I spent six days in Northern California, mostly staying with my long-time friend Dave.  The first few days were sunny and warm, and then the rain hit.  This rainbow appeared during a break in the weather.  It is springtime and everything was so green.

The primary reason for the trip was to see my advisor at CDSP about my thesis for a D. Min.  I am not happy with the data I've collected and proposed some additional work.  The thesis is on preaching in the interim time and has two parts, the first is how I use what is happening in the congregation to inform my preaching (the easy part) and assessing the feedback (if any) to see if my message is getting across. (the harder part).  I also needed to find someone to replace a member of my committee who is now at another seminary.

I also got to go up to Sebastapol and spend a day (and night) with my friends Rod and Mary.  Rod is recently retired, but seems to be working as hard as usual, finishing up work on committees for the diocese and his Rotary presidency.

I also got to go over to Sausalito to church.  It's been over five years since I did the interim there and they seem to be doing quite well.  They've put in a brand new kitchen in the parish hall that came in under expected cost and it's beautiful and so much more useful than the old one.  Of course I was there the week after Easter and there was no choir and a somewhat depleted congregation, but that's Low Sunday for you.  It was fun speaking with parishioners I knew and basking in their praise.

I really do love the San Francisco Bay Area, but the prices are still out of reach.  David took me out for some wonderful meals while I was at his house.  The most memorable of which was at a fantastic Chinese restaurant in Lafayette.

When I returned to Maine, I discovered that the forsythia was in full bloom.  The weather, which had been quite warm when I left, had turned seasonally cool and the yellow against the red barn was quite wonderful.   The lilac outside the kitchen is leafing, but there won't be any flowers until late May. The daylillies are up about a foot, although it will be a few months before we see the orange flowers.

The week that I returned has been a very busy one.  I did a workshop with a  group in a church in Auburn.  I was training them to facilitate small group meetings to start an Appreciative Inquiry process.  They are working to discover what God is calling them to be at this point in their life as a congregation and make plans on how to get there.

Then yesterday I drove to Brewer to start working with the search committee.  The fastest way to get there is to drive up the coast, and even though it was a drizzly morning, the views of the ocean along the way and the wonderful yellows of forsythia and daffodils and the occasional white blossoms on fruiting trees was  soothing to the soul.  The willows are nearly in leaf and have that pale green haze on their hanging branches.  My Izzie enjoys car trips so I had her squirmy company on the two hour journey.  The committee and I decided that it would be far more efficient to work with me via Skype than for me to make a lot of trips up to Brewer.  That suits me.

Here is a blessing for times of search:

The God of Truth bless you with the discomfort at easy answers, half truths, and superficiality so that you live and make decisions from deep within your heart.  Amen

The God of Understanding make you tender in the face of pain and rejection so that others can know the comfort of your acceptance.  Amen

The God of Justice make you fierce in the face of oppression and exploitation so that others can live with dignity in the midst of your respect.  Amen

The God of all Wisdom bless you with enough foolishness to believe that you can make a difference in this world, so that you can lead other to do what many claim cannot be done.  Amen.

And the Blessing of God Almighty, Creator, Redeemer and Life Giving Spirit keep you as Jesus' friends, in your search for a new leader, and forever.  Amen.

(The blessing is from Rob Voyle's "Assessing and Discerning Calls.")

Herbert's "Howls of a Fading Species"

I have a morning routine which includes doing the crossword puzzle and suduko in the LA Times, scanning a few local papers and then going to the NY Times to look at the Op-Ed page.  Yesterday morning I read Frank Rich's op-ed piece which Grandmère Mimi so ably commented on yesterday called Whose Fault, Dick.  As I was going to sleep I thought of George Lakoff's book, "Don't think of an elephant." The words people use makes a big difference and the political and religious right have gotten used to hijacking the debate with their inflamatory words.

I mentioned in a post a few weeks back how it takes a lot more positives to overcome a single negative.  I quoted from The Atlantic article on the Grant Study. Negative words, ideas, and emotions are useful in the short term because they elicit our basic need for survival.  Positive words, ideas and emotions are more useful in the long haul.  However there is the right time to fight fire with fire.

If what we focus on becomes our reality, as the Appreciative Inquiry folk tell us, then those who focus on the words of the likes of Cheney, Rove, Gingrich and Limbaugh will continue the insane craziness going on in our country, blaming the current administration for the actions of the last and trying to pull us back into the darkness of those eight years.

Today's NY Times op-ed piece by Bob Herbert called "The Howls of a Fading Species" continues the criticism of the right.   He takes on Gingrich, Rove, and Limbaugh and their despicable attacks on the Supreme Court Nominee, Sonia Sotomayor including calling her things like  "not necessarily smart" and a racist.  In Herbert's words:

It turns the stomach. There is no level of achievement sufficient to escape the stultifying bonds of bigotry. It is impossible to be smart enough or accomplished enough.

The amount of disrespect that has spattered the nomination of Judge Sotomayor is disgusting. She is spoken of, in some circles, as if she were the lowest of the low. Rush Limbaugh — now there’s a genius! — has compared her nomination to a hypothetical nomination of David Duke, a former head of the Ku Klux Klan. “How can a president nominate such a candidate?” Limbaugh asked.

I do like the way Herbert uses their kind of words against them, even though it undermines my argument for the positive. Sometimes, I just get angry, too.  I have bolded the ones I found particularly apt. 

Here’s the thing. Suddenly these hideously pompous and self-righteous white males of the right are all concerned about racism. They’re so concerned that they’re fully capable of finding it in places where it doesn’t for a moment exist. Not just finding it, but being outraged by it to the point of apoplexy. Oh, they tell us, this racism is a bad thing!

Are we supposed to not notice that these are the tribunes of a party that rose to power on the filthy waves of racial demagoguery. I don’t remember hearing their voices or the voices of their intellectual heroes when the Republican Party, as part of its Southern strategy, aggressively courted the bigots who fled the Democratic Party because the Democrats had become insufficiently hostile to blacks.

I recommend you read the whole column.  Herbert ends with: "Those types can still cause a lot of trouble, but the ridiculousness of their posture is pretty widely recognized. Thus the desperate howling."

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.

The Sand Labyrinth and Resolving Conflicts

I didn't get a lot of sleep last night. I've stirred up a hornet's nest and am getting stung. This morning in the office I "walked" my fingers through a sand labyrinth: bringing to mind all that is bothering me (including my own role in it}; leaving it in prayer at the center trusting that God is with me; and then moving back out to do the work I'm called to do. 

I reminded myself that Rob Voyle has developed a Coaching Spiral (see picture above and go to his site to read all about it) that has helped me before in my interims. I pretty sure we're trying to solve problems of environment, skills and abilities when we need to agree on a common identity and purpose. 

Voyle's wisdom on resolving conflict

"You can not solve a problem from the same level of consciousness that created it." Albert Einstein.

"Conflict can not be resolved at the same domain as it occurs. We must go closer to the Source of Life to find places of commonality upon which we build community.

While many church arguments appear to occur in the domain of environment, such as deciding on the shape of worship; or the domain of skills and abilities, such as deciding on who can or cannot be ordained. These conflicts can only be resolved by discovering commonality in the domains closer to the Source. Where there is fundamental disagreement over the purpose of the church, no resolution will be possible to conflicts occurring in the other domains. At these times it is probably best for people to sit in silence with each other until they can hear each other’s heart beat and together listen to the heartbeat of the Source of Life.

Don’t try lighting a fire under people to motivate them. All you’ll get is burnt butts. Rather, find the fire that is within them and fan it."

I've been having a hard time finding the fire here, at least during this long winter season. The summer folk come and there is lots of energy, and a lot gets done then, but maybe it's not just the bear who hibernate.  Some more good words from Rob:

"Resistance occurs when we initiate change outside the person or groups' perceptual reality.
Resistance occurs when some part of the system has not agreed to participate in the change.
Resistance occurs when a client perceives that the change will result in a loss of something of value that will not be outweighed by the apparent benefit."

Good and useful concepts. I'm trying to create a positive urgency to help them through the change. The Search Committee is working faithfully and well together and the congregation knows this, but I think some people  are hoping that things will just go back to same ole, same ole when the new priest comes so they can stay in their comfort zone.

Appreciative Inquiry in the Interim Time

I've been neglectful of work I've been trying to do on a thesis for a D. Min.  It's on preaching in the interim time.  I started going over some of my resource material and I re-read this essay on compassion by Rob Voyle of Clergy Leadership. Rob has been a teacher and mentor to many of us who have taken his Appreciative Interim Ministry and Appreciative Leadership courses. He writes:

One of the dangers of simplistic, black and white thinking is to assume that some human behaviors are righteous while others are not. A more comprehensive view of humanity would suggest that all human behaviors, character, and personality needs to be redeemed or transformed. For example, even our capacity to love, needs to be redeemed from self interest and liberated from all the fear-based conditions we place on who and how we will love. Until we are as liberal with God's love as Jesus was then our ability to love needs ongoing transformation. As we explore the nature of compassion we will see that all the faces of compassion need to be transformed so that we don't offer a simplistic and inappropriate response to the multitude of human conditions we encounter.

It's been a long and hard winter and I needed to be reminded of that paragraph. I so often find myself guilty of limiting myself and falling back into the trap of finding solutions to problems rather than embracing the mystery and my supply of love gets depleted. But things are getting better.  My change of mood must mean that spring is just around the corner. It has taken three winters in Maine to remind myself why March is the cruelest month even though TS Eliot claims it is April.  Christina Rosetti has this poem about the months of the year:

January cold and desolate;
February dripping wet;
March wind ranges;
April changes;
Birds sing in tune
To flowers of May,
And sunny June
Brings longest day;
In scorched July
The storm-clouds fly,
Lightning-torn;
August bears corn,
September fruit;
In rough October
Earth must disrobe her;
Stars fall and shoot
In keen November;
And night is long
And cold is strong
In bleak December.
- - - Christina Giorgina Rossetti "The Months"

March winds are appropriate since it is VERY windy here.  We're even thinking of putting in a windmill to generate most of the power for the church.  I keep reminding myself that it's just weather. I do miss the more even clime of California, though. I think a trip away is in the offing soon.