We are born seeking control...we never stop trying to assert ourselves over others, over our environment. Even the most meek among us have ways in which we have established control over some other or some situation. I recall how my brother used to silently assert himself over his very dominating wife by never, ever scrubbing the out of view, far corner of the pantry floor. In her book, "Imperfect control, our lifelong struggles with power and surrender," Judith Viorst claims that we will gain more control if we seek to understand better when we have little control, and then learn to live with surrender, to learn to live with the acknowledgment that there are situations - in relationships, at work, involving our bodies - when we do not have the power to change things. I hope we Unitarian Universalists can hear this, because it is exactly our personality types who get in trouble with too much persistence. Authors of a study about failure, Janoff-Bulman and Brickman, write: "We are in favor of dreaming impossible dreams, being willing to make a fool of oneself, letting one's reach exceed one's grasp. But, this works only if a person knows how to fail, how to recognize when control has been lost."
Viorst points out that there are two types of control - mastery and constraint. When a baby is born, these efforts to master behaviors and constrain behaviors are his or her tasks. If a baby feels loved - someone comes if she cries - she will feel in control. As she gets older, with helpful parents, she'll learn that she must restrain from too much crying, because that irritates her parents. If a child has felt heard, he will feel confident to try to control areas which are beyond his understanding - like the little boy who asked me if I thought putting his baby sister into the television and turning it off would make her go away? Or, in our family at the present, my two- and-one-half-year-old granddaughter's parents are expecting a second child, and whenever we talk about the coming baby, Madison proclaims: "No, I am the baby". With love and guidance, these young children will grow to understand what they can and can't control. They will feel proud of what they master and what restraints they are able to use, such as the little boy mentioned in the book, who, just recently toilet trained, asks his mother: "Can I please wear diapers today? I want to relax."
And suddenly, or so it seems, there is adolescence - don't Viorst's words sound familiar?: "and as if that were not bad enough, we have to contend with mothers and fathers who fail to recognize that we have outgrown them. They get in our way and our face with their rules and curfews and the kind of helpful advice that hasn't been relevant since we were two and a half. We don't mind the room and board they provide, or the clothes and allowance and use of the family car. We don't even mind that they're there -- just in case we should need them. But they somehow fail to grasp that not only our hair but our everything else belongs to us to do with as we choose. Even those moms and dads who insist on quoting the prophet's "your children are not your children" seem to believe that, to some extent, we're theirs -- their thing, their possession. They seem to believe that we're subject to their control." This struggle of coming into being in charge of our own lives is not only with one's self and one's parents, but with one's sexuality. And, I'm not sure how far we've come from the days of my youth when my mother informed me that I was in charge of whether or not I had sex with a boy. They're out of control, she said, so you have to do it, as the girl. We are different, we males and females - we must acknowledge the different meaning sex has for us. There is a great story to illustrate this about Calvin Coolidge and his wife: "Mrs. Coolidge....on a presidential tour of a chicken farm, noted approvingly a rooster copulating with a hen. 'Does he do that often?' she asked. 'Oh, several times a day,' said the farmer. 'Please tell that to the President,' she directed pointedly. Coolidge turned to the farmer. 'Always with the same hen?' he asked. 'No, all different,' was the response. 'Please tell that,' Coolidge said, 'to the first lady.'" One of the ways we here at church are helping with this dilemma is to work with our young people in the eighth grade to help them to understand their gender differences so that they can behave responsibly, each sex taking charge of their own sexual behavior. The curriculum we use, OWL, or Our Whole Lives, also deals with the issues of homosexuality and transgender. We want to provide all available knowledge about people's sexual preferences and all available sensitivity as to the meaning of our Unitarian Universalist principle which declares "the inherent worth and dignity of every person." Our statistical studies over the years have shown us that giving our young people the information they need to have to conduct themselves as "in control" of their sexuality has meant that they do not exploit one another, and do understand that their sexual relations with others are probably the most meaningful and most responsible relationships they'll have in life.
And then we move on, many of us, to coupling. Michael Miller, in Intimate Terrorism, states that "weak or strong, man or woman, gay or straight, if we're in a close relationship, we're each wanting something from the other and wanting to control the terms of getting it." If you have ever decided that you'll wait to bring something up until she's in a better mood, or have prepared a favorite meal for him before you request something, you have been using a form of control. Of course, there are always those gender differences which are a form of control. Here is a verse from a poem by Viorst: "Even if I were collapsing from thirst and from hunger, Even if I were reduced to darkest gloom, Even if I observed, between sobs, that we should have arrived three hours ago and the inn was going to give away our room, And even if I revived all my marital grievances: old hurts and humiliations and rejections, It still would be impossible to persuade my husband, when lost, to stop -- just stop -- the car, and ask for directions."
An area of control which is never ending is that of parenting. When my mother was eighty and I was fifty-seven, she still tried to correct what I ate. I, of course, am a much better parent of adult children than she was of me, and never, ever, interfere. Well, only when it comes to something my grandchildren need and my children, their parents, aren't providing, mainly, insistence upon good manners. This summer, when eleven-year-old Justin and nine-year-old Silja came to visit with me on the Cape, their father and I had made the agreement that I could insist upon decent table manners. My son, Edwin, says that when I visit them at their home in rural Maine, I must keep my opinions to myself, but when they are on my turf (and he's not around), I can "go for" good manners. After the third day, Justin announced that this manner stuff made eating too hard and too slow, as he jammed his mouth full of salad leaves. My aunt and I looked on in horror, as his sister declared, "Justin Chapin, take all that food out of your mouth right away, this is a house of manners!" Well, that's some progress. Anyway, for those of us who have had to do it, letting go of being the one who really knows how your children should be conducting their lives is very hard to do. There's a great quote from the Wall Street Journal: "at this very moment, some....sons are probably on the phone to their mothers.....calling from their medical clinics, law offices, their banks. Plenty of these are respected men who can often be heard yelling into the receiver, 'ma, would you stop it already!'" Before we look at the workplace, I think we have to remind ourselves that most of us have not come from crushing social or personal backgrounds, so that we enter into the job scene with a sense that we're going to be treated fairly and have some control of what happens to us if we do our work well. There are many in the workplace who do not have these expectations. But things in the corporate world may be changing. "a Harvard business school psychologist says that there was a long period of managerial domination of the corporate hierarchy when the manipulative, jungle-fighter boss was rewarded. But that rigid hierarchy started breaking down in the 1980s...the jungle fighter symbolizes where the corporation has been; the virtuoso in interpersonal skill is the corporate future." This is supposed to have something to do with the influence of the more "feminine" style of management, which emphasizes more democratic, more cooperative, more people oriented environments at work. I don't know how many of you have felt this change where you work, but in our churches, in our larger ones, at least, it seems to be moving away from the style we like to call partnership, to a more CEO approach for ministers - many of whom call themselves "senior" minister to make a statement of hierarchy. And, several of these "senior" types in large churches are women. Women ministers who insist upon being head of staff and in charge of all the other ministers on staff. Here Dick and I both report to the congregation, in the CEO type large churches, I would have to report to him -- (by the way, this seems to be a fantasy of his. .... When I returned from my sabbatical, there was a note on my office door explaining that there had been a change in staffing, and I was to report immediately to the new CEO down the hall....sick sense of humor, don't you think?) At least sexual harassment in the workplace is no longer supposed to be a way to control and it seems that people aren't afraid to report it. In most cases, that was men harassing women, and when it happens in our churches, even these days, it is usually a male minister using his position of power to attract a female parishioner. With the many new guidelines to assist us in the workplace, we still have to learn that it is wise to know when to surrender control - whether it is by delegating, if that is in our power, or by complying with authority, which we all have to do at times. And hopefully, how we are with one another will matter in terms of being a success or failure.
Well, finally, we've reached the one area which is truly our own, over which we have control - our bodies! If we have the right resources, we can control what we eat or don't, how much we sleep and exercise, in what sort of environment we live. But, sometimes uncontrollable things happen to our bodies which leave us terrorized. Some studies show that women who have been raped recover much faster if they can blame themselves for the rape. If she can say she was out walking too late on a dark street, or that she never should have gone alone to that bar, a woman can feel more in control than if the rape was a random act, with no way to explain the circumstances, no way to insure that it will never happen again. This is such a stunning example of how much we need control, we'd rather blame ourselves for being raped than feel we were out of control of a situation. This leads to what we do about our body's dying. Bill Fugate, I, and thirteen of you are spending eight Monday nights considering what kind of control we have when we are sick and/or dying. This is a plus for us, because if any of us are going to have any chance of being in control of our deaths, it is those of us who think about it and plan for it ahead of time. The course, "Faithful Choices", by Unitarian Universalist minister Wayne Arnason, is built around true case studies gathered by Wayne in a hospital setting. This case is called "not my other leg":
Bertha Harris was a spunky 73-year-old patient who had just had her left leg amputated because of gangrene. To do the operation, physicians accepted the consent of both Harris and her family. Two week later, the doctors saw her right foot blackening and said that unless her right leg, too, was amputated, she would die within a few months. She said, "no". She did not want to go to the grave without at least one leg. The hospital went to court to force her to have the operation. It now claimed that she was incompetent to make a decision, and the family could not decide for her, though she and the family had been deemed competent to give consent to the first operation shortly before. (As an aside, we in the class have decided - I think they would all agree - that if the hospital thinks there is any chance of being sued, they will want to perform further measures.) it turned out that Ms. Harris was lucky because her attorney understood the complicated ins and outs of health care law. After a first ruling for the hospital, she was granted her right of refusal by the court of appeals. She died nine months later, with her leg and her constitutional rights, which state that, one: she had to understand the choice and the issue, two: she had to understand the implications of her choice and three: she had to have the ability to make and communicate an unambiguous choice.
Have you thought about what would not be a quality life for you? Have you planned your memorial service, written your obituary, signed all the forms -- living wills and health care proxies? There is also a form that the caring community group of the church wants you to fill out, so that we will know about your doctor, your lawyer, your plans, your relatives and whom to inform, just in case there is an accident. These blue church forms are available this morning at the information table in the lobby. Yes, this is hard, but those who do consider their dying find that it leads to more appreciation of their living, to their better caring for how they spend their time, how they learn to control their existences so their lives consist of what they most value. I'd like to close this morning with a brief story quoted from another wonderful book, Tuesdays with Morrie, by Mitch Albom.
There's this little wave, this he-wave, who's bobbing up and down on the ocean, having a great time, and all of a sudden he recognizes he's going to crash into the shore...and he'll get annihilated. And he gets so despairing, "my god, what's going to happen to me?" And he's got this sour, despairing look on his face. Along comes a female wave, bobbing up and down, having a great time. And the female wave says to the male wave, "why are you so depressed?" the male says, "you don't understand. You're going to crash into the shore and you'll be nothing." she says, "you don't understand. You're not a wave, you're part of the ocean."
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