What Makes Us Change for the Better – January 10th, 2010
Now there’s always the clever and true insight that achieving good intentions is all about picking the right ones. I could promise to eat more chocolate and gain more weight, and I’ll bet that I could do that. I’ll bet we can all find some resolutions like that; I bet they’ll be painfully autobiographical, but, at least we’re making promises that we can keep!
So now that we’re stuck with keeping our resolutions, how can we make a genuine good intention really stick? This is a question about personal change. Personal happens in a couple of different ways, and when it comes to keeping good intentions, when it comes to intentional personal change, I think we can get distracted and discouraged by the wrong examples. Let me mention some, by way of warning, at least in my experience.
Who has seen the movie 2012? I love science fiction myself; I’ll sell state secrets to watch a B grade scifi movie. Personal change happens in the movie. Before the world ends, John Cusack and Amanda Peet don’t like each other very much,. They don’t meet each other needs, let say. But when the world ends, Amanda Peet discovers that she no longer wants a man who earns money and pays attention to the family; what she really needs is a man who can protect her kids from the apocalypse by driving cars through collapsing buildings and swimming under water for large amounts of time. John Cusack discovers he no longer cares about ‘being understood’; what he really needs is just someone still alive that’s related to him. So both characters make major personal changes in their life and marriage expectations, and they pull the family together.
But this movie isn’t a good example of how to make personal changes, right? If we need the world to end to make personal change, literally or even just figuratively, we might wait around a long time, probably beyond 2012 I’ll wager. Worse, we surrender our power to affect our own personal change, waiting for the world to inspire us or to terrify us. My favorite Roman Catholic saint is St. Francis of Assisi. He was born into a wealthy family, but he gave it all up, and surrendered himself to poverty and to following the example of Jesus. Now that’s personal change. But he also saw giant winged angels singing and trumpeting on the tops of mountains. Giant singing winged angels might even get a freethinker to change, especially if the music is good. Now I will return to mystical experiences another week, because I believe that the UU and freethinker tradition should not dismiss them. But for now, my point is the same; if we can only achieve our good intentions inspired by the music of angels, then we won’t accomplish much.
A great example of good intentions fulfilled time and time again lies right in our own freethought tradition. Eduard Schroeter, a founder of this congregation and its first speaker, devoted his entire life to promoting a free and rational and open-minded approach to religion. So intense were his liberal and anti-clerical convictions that in Germany he would speak to groups of a thousand people. He had his own congregation in Worms, and when the liberal movement in the German states failed in 1848, rather than lay low he broke all ties with the organized churches and declared his congregation at Worms a Free Congregation. The local German government expelled him, and he left for America like so many other German revolutionaries: 48ers, they were called. In America, he founded numerous free congregations among the German immigrant populations in the Northeast and in the Upper Mid-West. Eduard Schroeter’s example is rightly an inspiration to anyone of a liberal religious persuasion; he knew his convictions, and so he had the clarity of conviction needed to fulfill good intentions.
But even here we must be careful what we learn about fulfilling good intentions. If the lesson of Eduard Schroeter is that we must know our real convictions first before we can change ourselves, then we must also acknowledge an important difference between him and his times and ourselves and our times. Schroeter was born during a time of tremendous social change and tumult, in Europe and, in a different way, in America. His generation, just by luck I believe, was born at the end of Europe’s feudal period and was given by history, so to speak, the responsibility for ushering in a more liberal social order. Frankly, it is easier to acquire your convictions and to know them, when the movement of human history arrives at a cusp, a tipping point. Our congregation was founded by people who experienced a once-in-a-few-centuries kind of social change; they understood that, and reached out for a more civilized way of being religious. Ambiguity of conviction is the not the problem of a revolutionary in revolutionary times; staying out of jail, staying alive, is usually the problem.
But ambiguity of purpose can be a problem for us, for our times. Granted the issues of our times, we Americans today sit upon 60 years of peace, prosperity, and freedom unprecedented in human history. All this peace and prosperity can dim our resolve to improve ourselves. Broadband internet, a refrigerator full of food, well-kept roads, a government check every month; all this unprecedented comfort discourages us from paying too much attention to our good intentions. Our offering song today, Feed the Birds, asks the right question for a comfortable generation; what are we paying attention to? The song comes from the great musical and movie Mary Poppins, and the scene where this song is sung contrasts feeding the birds with the great financial activities of the British in the early 20th century. The British, in those days, were like we Americans are now: powerful, wealthy, self-satisfied. And what were they doing with themselves? In the movie, the father character must lose his job before he is able to pay attention to his life and resolve to improve his relations with his family. Is this the only way we can ever change? Must the world end, must we see seraphims, must history knock on our doorstep, must we lose our livelihoods, before we ever have the resolve to fulfill our good intentions? What does it take?
Well, let’s get back to that question raised by our offering song, Feed the Birds. What are we paying attention to? St. Francis, Eduard Schroeter, these people didn’t have to ask that question because life dramatically compelled their attention. But our generation must cultivate the skill of paying attention to the right things without those ‘right things’ shouting at us. We must cultivate a virtue, a discipline of self-awareness. In our story for all ages, I described how I learned to respect weeds on my vegetable farm. The story sounds a lot like another “Big-Experience-changes-person” story, and it is, but with a twist. I had to admit I was screwing up. I had to look at myself: not at the seraphims, not at current events, but at my own past actions. And for me that’s the key to fulfilling good intentions, for making New Year’s resolutions stick; we have to look at our own past actions, and be honest about the worth of our actions.
About a month ago, I suggested that the parable of the talents, is about fear. There was a lot of good disagreement about that. A problem I have with my own interpretation is that I can find no where in the Christian Gospels where Jesus teaches us how to move away from our fear and toward unconditional love. There is no moral psychology in Jesus’ teachings. There is a lot moral psychology in the Indian tradition, but the first real moral psychology from a Western writer that really got my attention is Charles Dicken’s A Christmas Carol.
Scrooge completely transforms himself in the story, and he does so because he is forced to look at his own past actions, and experience the worth of those actions. Dickens is not a Buddhist; Scrooge is not asked, what are your desires, what do you grasp at? Scrooge knows perfectly well what his desire is: money. Likewise, Dickens does not portray Scrooge as vaguely disaffected by his wealthy life. As far as Scrooge is concerned, he is happy and content because he has all the money. Instead, the three ghosts ask Scrooge, what does your love of money do to other people? What did it do to the woman who loved you once? What is it doing to your nephew now, to your employee and his family, now? The ghost of Christmas Future is the worst visitation of all because the vision of the future it presents to Scrooge is the answer to those questions. Your love of money has destroyed all of your human relations, this last visitation tells him, and without those human relations, you are so close to worthless that no one will even notice your death.
So I offer to all of you that in our comfortable times we will improve ourselves only when we review our actions honestly and ask, what am I doing for other people, what I am doing for my family, my community? We will not have the benefit of ghosts to help us, I suspect. But we needn’t conduct our review alone. Scrooge has lost his family, his community; all he has left are ghosts. But we have our families, we have each other, to help us look honestly at what our actions do to others.
Dickens’ never explains why Scrooge’s confrontation with the near worthlessness of his life inspires him to change; Dickens’ seems to feel that obviously one would so change, given such a poor review. But I believe that Scrooge changes because he still feels, at some level, what I believe we all feel, when our comforts don’t dim it for us. We exist for other people, for the world. We exist to make a contribution, we exist to give.
The worst thing we can do to ourselves is to feel that it is too late; that any personal change we make cannot overbalance the weight of our past shortcomings. Scrooge endures one of the worst reviews an ordinary life can have, but when Christmas morning arrives, he jumps outdoors, laughs, and begins, finally, at last, to give. We exist to give, each and every moment. There is no tally of sins, to be recompensed. The universe remembers, but does not tarry over bad things. Each moment is another moment of existence, and we exist to give.
When we can feel this truth, really feel it in spite of the distractions of comfort, really feel it and dispel our guilt, then we will stick to our New Year’s resolutions.
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