“Life is a shipwreck, remember to sing in the lifeboats”

“Life is a shipwreck, remember to sing in the lifeboats”  Nov. 10, 2019  Dr. Ray

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Ralph Waldo Emerson

“Write it on your heart

that every day is the best day in the year.

He is rich who owns the day, and no one owns the day

who allows it to be invaded with fret and anxiety.

Finish every day and be done with it.

You have done what you could.

Some blunders and absurdities, no doubt crept in.

Forget them as soon as you can, tomorrow is a new day;

begin it well and serenely, with too high a spirit

to be cumbered with your old nonsense.

This new day is too dear,

with its hopes and invitations,

to waste a moment on the yesterdays.”

I brought a first date to a very abrupt end when I made the very basic observation that chiropractics and acupuncture are largely based on a placebo effect. She took considerable umbridge to this claim and launched into quite a speech about several things she believes in passionately that are not rooted in science. Not that I like to turn to health insurance companies as arbitrators of reality but there is a reason why most of them won’t pay for visits to a chiropractor, an acupuncturist, a hypnotist, or for supplements, for much the same reason that they won’t pay for witch doctors, palm readers, astrologers, fortune tellers, or psychics. And I don’t say that to be incendiary or insulting. There is a lot of hard science behind physical therapy, and osteopathy, but a lot of what passes for holistic treatments are effective only when the patient believes that they are effective. History is full of examples of virtual “snake oil” treatments that enjoyed popularity for a long time, but people eventually stopped believing in them and they passed into the pages of history. 

Johann Hari introduces his book, Lost Connections, by talking about a 18^th century Connecticut doctor, Elisha Perkins, who noted that when he was extracting a tooth, if he touched the socket with one of his metal instruments that the pain was temporarily relieved. As one historian said, he put two and two together and regrettably came up with 5. 

He invented and very successfully marketed a metal wand that he called a “tractor” because when waved over any painful part of your body, it would pull the pain out. People everywhere, especially in the days following the Revolutionary War, fell for this. George Washington had them. He claimed that pain was disembodied energy that could be attracted into the wand and pulled out of the body. 

The miracle cure was so popular that it began to spread to England and there, a cynical physician in Bath, Dr. John Haygarth, disguised a wooden stick to look like the metal tractor and found that it had the same degree of success. Eventually, people realized that the pain, though sometimes temporarily relieved, usually came right back and the cure had nothing to do with the magic wand.

Now, to her credit, the woman at the center of this story did take the time to research what I had said and eventually reached out to me to say that she had discovered that I was right. Which, and I don’t think I am alone in this, is always music to my ears. But I was also able to say to her that the more important misunderstanding in our first conversation was that when she heard me say that these things were based on the placebo effect, that I meant that they were bad. I did not. 

Here is a very important point:  the placebo effective is proof that you have the ability to heal yourself. As a physician friend of mine has been fond of saying, if you catch a cold, it will take you about three weeks to wear it down on your own, but if you go see the doctor, you will usually get better in about 21 days. 

Athletes are notorious for fad supplements and techniques. A few years ago, during the summer Olympics, you could see circular bruises on several of the swimmers and divers who were engaging in what is called “cupping” a treatment that was basically putting a vacuum cleaner on parts of your body to increase circulation or something… if you think that wearing wearing magnets or copper fibers, or putting tape on your skin to affect the joints underneath helps you, then it helps you. I’m just saying that it helps you because you, at least temporarily, believe that it will.

To be completely clear, a whole lot of what prescription medications and medical treatments, including some surgeries, all of which are covered by insurance, work more or less the same way. Not to alienate every fan I have ever had, but all of the SSRI, serotonin drugs work in about the same way that the magic feather that Dumbo used to fly worked. And that is not me saying that, that is the conclusions of a study conducted at Harvard Medical School by Dr. Irving Kirsh. SSRIs work just as well as sugar pills though they have much worse side effects. 

A lot of medication works, a lot of psychological counseling works, because the patient or client believes that someone is taking their pain seriously and they are trying to help them. It is the caring connection to another person that contains most of the beneficial help. But, again, I am not saying that is a bad thing, in fact it is a very good thing. 

If you have meaningful and healthy connections to family members, especially a life partner, if you have meaningful work or if you are involved in meaningful volunteering, and if you spend time in nature, then you will not need very much of what they sell at Walgreens. There are exceptions, of course, and the fact remains that the mortality rate is 100%, so you can be the most centered person in the world and you will still eventually die… though, for example, Gandhi died because someone shot him . . . that will accelerate the heck out of the aging process.

One of the most common questions I get from traditional Christians who watch my videos or read my books is a fairly incredulous inquiry, “so you don’t believe in prayer?” That is as far from the truth as possible. Now, it is true that for me prayer is not a matter of presenting my wish list to a supernatural deity in heaven. That kind of prayer is closer to writing a Christmas wish list to Santa Claus than it is to the kind of prayer that is important to me. 

As Soren Kierkegaard said, “Prayer changes the one who prays, not the one to whom we pray.” Meditation, which in my use of the term, means to concentrate on an idea or a thing, and contemplation means to try to achieve internal silence in order to existentially and mindfully connect with nature, my own body, to enhance my awareness of my breath, the food that I eat, and the path beneath my feet.

I always counsel people who are fighting depression to make sure that they walk vigorously outside for at least 30 minutes a day. I have to battle depression more than most people do so I try to walk outside for about 2 hours every day. I think of that as either meditation or contemplation, it is my prayer time. But, beyond my own spiritual perspective on this, it is simply a matter of medical and psychological science that a regular dose of exposure to nature is good for us physically and mentally. 

Last year, Scotland instituted a practice in which physicians can literally prescribe exposure to nature as a treatment. They now send out suggestions and examples of experiences in nature for different seasons and places. The objective truth is my favorite meeting ground for science, medicine, psychology, and religion and this is clearly one of the best examples of this. Japanese doctors call it a forest bath and they aren’t talking about those Cialis adds with bathtubs in the woods … they simply mean spending time in nature.

But, as regards contemplative prayer, internal silence is often quite difficult to achieve and the largest reason for that is the other side of the coin of the placebo effect. Just as it is true that you have the ability to heal yourself, your mind has the ability to cure you, it also has the ability to make you sick or even to kill you.

As one of my professors at Vanderbilt said, “You may think that a witch doctor has no power but there are incidents in which a witch doctor can invoke a curse, break a chicken bone and point it at a man and that man will instantly drop dead… if that man believes in the magic of the witch doctor.” We might call it a heart attack, but, at least for that man, the curse was real.

The reason we teach meditation, talk about it, write about it, study it, is that for reasons which seem to be horribly contrary to evolutionary logic, left to its own devices, our minds will often automatically gravitate to things that kill us, usually killing us slowly through torturous memories of faithless friends, heart breaking endings to love relationships, missed opportunities, unjust endings, and tragic mistakes.

I have lived in Springfield for most of my adult life, 28 years now in the queen of the Ozarks. For no apparent reason, the other night, while trying to get still enough to go to sleep, the memory of an insulting exchange that happened more than 30 years ago came to mind. 

I was a young pastor in new church and a real jerk of a guy, for no apparent reason, pretending to be talking to someone else but saying it loudly enough to be heard by the 20 people in the room, called me an obscene name. The two men got a big laugh out of their put down and I had no idea what to do in that moment. But all these years later, my heart started to race, my face flushed red, and my blood pressure shot up so fast that I literally felt faint. 

I was literally, physically, reliving the moment. Now that I have had a lot of experience as an a-hole whisperer, I thought of all of eviscerating things I might have said in that moment, literally wishing that I could go back in time and defend myself. But these were mean old men back then. They are surely dead now. 

As my friend Dan likes to say, if you will sit quietly be the riverside long enough, you will see the bodies of your enemies float by. But, I don’t have a score to settle with those two jerks. They mean nothing to me. They have no power to hurt me or insult me ever again. However, if I let my memory go back to that incident, I can give them the power to make me miserable, to take my joy, to literally haunt me like ghosts of toxic churches past . . . but, and this is sincerely not an overstatement, the stress we embody by dwelling on these things can cause heart disease, stress can literally turn you into a diabetic . . . it can shorten your life . . . it can kill you. 

His theology is typically pretty labored but C. S. Lewis had great insight into people and relationships. He cautioned his readers, “You can’t go back and change the beginning, but you can start where you are and change the ending.” We don’t have the ability to undo past mistakes, bad decisions, and ill-advised love relationships, friendships, or even career moves. But, we can start where we are today to change the course of our future. 

The title of my sermon today is a quote falsely attributed to Voltaire though, to be fair, it was a comment made by someone writing about the theme of Voltaire’s Candid: Life is a shipwreck, so remember to sing in the lifeboats. I don’t want for you to hear that in a trite way. 

It echoes the famous line that Scott Peck uses as the first line of his famous book, The Road Less Traveled, “Life is full of suffering but as soon as you accept that fact, it no longer matters.” Most love relationships don’t last. Most people have no idea how to sustain a meaningful friendship. You can eat healthy foods, exercise, live like a saint, and you will still die. 

Many of us are plagued with excessive awareness of chaos in politics and world events. Even those who celebrate the long-delayed consideration of impeaching Donald Trump must be aware that no matter how necessary it may be to do, the process will be divisive and chaotic. The stock market will go through roller coaster rises and falls, and even the crime rate will have spikes as we move into a chaotic time that will likely last for the next year until matters are temporarily settled in the 2020 presidential election. 

In very many ways, life is a shipwreck, but along the way, even if it is not permanent, you will experience love, friendship, joy, sometimes you are the bug, sometimes you are the windshield.

Prayer is a matter of consciously choosing to forgive those who have wounded you, abandoned you, lied to you or about you, the ones who stabbed you in the back or just abandoned you. Prayer is choosing nobility over revenge. In meditation, we do not deny reality, we acknowledge it, honestly, courageously, and decisively move beyond these things, to, as Neihbur famously prayed, find the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things that I can, and the wisdom to be able to tell the difference. I think that one of the reasons the Christian religion has survived and dominated so much of modern history is because it teaches the very practical disciplines of forgiveness, compassion, empathy, and piety. With or without a supernatural theistic deity, a dying a rising savior, or sacraments; forgiveness, compassion, prayer are sustainable and life-giving habits.

The Buddhist philosopher, Alan Watts, said, “You do not sing a song to get to the end.” The point being that we must learn to love the process of living, even in the hard times. Almost all of us in graduate school where fighting to get to graduation and only too late we realize that our lives were not on hold while we were grinding through assignments, writing papers and earning credits . . . learning itself is a thing to be relished, regardless of grades, credits, and degrees. 

When I was younger, I was a runner. I ran two mini-marathons every year, one in the spring and one in the fall. I trained all year to run my best mini-marathon, always knowing that I would cross the finish line near the back of the pack of thousands of runners. 

But I never went out thinking that I would win. It wasn’t about the finish line, it was about sharing the 2 hours of running with all of those other runners, if I managed to run 13 miles, in my own mind, I was a winner. I didn’t even bother looking up to see who was first, or second, or third, it didn’t matter to me. It wasn’t about them, it was about the experience that I had, with sore knees, bleeding and chaffing, sometimes running in rain, heat, or cold, but finishing and feeling exhilarated about it. I get pretty much the same feeling these days from walking up a couple of flights of stairs but, you know, everything in its season.

Again, not to be trite about losses, but you can be tormented by the end of a love relationship, friendship, a career, or even your health, or you can be happy that you were able to have the experience at all. Being in love is sometimes like a beautiful fall day . . . you cannot stop time, you can’t store the day in a jar, you can live fully in the moment and be grateful for it, knowing full well that winter is still coming.

Depression comes from dwelling on the past. Anxiety comes from worrying about the future. Joy is never in the past or the future, it is always a present moment and nowhere else. Having an active prayer life should allow us to focus on the present moment, actively choosing not to sacrifice our present on the altar of bad memories of conflicts and losses in the past. 

Not to wade too deep into the weeds, but the addiction many young people have to playing video games and the addiction many adults have to gambling, is related to this matter of living in the present moment. An interactive video game allows an anxiety riddled teen to let go the rest of the world and to become immerse in a game that demands immediate focus. An unhappy adult can let go of depression and resentment to focus on the immediacy of a slot machine or a card game, never anticipating anything further ahead than the next card or the next spin. 

The problem comes when the money runs out or the game ends and the past and anxiety about the future reasserts itself. The better way is to be aware of your depression, your anxiety, your fear, so that you can reject it.  The popular Vietnamese Buddhist teacher, Thich Nhat Hahn, emphasizes in meditation instruction that your whole life is in the present moment and it would be a shame to miss it!

Your mind is very powerful, and when you dwell on past pain, depression can become your constant companion. Kierkegaard literally personified his painful depression when he said, “My depression has been my most faithful mistress, is it any wonder that I return her affection?”  As much as I have adored the work of Kierkegaard, you cannot really respect that acquiescence to depression anymore than you respect someone who suffers with psychosomatic illnesses but holds onto them because they believe that being sick gets them attention or makes them interesting. As one of my very southern aunts used to say in a withering way about some of the church ladies we knew, “Well, you know, Karen is enjoying ill health.”   

Kierkegaard was the product of an affair between his father and the housekeeper. His father, more or less, blamed Soren for merely existing and I sure that his childhood was unspeakably miserable. But, as Jung said, “You are not what has happened to you. You are what you choose to become.” We are living in turbulent times. The environment is being destroyed, militarism is causing massive casualties, millions are being made refugees and it is impoverishing the world. The wealth gap is growing, and politicians are so lost in their own corruption they are doing almost nothing to be helpful. Life is, in many ways, a shipwreck, but you must not forget to sing in the lifeboats. There is no way to avoid the hardships that are on the horizon but there is nothing that can keep us from dancing as forge ahead.

As Emerson said:

He is rich who owns the day, and no one owns the day

who allows it to be invaded with fret and anxiety.

Finish every day and be done with it.

You have done what you could.

Some blunders and absurdities, no doubt crept in.

Forget them as soon as you can, tomorrow is a new day;

begin it well and serenely, with too high a spirit

to be cumbered with your old nonsense.

This new day is too dear,

with its hopes and invitations,

to waste a moment on the yesterdays.”

Broken hearts eventually get better though they are apt to be broken again. Some friendships will fail, though we have reason to believe that there will be new ones. One day, Donald Trump will no longer be president and the news will have to make an awkward transition back towards reporting news again though there will always be another despot, another political disappointment, another cause to fight for around the corner. 

Garrison Keillor once said that When the country goes temporarily to the dogs, cats must learn to walk on fences, sleep in trees, and have faith that all this woofing is not the last word.

When Trump is gone, we will still be here, and so let us sing and dance along the way and not merely survive.