Einstein Quote of the Day

One thing I have learned in a long life: All our science, measured against reality, is primitive and childlike - and yet it is the most precious thing we have.


Einstein said this about science, but you could say this about all knowledge, yet I wonder if even knowledge is the most precious thing we have.  I would say that the most precious thing we have is love.  And the source of that love, in my humble opinion, is a God who gave us all there is, including knowledge.  I have no doubt, however, that our love, measured against the love that God has for us is truly primitive and childlike.

This is my commandment that you love one another

The seed for this sermon came from The Atlantic article referred to in my post On Happiness and Aging 

A parishioner who was normally angry and had little good to say about the sermons or any body, for that matter, is said to have approached her rector after church one Sunday. "Thank you for preaching a  sermon that focused on the history of the church," she said. The rector, unused to praise from this particular person smiled. The parishioner continued, "I really don’t think I could stand another sermon about love."

The current issue of The Atlantic, on-line, has an article about what is called the Grant Study; a study that has been going on for 72 years, looking at a group Harvard men and following them through those years to analyze what makes for a happy life. The current head researcher for the study concludes “that positive emotions make us more vulnerable than negative ones. One reason is that they’re future-oriented. Fear and sadness have immediate payoffs—protecting us from attack or attracting resources at times of distress. Gratitude and joy, over time, will yield better health and deeper connections—but in the short term actually put us at risk. That’s because, while negative emotions tend to be insulating, positive emotions expose us to the common elements of rejection and heartbreak.

To illustrate his point, he told a story about one of his “prize” Grant Study men, a doctor and well-loved husband. “On his 70th birthday,” [The researcher] said, “when he retired from the faculty of medicine, his wife got hold of his patient list and secretly wrote to many of his longest-running patients, ‘Would you write a letter of appreciation?’ And back came 100 single-spaced, desperately loving letters—often with pictures attached. And she put them in a lovely presentation box covered with Thai silk, and gave it to him.” Eight years later, the researcher interviewed the man, who proudly pulled the box down from his shelf. “…, I don’t know what you’re going to make of this,” the man said, as he began to cry, “but I’ve never read it.” “It’s very hard,” the researcher said, “for most of us to tolerate being loved.”

It must be very hard to be a Christian, if you have an issue with the "love thing."  I would think that today would have been a good Sunday to stay at home if that’s a problem for you.  Just as the doctor had a hard time accepting his farewell gift, we can find that farewell gifts are not always easy to get. And after a death accepting gifts can be even more difficult. Aunt Claire left us her Toby Jugs and she knew how much we dislike knick knacks. Our Uncle John left us his Harley to the dismay of his son and to our chagrin.

Soon we will celebrate the Feast of the Ascension.  The time when Jesus was no longer a visible, physical presence among his disciples.  So Jesus left us gifts. Gifts we tend to take for granted.

The first gift is that of baptism. It’s not a personal gift; it’s a gift that puts us into a community.  A gift that puts us into God's adopted family.

Another gift Jesus gave us is the Eucharist. Like Baptism, it’s neither personal nor complicated. We eat bread and drink wine in a community meal where we share as one body in the one bread. 

And then there’s the gift of Scripture. God speaks to us as the community of faith through the words of the writers and as a community we apply the words of scripture to our time and place.

Jesus gave us the Church, the community of all the faithful, dead, living, and to come. He didn't give us a building where you go to get something. The Church is "the blessed company of all faithful people." The Church is community.  The Church is the people living in this time and place who are the descendents of that early band of men and women who followed Jesus.  That community we now call the Church is best known among us, as The Church of the Good Shepherd. Maybe even we know a little about it as The Diocese of Maine, or as The Episcopal Church in the United States, or even as part of the Anglican Communion.

All of these gifts we probably acknowledge and accept, but like the doctor who couldn’t accept the love of his patients, the gift of God’s love is so often rejected.

Love is the greatest gift Jesus gave us.. He gave us this gift and he gave us a new commandment that we should love one another. Without love, none of the other gifts is of any use. Love makes our churches welcoming places for all people.  Love makes our lives fulfilling.  Love makes our crazy world bearable. Love is the basis of happiness.  Not a sentimental or “warm fuzzy feelings” kind of love, but the kind of love that lays down its life for a friend.

Jesus called his disciples friends and that’s what we are, friends of Jesus. When we reach out to others, particularly when it is inconvenient, or we’d rather not, or it costs us something in time or energy or money, we are acting as friends of Jesus. And when we risk loving and receiving love back, we are repaid by the peace and joy of being his friend.

It is this shared, giving, dying and rising love, which creates and sustains this community of Jesus’ friends we call the Church.  It is this shared giving, dying and rising love that creates and sustains us, friends made in the God’s image, so that the world may see through “the knowledge and love of God in Christ Jesus,” our friend.

Addendum:  When I gave the sermon, I realized that I had forgotten to mention the gift of the Holy Spirit.  Since we used Eucharistic Prayer D, it became even clearer to me that forgetting to mention that gift was a major loss in the sermon.  Oh well.

On Happiness and Aging

David Brooks in today's NY Times op-ed piece: They Had it Made  is about and  links to The Atlantic  piece by Joshua Wolf Schenk on the 72-year-long longitudinal study of 268 Harvard men who started college in 1937 when they were all sophomores. All were considered happy and well adjusted at the time.  Some of the men predicted to end up the most happy did not. The preface to The Atlantic article says:

Is there a formula—some mix of love, work, and psychological adaptation—for a good life? For 72 years, researchers at Harvard have been examining this question, following 268 men who entered college in the late 1930s through war, career, marriage and divorce, parenthood and grandparenthood, and old age. Here, for the first time, a journalist gains access to the archive of one of the most comprehensive longitudinal studies in history. Its contents, as much literature as science, offer profound insight into the human condition—and into the brilliant, complex mind of the study’s longtime director, George Vaillant.

The study is named after the original funding source (Grant), which lasting for the first ten years.  I have only quoted a few paragraphs that I found the most intriguing.

(Arlie) Bock [the first researcher] assembled a team that spanned medicine, physiology, anthropology, psychiatry, psychology, and social work, and was advised by such luminaries as the psychiatrist Adolf Meyer and the psychologist Henry Murray. Combing through health data, academic records, and recommendations from the Harvard dean, they chose 268 students—mostly from the classes of 1942, ’43, and ’44—and measured them from every conceivable angle and with every available scientific tool.

But it turned out that the lives were too big, too weird, too full of subtleties and contradictions to fit any easy conception of “successful living.” Arlie Bock had gone looking for binary conclusions—yeses and nos, dos and don’ts. But the enduring lessons would be paradoxical, not only on the substance of the men’s lives (the most inspiring triumphs were often studies in hardship) but also with respect to method: if it was to come to life, this cleaver-sharp science project would need the rounding influence of storytelling.

So one of the stories we get is really about Vaillant and his perspective:

Yet, even as he takes pleasure in poking holes in an innocent idealism, Vaillant says his hopeful temperament is best summed up by the story of a father who on Christmas Eve puts into one son’s stocking a fine gold watch, and into another son’s, a pile of horse manure. The next morning, the first boy comes to his father and says glumly, “Dad, I just don’t know what I’ll do with this watch. It’s so fragile. It could break.” The other boy runs to him and says, “Daddy! Daddy! Santa left me a pony, if only I can just find it!”

Vaillant’s other main interest is the power of relationships. “It is social aptitude,” he writes, “not intellectual brilliance or parental social class, that leads to successful aging.” Warm connections are necessary—and if not found in a mother or father, they can come from siblings, uncles, friends, mentors. The men’s relationships at age 47, he found, predicted late-life adjustment better than any other variable, except defenses. Good sibling relationships seem especially powerful: 93 percent of the men who were thriving at age 65 had been close to a brother or sister when younger. In an interview in the March 2008 newsletter to the Grant Study subjects, Vaillant was asked, “What have you learned from the Grant Study men?” Vaillant’s response: “That the only thing that really matters in life are your relationships to other people.”

The next three paragraph are the ones I'm particularly interested in with my Appreciative Inquiry hat on.  Positive emotions are so key to successful transitions and I'm interested in any new information on the subject.

Vaillant became a kind of godfather to the field, and a champion of its message that psychology can improve ordinary lives, not just treat disease. But in many ways, his role in the movement is as provocateur. Last October, I watched him give a lecture to Seligman’s graduate students on the power of positive emotions—awe, love, compassion, gratitude, forgiveness, joy, hope, and trust (or faith). “The happiness books say, ‘Try happiness. You’ll like it a lot more than misery’—which is perfectly true,” he told them. But why, he asked, do people tell psychologists they’d cross the street to avoid someone who had given them a compliment the previous day?

In fact, Vaillant went on, positive emotions make us more vulnerable than negative ones. One reason is that they’re future-oriented. Fear and sadness have immediate payoffs—protecting us from attack or attracting resources at times of distress. Gratitude and joy, over time, will yield better health and deeper connections—but in the short term actually put us at risk. That’s because, while negative emotions tend to be insulating, positive emotions expose us to the common elements of rejection and heartbreak.

To illustrate his point, he told a story about one of his “prize” Grant Study men, a doctor and well-loved husband. “On his 70th birthday,” Vaillant said, “when he retired from the faculty of medicine, his wife got hold of his patient list and secretly wrote to many of his longest-running patients, ‘Would you write a letter of appreciation?’ And back came 100 single-spaced, desperately loving letters—often with pictures attached. And she put them in a lovely presentation box covered with Thai silk, and gave it to him.” Eight years later, Vaillant interviewed the man, who proudly pulled the box down from his shelf. “George, I don’t know what you’re going to make of this,” the man said, as he began to cry, “but I’ve never read it.” “It’s very hard,” Vaillant said, “for most of us to tolerate being loved.”

Brooks ends his op-ed piece with an appreciation of the skill that Schenk uses in weaving bits about Vaillant's life into his work. I would guess that the quotation from Vaillant in the last paragraph I quoted above says as much about Vaillant as it does about the man he interviewed. Brooks ends his piece with: "There is a complexity to human affairs before which science and analysis simply stands mute."

Comment:  As I mentioned in the middle of the piece, I am particularly interested in how positive emotions assist in people's abilities to move into the future in a positive way.  The importance of love is a message that Jesus brought us and it is a keystone message in both the Gospel of John and the Epistles of John and this message of love was spoken loud and clearly by Tobias Heller's message to Provice II (see my sermon for last Sunday)  But if it's true that "It's very hard for most of us to tolerate being loved, " (I wonder if that's a man-thing, or a thing of men of  "a certain age" or culture (African Bishops take note), then other positive emotions need to come into play, although I don't see how one can be happy without love.  If you meet someone Like Archbishop Desmond Tutu and experience his amazing  ability to show God's love to those around him and to laugh and have fun, you can see the power of positive emotions to effect change for good.  Love and humor and compassion and gratitude and forgiveness and joy and hope and trust and faith:  all positive emotions and IMHO all necessary for happiness.

Relationships: A Sermon for Mother's Day

Friday, those of us who were at Helen's funeral were graced to hear words of love from two of her daughters.  Words about a mother and wife whose loving embrace was all encompassing.   Now many of us have been blessed with good mothers, whether natural or adoptive, but some have not.  Some of us are mothers, but not all.  Some of us will be spending the day with our children and some of us will not have this joy.  I know that there are many times when it is easy to appreciate our mothers.  Those times when their virtues - their hard work - their care - and their love are clear .  In these times it’s easy to see that they are living examples of God's love .

For some people though, it is difficult to appreciate and to honour their mothers, and even more difficult to love them.  Not all parents act in a loving and sacrificial way   At such times it is hard to celebrate a day like today - - hard because anger and pain and hurt get in our way  - hard because we do not understand how it is that someone who is supposed to love us has left us behind.  If they’ve been fortunate, they’ve found someone else, some other woman, or even a man, who has given them the love and support that mothers are supposed to give to help them grow into a healthy adult.

Another important event happened this week.  The Governor signed a bill passed by the Maine Legislature allowing same sex marriage here in Maine.  Governor Baldacci said he had changed his mind because he felt it was a matter of justice. I want to read to you some of the testimony Bishop Lane wrote for a hearing on the bill:

The Episcopal Church, long ago, concluded and publicly proclaimed through its own legislative body that gay and lesbian persons are children of God and, by baptism, full members of the church. We have also concluded that sexual orientation, in and of itself, is no bar to holding any office or ministry in the church, as long as the particular requirements of that office or ministry are met. And we have repeatedly affirmed our support for the human and civil rights of gay, lesbian, bi-sexual and transgendered persons. In many of our congregations, both here in Maine and around the country, faithful same sex couples and their families are participating in the life of the church and sharing in the work of ministry and service to their communities.

If we, as Mainers, believe that faithful, lifelong monogamous relationships are among the building blocks of a healthy and stable society, then it is in our interest to extend the rights and obligations of civil marriage to all Maine citizens. To deny those rights to certain persons on the basis of sexual orientation is to create two classes of citizens and to deny one group what we believe is best for them and for society.

The Episcopal Church continues its conversations about doctrine in relation to same sex marriage and the blessing of same sex relationships, and there is yet no consensus. We continue to search for ways to honor the varied viewpoints of all our members and to provide a place of dignity and respect for each of them.

The bishop went on to say that no clergy would be required to act against his or her conscience and be required to perform marriages for gays and lesbians.  I’ve been questioning for years why clergy act as agents of the state in marrying people.  I’ve thought that that function should be the responsibility of civil authorities and the church’s responsibility is about blessing relationships.  I have decided that I will not perform the function of the state.

I hear people say. “I support Civil Unions, but not gay marriage.” I hear others say “I support equal rights for gays and lesbians, but not gay marriage.” And I hear others ask “why do gays and lesbians want marriage so much when they can have civil unions? “ When most people marry, they do it because they love one another and are committed to each other. But marriage is also a legal contract, with rights and responsibilities. Even though each state has its own laws around marriage, if someone is married in one state and moves to another, their marriage is legally recognized. This is not so with Civil Unions. Civil Unions are only recognized in the state in which they are done and the way people in our society move about, this can be problematic.

There is a whole long list of benefits and protections for heterosexual couples  (more than 1000) that ranges from federal benefits, such as Social Security survivor benefits, sick leave to care for ailing partner, tax breaks, veterans benefits and insurance breaks. The list includes things like family discounts, getting family insurance through employers, visiting spouses in the hospital and making medical decisions if your partner is unable to. Some of these benefits can be had through Civil Unions, but not all of them and to get many of them  the assistance of a lawyer is needed. Yet for a married couple a marriage license is all that is necessary. I agree with the governor and our bishop that marriage should be available to any couple.  That doesn't mean that any couple should get married.  The divorce rate is high enough.

Same sex marriage is about relationship. Mother’s Day is about relationship.  God is about relationship. Being a Christian is about relationship. Thursday, Tobias Haller a Brother of St. Gregory gave an address to the Province II Synod in which this wonderful paragraph stands out about our relationships with God and one another:

In the long run, there is no such thing as a solitary Christian. There is no Christian without the church, no church without Christ, no Christ without God. For as we believe that God is love, there can be no love without relationship. This love divine, all loves excelling, is the ultimate compassion — feeling-with — the love that embraces the other, that gives itself for the life of the other, that becomes itself in losing itself, saving its life in losing it. This is the embodied love of the Incarnation, the love that died on the Cross, the love that rose again from the dead, and in whom we will one day be raised: love that becomes so united with the beloved that the old categories that ruled the world — Jew and Greek, slave and free, male and female — are overshadowed by the love which passes all understanding, yet shelters our hearts and minds under the shadow of everlasting wings.[Tobias Haller BSG, Address to Provincial Synod II, May 7, 2009]

To love someone else as God loves us doesn’t require that we understand them. It doesn’t require that we approve of their actions or their lifestyle or their decisions. And it most certainly does not require that they love us, though it is always very nice when they do. To become a branch of the vine that bears fruit means we need pruning. And vine branches need pruning every year.  So those ideas and attitudes that used to bear fruit in the past will only bear abundant fruit with pruning. In that way the love that overshadows all helps us to grow into the fullness of our potential.  The love that gives life to all of love's children will help remove outworn categories.   The love that we feel as a mother's love is a love with arms wide open to embrace and shelter all of love’s children.