandising tries to convince us that wealth equals happiness but all of the field research tends to point in the opposite direction. What actually makes life good, meaningful, joyful, has something to do with facing and solving life’s challenges.

This is an over simplification but Peck writes:

Most people who come to see a psychiatrist are suffering from what is called either a neurosis or a character disorder. Put most simply, these two conditions are disorders of responsibility, and as such they are opposite styles of relating to the world and its problems. The neurotic assumes too much responsibility; the person with a character disorder not enough. When neurotics are in conflict with the world they automatically assume that they are at fault. When those with character disorders are in conflict with the world they automatically assume that the world is at fault.

I need to add the caveat that anything that can be put in a nutshell probably belongs there but this synopsis of the field of psychology is useful in thinking about the kinds of mental suffering that are not caused by an actual psychosis.

You can fairly accurately predict that about half of the children of an active alcoholic will become an alcoholic and many of the others will develop a borderline personality disorder but what should be of interest to us are the children who emerge from an alcoholic home intact. What made the difference for them?

While most of us know of Abraham Maslow primarily for his famous pyramid illustration of our hierarchy of needs, I believe that his real contribution to psychology was in his decision to focus on the strengths of his patients rather than focusing on their weaknesses, or their mental illness that first brought them to his office.

People often to go to counseling to find a fix for their suffering and too often that fix involves a serotonin drug and week after week of talk therapy devoted to giving more and more space in the patient’s skull to their pain. Maslow challenged the entire field of psychology to stop thinking about illness and start thinking about health.

My recently deceased friend, Dr. Todd Schiable, repeatedly told the story to those of us on the board of Burrell Mental Health, about his repeated trips to the lawn and garden center trying to find the right products to rid his lawn of weeds.

After many months of failed efforts, the old man at the lawn center gave him this sage advice, “Son, you need to stop worrying about killing weeds and start focusing on growing grass.”

As you know, I am spending most of this year working on a book about needed social change in America but this week and next week, I am trying to take spirituality down to the personal level, hopefully, in a pastoral way. There is a lot of suffering in the world that is systemic but none of that can be meaningfully addressed by a population that is trapped in blaming and refusing to accept personal responsibility.

The ability to delay gratification and the willingness to accept responsibility are two aspects of growing grass rather than killing weeds. Next week we’ll talk about dedication to reality, and balancing. Between now and then let me encourage you with a proverb from the AA program, don’t think so much about how sick you have been, think about how well that you want to be.