I'd like you to meet my Dilbert dolls, given to me by a member of the congregation. I can't imagine why, but here they are - pulpit illustrations of the age in which we live - a gentle reminder of how the world seems to turn. I'd like you to listen to them.
Dilbert: "I'm surrounded by idiots."
Boss: "Meeting adjourned."
Dilbert: "That's the stupidist thing I've ever heard."
Boss: "I'm the boss. It doesn't have to make sense."
Dilbert: "Get out of my cubicle."
Boss: "This will not look good on your performance review."
Over the past few years I have noticed a coarsening of our culture. People are becoming increasingly prickly with one another. Be it in home and family, church and community, government and market, judgmentalism is in - gentleness is out. It's a bit like two porcupines huddling together for warmth.
Vivian Paley in her book The Kindness of Children, is speaking with her elderly mother. "Mom, I have an odd question for you. Have you ever witnessed a spiritual event?" Her mother replied:
"Something to do with God? A miracle, do you mean? I don't know. Nowadays it's a miracle if people are nice to each other . . . I'm not sure about spiritual."
Let me share a personal example of our cultural insensitivity. Two weeks ago Joyce and I took a quick mid-week weekend to visit Niagara Falls, Canada. The Falls in winter is a spectacular sight; the butterfly preserve we visited was a beautiful experience; we had a good time. But it turned out to be a much more expensive trip than we had planned. The first night someone smashed the driver's side rear door of my car in the hotel parking lot and left. The hotel manager was apologetic, and the clerk helpfully suggested parking the second night in their underground parking garage with its surveillance cameras. Fine, except some kindly thief broke into our car; I say kindly because he or she did minimal damage and stole only a few dollars and our change drawer. We filed the appropriate reports with the hotel, our insurance company and theirs.
In our written responses from the hotel and their insurance company, however, the main theme was that they bore no responsibility for what had happened. Maybe so; however, we were dismayed because there was not a single word of apology or concern for our having had two very unpleasant incidents on
successive nights at their hotel. Now, I relealize business is business, but was it too much to hope for one kindly word? Kindness is just not fashionable.
I cannot resist a religious reference, an illustration whose resemblance to any congregation, living or dead, is purely coincidental. In his amusing and provocative book Heaven Help Us, Herbert Tarr writes about the travails of a young rabbi named Gideon Abel at his first synagogue: "'Are you happy, Gideon?' asked his mother. "Dad beat me to an answer. 'Why shouldn't he be happy? He has five hundred bosses to make him happy. That, and the knowledge that he'll always be in the wrong. It stands to reason: how can a rabbi ever be right when whatever he does, he can't avoid antagonizing somebody? Ask him enough questions during the year, let him take enough stands, and a rabbi's lucky if by June, seventy-five percent of the congregation don't vote to throw him a lynching party!' "'Thanks a lot, Dad! Tonight's my installation, and already you're having me canned!' "'Gideon,' said his father, 'when you were a little boy, I was on the shul's board, and in all my life the one time I saw the trustees happier than when they were interviewing and hiring rabbis was when they fired them!'"
We see the unkind culture everywhere: store clerks who ignore us as we enter and stand there waiting to be served; road rage drivers who cut us off at the corner; co-workers who are critical of our work habits; spouses who are impatient with us as we try to be on time for a movie; parents who lose their cool at the seeming incalcitrance of their children; children who blow up and fight on the playground at the drop of a hat; television, which in its fascination with "reality," pits people against one another for survival; pro athletes, not satisfied with victory, who must also taunt the vanquished; politicians who trash-talk their opponents. You, no doubt, have your own favorite examples.
There is a kind of judgmentalism abroad in the land and in the midst of us. It seems we have lost the capacity to discriminate - in the sense of nuanced understandings of another person. They are unfit for their job! They're no good! They are wrong! Can't they do anything right?
I think back to one of the most influential books in my life, psychologist Gordon Allport's The Individual and His Religion, written in 1960. In it Allport describes what he calls the "mature religious sentiment" with six criteria, one of which is differentiation - the ability to have a balanced view of other people.
His illustration has stuck with me over the years and continues to haunt me even as I judge other people unfairly.
"The distinction between the undifferentiated and the differentiated sentiment is illustrated by two students' descriptions of their fathers. One wrote, 'Dad is a perfect father. He loves his family and his family loves him. He is looked up to in all the town, highly admired. . . . He will help anyone. He is noted for his fairness and honesty. Fairness and honesty are Dad.' This encomium betrays an undifferentiated sentiment. The father is just perfect, everything about him is right. The student's devotion to him is marked by such abandon that we suspect she has never made a close and analytic inspection of his character, and even that her lavish praise may cover some repressed animosity. Detailed study of this case shows this suspicion to be justified. Deep inside the girl dislikes many things about her father, though she denies this dislike even to herself. The sentiment therefore emerges as an oversimplified disposition, not well integrated with the deeper life of the subject.
"Another daughter describes her father in the following way: 'He is somewhat unsocial, but dramatic enough to be pleasing in company; irritable, but not at all ill-natured; conscientious, hardworking, puritanical; timid in some things, dogged in others. His imagination is shown in his love of travel, but is not much in evidence otherwise.' This daughter likewise approves of her father. Yet, unlike the first, she is observant, critical, not merely abandoned in her admiration. One suspects that the very differentiation of the sentiment in the second case prevents repressed criticisms and hostility from forming. Her view of her father, is more complex, is more complex, is more realistic."[1]
At my best I have this capacity to differentiate, to see the good and the bad, the best and the worst in myself and in people I know. And at their best they can see the same in me. I can sort out these confliciting characteristics in people and still love them. They can sort out the inconsistencies in my behavior and still love me. The best of us do stupid and hurtful things; the worst of us do kind and healing things.
Unfortunately, my observation is that often we are apt to exaggerate the best and the worst in people and lable them accordingly. We have a hard time grasping the wise words of Alexander Solzynitsin that the line between good and evil passes not between groups or people, but right down the middle of each and every one of us.
If I am right, we might ask why? Why are we unable to differentiate? I think it has to do in part with the speed and intensity of our time. Everthing is speeded up, including our very natural tendency to pass judgment on everyone but ourselves.
We are so busy, we often are too tired to deliberate in the way that makes it possible to understand people as they are - intriguing and complicated mixtures of problems and possibilities. The rhetoric of the media infuses us with a desire to exaggerate our feelings and express them quickly - often without thought. We think anything less than a complete and total judgment isn't sufficient.
As a result we have become a critical people. Critique, criticism, complaint have become a way of life for many of us. We have so honed our critical faculties that we feel impelled to use them at every turn, with every one. Nothing ever seems quite right and we feel impelled to tell the world the way we feel. I face that tendency in myself - and it is not pretty in a preacher who is supposed to love everyone equally. I find myself caught up in the critical culture; it is a struggle to keep from rushing to judgment about all I meet. As the Bible says, "Judge not, that ye be not judged."
What do we do about this? James M. Wall, writing in The Christian Century, has given us some very wise words: "It is in each of these days that we are given the gift of being present to others. Rarely do we stop to think of the present moment as the intersections of biographies. If we thought about it too much we might be overwhelmed by the responsibilty and by the sense that we have
failed to say what we ought to have said or have said the wrong thing."[2]
"The intersection of biographies." I like that phrase. It suggests that when we meet it is not merely a casual encounter at a particular time and place, but really the culmination of two or more human lives - lives we do not fully understand - including our own. If we knew the stories of those we meet - the full and unfettered story of their happiness and hurt, of their triumph and failure, of their exhillaration and depression - would we be as likely to judge them unkindly? But generally we don't know what the other is experiencing, what they are going through, what they are suffering. If we did, might we not be gentler with them?
In my counseling, and in my more casual contacts with people, I find that as I get to know them better, it becomes harder to think ill of them - no matter what they have said or done. There is an empathy required here - a sense not only of trying to walk a mile in their moccassins, but feeling what they have felt as they have walked. Poet William Blake said it well:
"Can I see another's woe, and not be in sorrow too?
Can I see another's grief, and not seek for kind relief?
Can I see a falling tear, and not feel my sorrow's share?
Can a father see his child weep, nor be with sorrow filled?
Can a mother sit and hear infant groan, an infant fear?
No, no, never can it be! Never, never can it be."[3]
We all belong to what Albert Schweitzer called "the fellowship of those who bear the mark of pain."
But we need more than analysis of our all-too-human nature. We need encouragement as well. We need narratives of hope, stories that show how we might encourage one another in our common quest to be human. We're awfully strong, we human beings, but we are also awfully vulnerable - fragile citizens at the edge of being.
Some years ago on a sunny Sunday afternoon in Seattle, a young priest stopped to talk to a parishioner and her year-old daughter, Carmine. The little girl had a new jump rope, and the priest began to demonstrate the intricacies of jumping rope to her. After a while Carmine began to jump, first once, then twice. Mother and priest clapped loudly for her skill. Eventually, the little girl was able to jump quite well on her own and wandered off with her new-found skill. Priest and mother chatted a few moments until Carmine, with the saddest, wisest eyes imaginable, returned dragging her rope. "Mommy," she lamented, "I can do it, but I need lots of clapping."
We all need lots of clapping to help us move through this one and only opportunity we have to live a life. We all need to be cheerleaders of the spirit. It isn't always easy to be kind; it isn't always simple to be gentle - when the lesser angels of our spirits cry out for the critical word and the judgmental deed. The great philosopher Aldous Huxley sums up his philosophy in these words: "It's a bit embarrassing to have been concerned with the human problem all one's life and find at the end that one has no more to offer by the way of advice than this: 'Try to be a little kinder.'"
Now, ministers live in the delusionary state that their words are going to change lives - probably dramatically. When I escape my delusion I wonder if anything ever said from this pulpit about how we treat one another is heard, much less acted upon. Preaching, in this sense, is an act of faith. In the final analysis, what I am trying to do is not so much try to reach you with my words, but I must try to reach myself, to minimize the hypocrisy of my own life. But I press on because once in a while it all seems worth it.
Of all the meditations I have written, none has received the response generated by "Gentleness in Living." I wrote it right after I witnessed a really senseless, but bitter argument by two members of the congregation over some matter of church policy and practice.
There they were in the Susan B. Anthony Lounge going at it during our social hour - hammer and tongs. "Gentleness in Living" was my response to their argument, "Gentleness in Living" is still my response to the tough times in which we live.
Be gentle with one another -
It is a cry from the lives of people battered
By thoughtless words and brutal deeds;
It comes from the lips of those who speak them,
And the lives of those who do them.
Who of us can look inside another and know what is there
Of hope and hurt, or promise and pain?
Who can know from what far places each has come
Or to what far places each may hope to go?
Our lives are like fragile eggs.
They crack and the substance escapes.
Handle with care!
Handle with exceedingly tender care
For there are human beings within,
Human beings as vulnerable as we are,
Who feel as we feel,
Who hurt as we hurt.
Life is too transient to be cruel with one another;
It is too short for thoughtlessness,
Too brief for hurting.
Life is long enough for caring,
It is lasting enough for sharing,
Precious enough for love.
Be gentle with one another.
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