“Spiritual but not Religious…”    Oct. 29, 2017    Dr. Roger Ray

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Matthew 22:34-46                              When the Pharisees heard that he had silenced the Sadducees, they gathered together, and one of them, a lawyer, asked him a question to test him. "Teacher, which commandment in the law is the greatest?"

He said to him, "'You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind.' This is the greatest and first commandment. And a second is like it: 'You shall love your neighbor as yourself.' On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets."

    Bill Nye, a.k.a. “The Science Guy” has added his voice to the chorus of genetic scientists who insist that race is a human construct. As he said, if someone from Papua New Guiana has a child with someone from Sweden, their child is a human. Looked at from a perspective of DNA, there really is no such thing as African, Asian, Native American, Latino, Caucasian, or Eskimo. The differences among humans are subtle and insignificant.

I don’t get to talk about philosophy very often and I’m sure most of you can count your lucky stars for that but there was one philosopher that I studied in college that didn’t make much sense to me at the time who has come to make a lot more sense to me in recent years.  Ludwig Wittgenstein was a British and Austrian philosopher who talked about the philosophy of mind and of language. I remember my professor explaining his existential argument by saying that if you look down at a table that you are not seeing the same table you would see if you looked at it from beneath it. That hardly seemed like it was worth the price of tuition but the real point of it is, the truth of a thing depends entirely upon the perspective from which you see it. And you know me, I’m all about evidence based faith and I like to root my reality in scientific facts but perspective is a huge determinant in what truth you experience.

It is true that there is, from the perspective of science, no such thing as race. We are all humans but if you ask a black person if there is such a thing as blackness, that is, has growing up being identified as a black person had any influence on you?  Well, their reality is not the reality that Bill Nye is talking about. White privilege is real, minority prejudice is real, gender discrimination is real, and while scientists may be trying to defuse the assumptions our society has accumulated around race, the fact is, race is still real. Maybe not from a scientific perspective, but from a lived, realized, social perspective, it is very real.

We are all decent people here. None of us want to be racists. All of us would like to eradicate racism from our society and I believe that we have made progress in lots of ways but there is a great deal more progress to take place. When the Black Lives Matter movement began there were a lot of us, good, well-intended people, who made stumbling and somewhat confused responses to say “all lives matter.” Even Bernie Sanders, when he was first being confronted by Black Lives Matter protestors, said exactly those words, “all lives matter.” Bernie is a Jewish liberal in Washington, D.C., being in a minority is not new territory to him, but even a seasoned, progressive liberal who had marched in Civil Rights demonstrations back in the old days, still couldn’t see the table from the black side of the street.

The truth is that there has never been a time in modern American history when it wasn’t obvious that white lives matter. We have a long history of institutionally and individually insisting that black lives do not matter. And so the alternative needs to be said. And those of us who believe that we are “woke” to this issue, even those of us who are in inter-racial families, need to calm down and listen, ask more questions than we offer opinions, and see if we can grow our way out of racism.

Not since the days of the Clarence Thomas hearings in 1991 has the issue of sexual harassment been in the news since the case of Harvey Weinstein gained media attention. Sex scandals are not at all uncommon in the past generation but the coercion of sex from women by powerful men has been an especially nauseating bit of news. It is not hard to imagine that there were not a lot of applicants of women wanting to date Harvey for his natural good looks but his use of money and power to force himself into the lives of women has been especially disgusting, along the lines of the whole Bill Cosby case.

Still, I have to admit that I have a negative gut reaction to hearing people like George H. W. Bush being lumped together with the likes of Cosby and Weinstein. When a man in his 90’s who is confined to a wheelchair gives himself permission to inappropriately touch women who are standing close to his chair, I’m willing to insist that the difference between a confused, sick, old man and the kind of predator that we have seen from younger and more aggressive people in power . . . but I am not a young woman who has been groped. I have an opinion, but this is not a time to listen to the opinions of old, white, men. We need to listen to women who have been victimized.

And, yes, especially as a younger pastor, I can tell you that I have been groped by little old ladies during my nursing home visits. There was one little lady at my former parish who came through the greeting line at the end of the service every week and would reach around behind me for a squeeze and after a while she started coming through for a handful and then going to the back of the line and coming through a second and third time. It was annoying, but I knew that she was suffering from dementia and, folks, it is different for men. I didn’t feel objectified. I wasn’t afraid of assault. I didn’t feel that my credibility was in question.

I am aware that men can be sexually assaulted and I know that an alarming number of boys have suffered the worst kinds of sexual assault and humiliation, but what I am specifically saying here is that while there may be a huge difference between what George Bush did and what Harvey Weinstein did, it is time for men to be quiet and listen . . . we might learn something on this topic if we will wait to hear what the table looks like from another perspective.

I am aware that there are also false allegations and there are people who are trying to make their reputations by making claims of victimization but if you lead off with that reply, you are telling legitimate victims to remain silent because they will not be believed. I get called into these conversations at times, especially when the offense takes place within a family and I know how dangerous it is to give credence to a false allegation. I know how delicate a thing that a reputation is but our first response needs to be affirmative. We need to believe the people who come forward with complaints before the list gets to be as long as it was with Bill Cosby or Harvey Weinstein.

Weinstein even insisted that he deserved a second chance. He has settled out of court in 8 different cases! What does he mean by a second chance? He has had a second, third, and fourth chance and quite a few more after that . . . and that was the reported cases. I think we’re looking for a prison with no exit in his case.

Still, I find myself changing the channel or skipping a podcast when this story comes on. I feel that I have heard enough and with Congress set to shift another huge portion of the tax burden onto the backs of the poor and middle class to give even more tax favoritism to the super wealthy, and with our President still threatening to get us into a nuclear exchange with North Korea and maybe even Iran, stories about men behaving like pigs just doesn’t get to take up all of the news cycle.

But, as Winston Churchill said, “Courage is what it takes to stand up and speak; and courage is what it also takes to sit down and listen.” We progressives are a lot better at speaking than we are at listening. Most of us spent most of our lives being silenced by employers, parents, pastors, and schools. We spent most of our education learning how to stand in line and how to color inside of the lines and when we finally broke loose, and learned how to get out of line, how to color without lines, we lost an appropriate sense of balance.

You cannot accurately describe the world only from your perspective. The universe does not revolve around your navel. We like to say that we are spiritual and not religious. We like to say that love is our religion. And our collective rejection of creeds, dogmas, and institutional authority has been vital to our liberation but on this week when we observe the 500^th anniversary of Martin Luther’s nailing of the 95 theses to the church door in Wittenberg, for all of the freedom and independent thinking and scholarship that was born in that Reformation, there were also an uncountable number of wars, factions, heresies and abuses. The Catholic church was and is guilty of any number of abuses but have you ever heard of the Assemblies of God?  The Mormons?  The Church of Christ? Do you know what the Jehovah’s Witnesses have put people through?

I appreciate the fact that the Unitarian Universalists have commonly taken up this theme in many of their congregations. But it has to be more than a slogan. In the well known passage from the 22^nd chapter of Matthew that we used as our wisdom lesson today; Jesus is reported to have said that the greatest commandment is to love God and the second is like it, that we love one another. I’m in no position to edit Jesus but since I’m pretty sure that Matthew edited him, I’m going to give it a stab.

I’m going to insist that the two commandments are really just one. Think about it, what does it mean to love God? If you stop there, full-stop, period, just love God, that doesn’t mean a thing. The only way to love God is to love other people.

I can tell you that I am totally devoted to the Persian god, Ahura Mazda, but unless you know more about Zoroastrianism than I assume you do, that isn’t going to mean a thing to you. The only way to be sincerely spiritual, the only way to have a faith that has substance, is to literally be on the side of love and that will necessarily mean putting our own egos on hold now and then so that we can listen, learn, understand, empathize, and have real compassion for those around us.

Bill Nye is not technically wrong, from a scientific perspective. There is no race beyond our social constructs. And the world’s religions are all more full of balloon juice than they are substance and yet, the social reality we are living on the under side of the table is that there is still a lot of racism, sexual harassment is a nightmare, and people are still fighting and dying for their own version of an ancient religion that is still important to them.

I am proud to be among you. I am sincerely proud of your willingness to protest, demonstrate, write, speak, and advocate but I don’t want us to forget that love also demands that we listen, to see the table from another perspective, and to accept that our own views are not always either right or universal. That’s just my opinion, I’ll let you decide if I am right.

                                                          

“Dedication to Reality and Balancing”

“Dedication to Reality and Balancing”     Oct. 22, 2017    

Dr Roger Ray, pastor

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M. Scott Peck, (The Road Less Traveled, p. 51) 

"What does a life of total dedication to the truth mean? It means, first of all, a life of continuous and never-ending stringent self-examination. We know the world only through our relationship to it. Therefore, to know the world, we must not only examine it but we must simultaneously examine the examiner . . . The life of wisdom must be a life of contemplation combined with action.”

I personally and our church collectively owes a lot to the work and the character of Bishop John Shelby Spong. We studied several of his books before we first hosted the good Bishop here in Springfield and his three visits to our church over the past few years has grown our on-line audience and given us both encouragement and global credibility.

But my relationship with John Spong didn’t start out smoothly. Like most pastors who received a academically credible and progressive theological education, I had formed a pretty comfortable barrier between the books that I read and the papers that I wrote in grad school, and what I said and taught in my churches post grad school.

I cannot even remember who first put his 1999 book, “Why Christianity Must Change or Die” into my hands but I know that my initial reaction was very negative. In the pages of this important book, Spong was demanding that people like me stop this foolish “cat and mouse game” of keeping biblical and theological scholarship a secret from our congregations. It was time for Christians to get honest, to become congruent between what we knew was true in the classroom and what we said was true in the pulpit.

I kept getting mad and putting the book back on the shelf of my study. I could not believe that there was anyway to be break down the barrier between the superstition of religion and the honesty of theology and keep my job. And maybe I was right, because the more I became convinced that it was time to be honest about these things the closer I got to being fired and kicked to the curb by my denomination.

In Scott Peck’s, The Road Less Traveled, he describes the four tools of discipline necessary to leading a decent life. Last week we talked about the first two: the ability to delay gratification, and the willingness to accept responsibility for our own lives.

This week I want to talk about the other two, which are: a dedication to reality, and balancing. Being dedicated to reality, honesty, the truth, seems so obvious that it doesn’t need to be said. If you can’t tell the difference between what is real and what is imaginary, well, that is the basic meaning of what it means to be schizophrenic, right? And yet, any minister who has been educated at a top, secondary, or tertiary seminary in the past century who is still talking about a literal heaven, hell, souls, angels, demons, and a terribly judgmental father in the clouds, has already crossed the Rubicon into an indisputably schizophrenic way of living. There is a reality they know inside their own skulls, and a separate reality they talk about under their steeples.

A lot of us have a map of reality that we drew up early in life that helped us to navigate our childhood years.

That map of reality may have been crucial to their survival in a chaotic, or dysfunctional home but when you move into adolescence and take on the responsibility of living independently as a young adult, it becomes necessary to make changes to that map.

Being dedicated to the truth means that you both have to constantly examine and re-examine the world but you also have to re-examine the examiner. You have to be willing to question your most closely held beliefs. Anything that you are not allowed to question is probably false. If you have a religious or political belief that cannot be question, there is probably a reason why it can’t be questioned, and that reason is this: if you expose it to the light of facts and reason, it will be shown to be false.

Religion can be especially vulnerable to this refusal to face facts but in the past few years we have seen how much this also affects politics. I continue to be stunned by the fact that we actually launched an all-out war on Iraq based on the obviously false claims that they were somehow involved with 9-11 and that they were harboring weapons of mass destruction.

Somehow, the Bush administration was convinced of Mark Twain’s maxim that a lie told and stuck to is as good as the truth. And in very short order news agencies were repeating the obviously false claims, staring at us through the screens of our TV’s in our living rooms where a huge portion of the population came to believe it… I guess, did they really “believe” it, as in, they thought it was true, or did they believe it because it fit into their map of reality that told them that we had to go kill thousands of people because thousands of Americans had been killed by a handful of terrorists?

I rarely implied on Easter morning that Jesus had physically come out of a tomb in Jerusalem, nor did I make inflated promises in funeral sermons that the dearly departed was now enjoying eternal bliss in an invisible heaven, but I spoke in a way that let my audiences believe that I believed those things. I artfully spoke above the heads of my congregation in a way that left me with a false sense of integrity while coddling their childish superstitions.

George W. Bush knew that Iraq wasn’t involved in 9-11 and that they posed no existential threat to our security but they were a conveniently disarmed foil, and how he waved off the deaths of thousands of American soldiers in that war is still just mystifying to me.

But he was an armature compared to President Trump and his revolving cast of White House spokespersons who use the circumlocution of “alternative truths” to put lipstick on the pigs that are their daily series of lies.

Now that ta reform is the policy agenda de jour, Trump keeps saying that America is the most taxed nation in the world, which is clearly not true. And when confronted he will say that we have the highest corporate taxes in the world, which is also not even close to true. But he keeps saying it as if saying it more and more emphatically will somehow make it true.

George Orwell coined the proverb that, “Truth is treason in an empire of lies,” but now we have a president who openly discusses jailing journalists who tell truths that he does not like or that he does not want to have told. Telling the truth is now portrayed as treason in the United States of America.

We have come to expect this in Russia, or North Korea, or China, but it may now be more true here than in the worst of tyrannical dictatorships in the modern world.

It is difficult to believe that this is happening. We are used to politicians lying when they make campaign promises in order to get elected that cannot be fulfilled. When Regan promised to cut taxes and simultaneously increase military spending AND balance the budget, anyone who had ever passed first grade math could have easily seen that this was not true and yet he was handily elected in 1980 and by 1984 when his promises had been shown to be false, he was re-elected by a public that had a very sketchy relationship with reality. Of course, all the while, they were going to churches that regularly lied to them so, in a way, they are used to it.

As Voltaire said, “Those who can convince you to believe in absurdities can get you to commit atrocities.” One of the most important aspects of citizenship is to refuse to believe the lies of politicians. We must demand honesty, a devotion to the truth, and a total rejection of false propaganda.

The same can be said about religion. You can do me no greater favor than to challenge the truth of anything you hear me say from this pulpit. Those of you who listen to our podcasts and videos, as dangerous as this can be to your church relationships, please, don’t be afraid to ask your priest, your rabbi, your imam, or your pastor, “Is that really true?” “Do you really believe what you are saying?”

I would love for pastors everywhere to be set free from the cage of keeping what they know to themselves while feeding falsehoods to their parish. When we are in grad school, our work is subject to peer review and it should be no different in the pulpit.

Where we most often fail is in the discipline of dedication to reality. I meet people all of the time who tell me that they read my columns in the Springfield NewsLeader and most of them feel obligated to add the caveat, “But I don’t always agree with you.” I try to be polite about it but, seriously, what is agreement? Too often, we have equated truth with preference. What you like, what you prefer, what you wish was true, is the single most irrelevant thing in the world.

When someone takes me to task about the facts of an article, I always stop to check my facts and seriously look into their objections but when they come at me with name calling, or angry dismissal, so far as I am concerned, they are just telling me that I hit the nail on the head.

Trumps largest failing is his narcissistic refusal to examine himself. Thinking people already know that he is full of balloon juice. What is sad is that he doesn’t slow down for a minute to let the fact that he is a liar work its way down into his self-awareness.

Still, it doesn’t do us any good to sit here in judgment of our President, or the Pope, or the Mormon Church, or Evangelicals, if we are not willing to examine ourselves.

The last of Peck’s four tools of discipline is balance, and again, it sounds deceptively easy. The best illustration I know for this one though comes from the hand of Aristotle when he talked about anger in his work on ethics. Quite prophetically, the philosopher wrote:  “Anyone can become angry - that is easy. But to be angry with the right person, to the right degree, at the right time, for the right purpose, and in the right way - that is not easy.”

As Scott Peck says, even discipline must be disciplined. You can fail to have integrity if you never get angry and you can fail to have credibility if you are always angry. Balancing is related to the schizophrenic aspect of a dedication to reality. Peck cites one female client who went wildly between severe isolation and careless sexuality, unable to make good distinctions between the people to whom she does not open her door at all and those she allows directly into her bedroom.

One of the most painful exchanges I’ve had in recent years was with a church member who came into our community with unbridled enthusiasm, virtually immediately pushing me up onto a pedestal as soon as they arrived in town. Three years later there was a sudden reversal in attitude that digressed into what looked like playground bullying.

Liberal churches all suffer from fairly high rates of turnover. People come, get their immediate needs met and too often just move on. Others come for a single issue and become disillusioned when they discover that their single issue is not our only issue. And, of course, I’ve something of a lightening rod myself and so a reasonable person can certainly find issues with which to disagree with me.

But this woman was so eager to find my clay feet that she just fabricated an offense. And I told her, “I never said what you are telling people that I said.” And she replied, “Well, maybe you didn’t but you thought it and if you thought it that is as bad as saying it.” And I replied, “But I didn’t think it either, nor anything like it. In fact, my thoughts are the opposite of what you are saying.” She staunchly insisted, “I know what you think.” I tried to reason with her, “Do you know what other people think?” “Do you actually hear the thoughts in other voices?” I cannot say that this tactic worked well in conversation but you see how a failing in both a dedication to the truth and in striking an appropriate balance becomes, if not mental illness itself, at least a schizophrenic like conduct.

In both of these dimensions of discipline, dedication to reality and balancing, we are obligated to keep trying to hit a moving target. Our understanding of reality needs to be constantly re-examined, and as our understanding of reality changes we have to restrike a new balance of beliefs and behaviors.

We say that we are on a spiritual journey rather than that we have arrived at some religious graduation ceremony. Our church is not what it was five years ago and certainly we are quite different from what we envisioned ten years ago when we were planning our first meeting.

Our original members all came from decidedly mainstream Christian heritage and as we have closely examined the claims of traditional Christianity, we have found the need to pack a lot of that stuff away and consign it to history.

We have reached out to gain a deeper understanding of other major world religions and while we find wisdom and insight in these other traditions, we can also see that there is a good deal of primitive superstition clinging to all world religions.

What we have come to accept, though it isn’t always comfortable, is that there are no absolutes and we have to personally shoulder the responsibility of being forever in transition, looking for truths that we can no more capture than we can a beautiful morning, or the toddler years of our children. Reality is always on the move and we are either becoming something new or we risk becoming irrelevant fossils.

My old friend, Bishop John Spong, was right in his original assertion:  Christianity has to change or die. What I hope we all realize is that the same is true for us as individuals. Our faith has changed but as progressive as we are compared to the religious landscape, the superstition of others was never the yardstick we used to measure our own faith. We’re on our own, accepting that we have given up false certainty in favor of honest uncertainty, in a lifelong search for meaning, relevance, and purpose.

“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.