Are Spirituality and Science Compatible?
Sermons
“Listening and Being Heard”
By Rev. Ed Brock
From March 14 to May 31, 2010, the Museum of Modern Art in New York City held an exhibition of the work of artist Marina Abramovic. Her exhibit was more performance than conventional art and was called “The Artist Is Present.”
Two chairs were placed on opposite sides of a simple wooden table on the ground floor of a large atrium under a high ceiling. Marina, sitting in one chair, with head bowed and eyes closed, would be approached by someone who would sit in the chair opposite Marina. Marina would then raise her head, open her eyes, and looked into the eyes of the person on the other side of the table. The person seated in the chair would look at Maria, locked in mutual attentiveness for five minutes. When the person leaves, Marina bows her head and closes her eyes, until the next person comes to the chair, and it begins again. No talking or touching was allowed. Each person was coached on the rules of this process before they sat down.
Marina did this seven hours a day, for several days each week, for three months. Seven hundred fifty thousand people attended the show over three months. Each day hundreds of people stood about around the periphery of the area to watch the two people sit facing each other.
Why did so many people sit in silence, not moving, to gaze into Maria’s eyes for so long? Why did tears well up in so many when having this experience? Why did so many people stand each day on the periphery of this display fascinated by what they watched?
I think this exhibit was so popular because it provided the experience of
being with another person without needing or expecting anything from them other than their presence. The events at the Museum suggest being present to another, accepting the other without judgment, can be healing.
The act of listening without blame and accepting others as they are without judgement are part of giving our presence to others. So is the ability to listen without needing to change or control the other. All of these ingredients of presence are rare.
A friend, who I will call Fred, specializes in counseling couples. Fred regularly asks one partner of a couple to answer the question, “What would you like your partner to know about you?” and reply only directly to him while the other partner listens silently. Then Fred does the same with the other partner. Each partner is allotted the same amount of time to speak.
Often after such sessions, each partner will say “I never knew he/she thought that” or “I never knew what he or she believed about ________ until I heard them just now.” In other words, people who might have been living with one another for years or even decades did not know what the person they lived with thought and believed about a host of issues. Fred believed this was a widespread problem.
Fred stated that with some couples, the simple act of hearing an honest and authentic version of their partner’s thoughts and feelings led to an improvement in their relationship.
Some of the factors that undermine presence and blocks communication are:
Confirmation bias – if what I hear is not a version of what I think, believe, or want to believe, I shut the words out.
A need to have one’s opinion prevail – If my sole objective is to have my ideas and opinions prevail, I will listen to others if their views agree with my own; everything else is not of interest.
Communication Scarcity – In a world where listening and being listened to are ever rarer, people become starved to get to be heard, and less able to listen to others.
Time poverty – modern life is fast-paced; time to be calmly present with another, and patient, seems impossible to find.
Rise of electronic media – Direct and unmediated human interaction is increasingly rare. Much is lost when using a phone or computer to communicate.
The increase of ways information flows toward us – We live in a sea of messages from Twitter, Facebook, I-phones, tv, and radio. The act of being physically present and patiently listening and being heard by one another seems to belong to a bygone era.
Under the best of conditions, we have a hard time listening to one another. But that task is made even more difficult by the circumstances in which we live.
This difficulty is compounded by the increasing polarization and fragmentation of our society. Our society is beset by decreasing civility and opportunities to build trust.
The coherence of society depends upon society’s level of civility and opportunities to develop trust.
It is critically important for the times we live in to create circles of civility and mutual respect. We can define what creates deeply satisfying communication: openness, transparency, mutual respect, acceptance of differences, and self- management.
These patterns of behavior over time, trust. Encouraging and supporting these behaviors is, in my opinion, one of the chief functions of religious communities.
Every religious tradition has teachings about how to generate genuine communication. But what is required is doing the work required to make our relationships places where trust, mutuality, and safety, can grow.
Our religious movement, with its Seven Principles, and other standards for civility and the practice of presence, is well suited to be leaders in this great need in our times.
“In Praise of Gratitude”
By Rev. Ed Brock
After she first learned to walk, I would take my daughter Allie to a local park every week.
On each visit, whenever she saw a pool of water, she would stop and gaze at it as though it were the most astounding sight on Earth. She would kick the water gently with her foot and watch the ripples of water run across the surface of these little pools of water. Allie was mesmerized by the tiny tides her shoe created.
She also stopped to look at flowers, low hanging limbs of trees, rocks protruded from the ground, the moss that grew on the rocks, and blades of grass that stood isolated from other clumps of grass.
As she fixated on each new wonder, I would soon become impatient, and think about all the ‘important’ things I needed to do after our walk. Over time, Allie’s fascination with the mundane seems increasingly wise over time.
Allie exhibited a natural gratitude wherein a person is grateful for what is, and for what is happening right now. It is supported by the ability to feel wonder. This innate gratitude finds sufficiency in life in each moment. As we move through adulthood, we feel a countervailing wind all around us.
For we live in a society that persuades us to believe that we need to have more of everything, and sooner rather than later. The creation of dissatisfaction (through advertising, for example) is the primary means by which the powerful wheels of commerce turn. A simple appreciation for life as it arises in each moment has no place in this way of thinking.
So, as we grow out of childhood, our natural gratitude tends to dissolve. By degrees we learn to be discontent and embrace an inexhaustible hunger for ‘more.’ We fall into the common pattern of believing that through acquiring more things we will feel fulfilled. Perhaps we become aware that others have things we don’t, and we become jealous, which is the opposite of the state of gratitude, a sort of corrosive to the soul.
As adults, it takes intentionality and effort to move back toward the natural and spontaneous gratitude that comes more easily to us at an earlier stage of life. So much so that gratitude can be thought of as a spiritual practice, reviving and engaging our ability to savor life, which goes against the prevailing winds of the dominant cultural norms. However, it is worth the effort, for gratitude appears to be an essential requisite for our well-being.
For more than 40 years, Dr. John Gottman, now a Professor Emeritus at the University of Washington, studied more than 7,000 couples in research.
One of his discoveries was that four specific behaviors have a remarkable power to predict whether a relationship will last. Dr. Gottman calls these “The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse.” They are Criticism, Contempt, Defensiveness, and Stonewalling. They destroy relationships. Criticism and contempt are particularly potent in the work of destruction.
If criticism, contempt, defensiveness, and distancing are toxic, might their opposites, appreciation, gratitude, openness, and presence, be healing and life-giving? His research indicated that the answer is yes.
What is true for relationships is true for a family, a marriage, a congregation, or an individual. Gratitude and appreciation are particularly positive for relationships.
Gratitude is very powerful. If it infuses how we perceive our lives, the mundane can become sacred. I have found a personal practice of expressing gratitude as often as I can, and anyway I can, to be extremely valuable.
Of course, we cannot live in a continual state of wonder and gratitude. The world is filled with hardships and tragedies too numerous to name, both personal and social, which touch us all. Gratitude is not an antidote or magic elixir for all that troubles us, but it has its place, perhaps as a spiritual truth, that is extraordinarily important.
Gratitude is healing and vivifying. Giving it a prominent place in our lives strengthens us and enlivens the tender cords linking us to others, to nature, and to all of life. And so I concur with the sentiments of the poet John O’Donohue who wrote:
I would like to live
Like a river flows
Carried by the surprise
Of its own unfolding.
I invite you to engage in a spiritual practice of gratitude. I invite you to express gratitude and appreciation to as many people as possible this week and see what happens. I close my remarks, in a spirit of gratitude, by expressing my appreciation for each of you:
For the sacrifices you have made, and for your generosity.
For all the things you have done for the sake of what is right and good.
For helping others in small and large ways, sometimes in ways that no one will see or have a chance to acknowledge, to advance the cause of hope, and build places where compassion can flourish, and justice honored.
“Shame And Forgiveness”
By Rev. Ed Brock
Libby, one of my aunts (her real name was Elizabeth), was a collector of family secrets.
Libby was different from her siblings – my father and his sisters and brothers – in her curiosity about family secrets and her willingness, very selectively, to share them. Her ability to gather and collect family secrets was formidable.
A special bond existed between Libby and me. We were both the youngest of our siblings. She, the youngest of eight children, and I the youngest of four children. The youngest member of a family is usually the one most free of family dynamics, and this includes, in our cases, an inordinate interest in what happens in the subterranean level of the family life, beneath the surface.
Aunt Libby passed on to me an abiding suspicion that the ‘authorities’ are not always telling the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth.
Aunt Libby, for all her willingness to share family secrets, did so with deeply mixed emotions.
For example, she would often speak in a low voice when telling me a family secret, and often add ‘Ed, don’t tell this to another soul,’ as though she were passing on information that might get us both shot if disclosed to others.
It was through my Aunt Libby that I learned what was one of the most deeply guarded family secrets – that my eldest sister, Kay Rose Brock, was conceived before marriage, and that extraordinary measures were taken to hide this fact. I cannot adequately express to what extent the timing of my sister Kay’s conception was covered with layers of secrecy, affecting so many things, creating ripples felt through the family for years stretching into the present.
Today, conceiving a child outside of matrimony does not bear the negative social taboos which permeated the time and place in which my parents grew up. For contrast, I think, of one of my nephews, who had a child with his girlfriend and broadcast this information via Facebook and other social media so that the whole world could know. What a difference two generations make!
So, we might smile at the quaint morality that made my mother so devoted to keeping this fact secret.
But the shame surrounding this family secret was real and powerful.
My mother believed that she had done something nearly unforgivable. It mattered not that this was a silly notion; it was what she felt it meant. The secret possessed a power she gave it, and the culture she grew up in, had given it. It was what she believed it meant in the eyes of others that dominated her thinking.
I stress again that we may smile at the pointlessness of my mother’s guilt or shame or any specific reason for anyone being guilty – but the point is, it is real to the person who feels it.
I began to learn through the experience of my mother’s guilt, and later through my work as a minister and then as a therapist, that there is a vast hidden world of the unforgiven, and the unacceptable, which exerts considerable power in this world.
And it was through this experience that I learned about the power of shame, which is the name of whatever is perceived as permanently unacceptable and unforgivable.
Dr. Brene Brown has done a great deal of work on shame. She believes shame is an epidemic affecting millions of people and is associated with depression, grief, anxiety, eating disorders, addiction, and violence.
Shame can also reveal itself in rage and anger toward others, even to the point of violence. Is this one reason there is so much violence in our society?
Shame, if unchecked, can metastasize into a belief that we are, at our core, flawed and fundamentally unacceptable, in the depths of our being.
There is a social and cultural dimension to the power of shame.
Sharon Salzburg, a well-known Buddhist teacher, attended the Mind and Life Conference with the Dalai Lama in Dharamsala, India, in 1990. This conference was one of the first contacts between Western psychologists, scientists and meditators, and the Dalai Lama. During a Q & A session, Sharon asked the Dalai Lama, “What do you think about self-hatred?” Her question grew out of her experience with the self-rejection she had often observed in her students and even herself.
The Dalai Lama turned to his translator and asked in Tibetan for an explanation; it was evident he was puzzled. Finally, looking back at Sharon, the Dalai Lama said, “Self-hatred? What is that? Is that some kind of nervous disorder?” He added: “…you have Buddha-nature. How could you think of yourself that way? I thought I had a very good acquaintance with the mind, but now I feel quite ignorant. I find this very, very strange.”
Salzburg reflected that many people she encountered had not believed they deserved happiness, well-being, or peace. And it struck her: she was dealing with something widespread that had become part of the culture.
Where did this come from? From the negative heritage of our culture’s religious traditions? From materialism? From racism? From classism? From economic disparities? All the above?
In a certain sense, however, it does not matter where it arose. To not be infected by toxic shame, and affirming the worth and dignity of ourselves and others, is the important task.
As members of a religious community, we are here to reclaim our human dignity, our capacity for caring, our ability to forgive and let go, and to recover our right to well-being, against the power of shame in our culture.
The best place to start is with ourselves. Buddha stated that we can “search the entire universe for someone who is more deserving of our love and affection than ourselves and that we won’t find that person anywhere.”
An enormous amount of shame percolates through our culture and society, and one of the ways in which it is most commonly manifest is as self-hatred. But self-hatred can also ‘flip’ outward and be manifest as hatred directed toward those who are ‘different’ from one’s self or one’s group. Is this one reason why there is so much violence and division in our society?
Brené Brown wrote that “Shame is like a prison, and healing is the key to unlock the door and set yourself free.” Sharon Salzberg suggests that “Healing shame requires compassion, empathy, and self-forgiveness.“
John Bradshaw wrote that “healing shame means embracing your authentic self, with all your flaws and imperfections, and learning to love and accept yourself unconditionally.”
If we can truly forgive ourselves and others, and direct compassion toward ourselves and others, the whole world changes. And other people change, too, because we have changed.