Do I Matter?
First Universalist Unitarian Church ~
www.uuwausau.org
Rev. Paul Beckel
CHILDREN’S FOCUS Allison Allen
Say
Allison, an Asian pre-schooler, suddenly
notices that she doesn’t look like her adoptive Caucasian parents. Her query:
“Didn’t my mommy and daddy want me?” elicits no satisfactory answers. She
angrily lashes out at her parents. While talking to her doll—the only one in
the house who does look like her—a stray cat keeps returning and requesting her
attention. When her parents agree that
it would be ok for Allison to adopt the stray, she begins to accept their love
for her again.
Megan
Dean, who graduated from our youth group last year, died this past weekend. One
of the many ways she impacted us was in the enthusiasm she showed for causes
that mattered to her. Publicly voicing her opposition to war, standing against
the anti-gay hate group...and one of her favorites: supporting the local humane
society. Today’s collection will be given to the humane society in her name.
READING “It Matters” Robert Walsh
MEDITATION I
Know This Rose Will Open #396
MESSAGE
Does the universe operate by fate? Or by human agency?
This week we began a month of dog-sitting
for my in-laws’ large, youthful, yellow lab. Abby is both lovable and strong.
It’s just adorable the way she tears through the house, smashing painstakingly
crafted school projects while cats flee for their lives. I can hardly wait to
see what unfolds when we set up a Christmas tree.
When we got our first dog, several years
ago, for Jane it was a matter of making a free choice. For her this was a
conscious act, taken in full awareness that this would change her life. For me, it was succumbing to the inevitable.
Our dogs have always had...foibles. For example, you may have heard that some
dogs like to chew. One might even think
that it is inevitable. It has to happen.
But there is one breed of people who do not believe that chewing is
inevitable. And that is the kind of
people who read books on dog training. There must be a lot of people who believe that misbehavior is not
inevitable… people who believe that what they do with their dog makes a
difference. Because there are, perhaps, even
more books on how to train and care for your dog than there are on how to
train and care for your children, if that is possible. And, just like the kid
books, it turns out that you have to
read them ALL. You can’t get by just
reading one...because they all contradict each other.
On the matter of biting, for example, you
can find at least four authorities advocating different approaches. Authority 1 says if the dog bites your hand,
stay still and he will get bored. Authority
2 says pull your hand away. Authority 3
says slap the dog on the nose. And
authority 4 says growl at him! Well, I’ve tried each of these tactics. But I have to wonder whether it really
matters what I do. Perhaps it is just a matter of satisfying my own ego to think that I could have control over another being.
***
A few weeks ago I spoke briefly about a
suicide prevention workshop that I had just taken. One of the most difficult
questions raised during the workshop was, “Does this make any difference?”
Because we all know it happens. We care, we speak, we offer help... we watch,
we intervene. And we fail.
Or is it failure on our part? If someone
is going to take their own life is it just going to happen... regardless of
what we do to try to stop them?
This is a hell of a question. If we
believe that it does matter, we may find ourselves in a pit of responsibility,
wracked with guilt for the rest of our lives. If it doesn’t matter, then we’re
in just as deep a pit called “apathy.”
***
A few years ago a book called The
Nurture Assumption made headlines
and was widely condemned. The Nurture Assumption got a lot of attention
because it contradicts the trend of parenting literature in recent
decades. While most parenting books
emphasize the importance of
parental influence on children, this author, Judith Harris, argues that the
long-term impact of parents on their children’s personality is approximately zero.
At first glance this theory would seem to
be the work of a crackpot. How could
anyone say such a thing? Doesn’t it fly
in the face of reality? And even if, god
forbid, it is true...well, you can’t go around telling people such a thing.
Imagine what would become of parenting if parents came to believe that
it was all the same if they beat their kids, or hugged them...taught them or
ignored them. Could Harris really be
saying with a straight face that it doesn’t make any difference?
Now of course, in today’s media market,
one can get a lot of attention for crackpot ideas. But Harris received an award from the
American Psychological Association.
Maybe her ideas are worth noticing.
Intuitively,
it seems obvious that parents have an enormous impact on children’s lives. But let’s look at the evidence: Within most
families we see two or more children who share the same parents but have vastly
different personalities. This was particularly evident to Harris, who was the
biological mother of one daughter, and the adoptive mother of another. Looking back over three decades as a family,
Harris could not help but wonder how these two children, who both entered her
household as infants, could turn out so differently.
One daughter was rather timid, and did
well in school. The other daughter was
bubbly and outgoing, had a great deal of difficulty in school, and hung out
with friends who got into trouble.
Through these decades of parenting two
drastically different children, Harris was also writing psychology textbooks,
and seeing in the literature an increasing emphasis upon the role of parents...
sometimes, she thought, to an extreme. Theories about physically bonding with a
child immediately after birth... and even about having an impact on the child’s
development before birth by playing music or reading to a child in the
womb.
These ideas were quite in contrast to the
pre-Freudian literature, when books on child development didn’t mention parents
at all! But now it has come to the point
where -- every problem a person has—they look back to see what their parents
did to cause it!
***
But why shouldn’t we look to our parents
to help us understand why we’ve turned out as we have? Many studies have shown
the impact of quality parenting on children’s outcomes. Dad reads to Charlie, for example, and
Charlie comes to love reading, does well in school, and finds love and
financial success in adulthood.
But Harris took these same studies and
turned the assumption of cause and effect on its head. Isn’t it possible, she
asks, that Dad reads to Charlie because Charlie LIKES to be read to? That he was born that way? That it is in
his genes?
And so Charlie becomes a good reader, not
because Dad reads to him all the time.
But dad reads to him all of the time because Charlie is genetically
predisposed to be a good reader. Perhaps Charlie isn’t responding to Dad’s
reading, but Dad was responding to
Charlie’s excitement about sitting down with a book, or to his
pre-programmed temperament.
In biologically intact families, it would
be hard to tell which came first. How do
we know whether Charlie inherited a
love of reading from his dad, or if he learned it? Harris looks to studies of adoptive families, where the children
came to have no more in common with the people who reared them, fed them,
clothed them, taught them, and loved them all their lives...than with any two
adults taken at random off the street.
Her preliminary conclusion, then, is that
most of what becomes of kids is determined by their genes...and the rest is
determined by their peers. Not surprisingly, this thesis was sensationalized
and blown out of proportion. But I
believe the expressions of outrage at
Harris, the flood of letters to the editor at that time... reveal an
ego-centric desire for control... or, perhaps, a love of responsibility that I certainly cannot maintain as a parent.
Harris acknowledges two significant areas
in which parental behavior has an effect upon children. First, she says, “the parent’s
behavior...does affect how the child behaves in the presence of the parent, or
in contexts that are associated with the parent.” Second, “the parent’s behavior also affects
the way the child feels about the
parent.” And these feelings can last a
lifetime.
***
I am interested in Harris’s studies
because I am a parent. But I am also
interested as a minister, not just to parents, but to everyone who asks about
their relative importance in the cosmos ...anyone who asks if what they do with
their lives...if the way they behave...even matters.
I would like you to imagine in your mind,
a continuum. A simple line, running from
one side of the room to another. Allow
this line to represent your own beliefs about how much of an impact you have
upon the world around you...how much control you have over how things turn out.
At one end of the line => we would
have the extreme position that everything that has happened and everything that
is going to happen has already been determined. Everything is set in place, and you cannot change it.
Perhaps it has been set in place by the
natural unfolding of the laws of nature.
Because of the way atoms collide and react with one another, this is the
only way things could possibly have
turned out. And it’s our role in life to go with the flow.
Still on this end of the continuum: Perhaps everything is set because God has made it this way. This is God’s plan. This is the will of the universe. And you cannot change it. So let go and let God.
Do you notice that this position is
neither inherently theistic nor atheistic.
The theist—who says all is in God’s plan—and the atheist—who speaks of
natural law—are entirely in agreement.
Nor is this position inherently
optimistic, or pessimistic. The optimist
might say how wonderful it is that
everything is unfolding according to the plan. And even if I cannot understand why I have cancer... everything happens for a reason.
The pessimist can also hover around this
end of the philosophical spectrum, bemoaning the fact that the world is going
to go its own way, regardless of how hard he tries...that nothing he does is
going to make any difference.
It is ironic—that the person who lives at
ease, and without care, is so philosophically similar to the person who
couldn’t care less.
***
Do you live somewhere in this realm? Or down at the other end <= of the
spectrum where
the future is entirely open... where
anything and everything is possible?
Again, this point of view is not inherently
theistic, or atheistic. The theist may
say that god is a process, god is the grand accumulation of all that has come before... but god is not a control freak ...god is not
absolute and unchanging, remote and unaffected by the world...but the future is open because god is open, and
responsive, to world.
In Poor
Richard’s Almanac it was said this way: “God helps those who help
themselves.” In the Hebrew scriptures it
was said this way: “I the Lord will smite your city with pestilence...but if
you turn from your evil ways, I will change my mind and you will have
prosperity instead.”
The atheist may also find herself at this
end of the spectrum. The atheist might
say that randomness is always a factor in physics, or that natural law is a
purely human construct, or that just because the sun has come up predictably
for billions of years doesn’t mean that it will come up tomorrow.
Down at this end, nothing is settled.
Interestingly, both the optimist and the
pessimist can live in this realm. The
optimist giddy at the thought of
freedom & potential... The pessimist fearful
that nothing can be relied upon to
stay the same.
Once again, you have strong philosophical
similarity between the person who is ecstatic about life’s possibilities...
next to the person who is paralyzed with fear by the same thing.
Consider the extremes:
=> everything is set, and controlled
by something outside of me...
<= nothing is set, I have the potential to change it all...
Where do you find yourself on this
continuum? This is actually two questions: where do you find yourself on the
line, philosophically. And where do you find yourself on the line,
according to your behavior?
Do you THINK you have some control?
Do you ACT as if you have some control?
In our reading today, Robert Walsh tells
us that EVERYTHING matters. I love what he has to say. It is inspirational. It is an extreme position. I don’t think that I could live from day to
day if I took it literally. So instead of taking it literally, I take it as a
metaphor. A deeply inspirational,
non-absolute, metaphor. Like the
metaphor of the interdependent web of existence.
The metaphor of “the interdependent web
of existence of which we are a part” is powerful and dramatic. When I experience myself engaged in that web
I know that what I do has an impact. If
I love, I send out waves of love. If I
recoil from love, then everything that I touch is affected. Belief in the interdependent web is belief that I matter.
But sometimes this metaphor has been
taken to extremes. In one of Ray Bradbury’s short stories, for example, he
tells of a time-traveler who—having traveled back in time—accidentally disturbs
the flight of a butterfly. Returning to
his own time, the traveler finds everything to be exactly the same—except that a new dictatorial regime has taken power.
I don’t think it matters what I believe
about theories of time travel. But the story helps me to see where I am on the
continuum: somewhere between “my actions mean nothing,” and “my actions
mean everything.” And I find my place in
an area marked “proportionality.”
That is to say, I expect my effect on the
world to be proportionate to the effort that I put into it... which brings me
over there somewhere. <=
But I also have a strong appreciation for
benefits that I have done nothing to deserve. For grace or fortune which has
brought so much good into my life. =>
Consider our children’s story today. Allison’s adoptive parents clearly had good
intentions. They loved her and attended
to her needs. But when Allison discovered that she was different, all of her
adoptive parents’ love wasn’t enough.
All of their love could not keep her from feeling different, and
isolated. And they felt as if they
didn’t matter. And yet they did matter.
Because they set a context in
which the seemingly random appearance of the stray cat ...came to matter.
A central principle of our Unitarian
Universalist philosophy is that human beings create meaning out of their own
experience. Some of us believe that => an external and/or conscious power
guides our experience to happen. Some of us <= do not. Some of us are somewhere in between.
But regardless of whether an external
and/or conscious power guides our experience to unfold in a certain way, it is
still up to us to make something out of it.
Allison, in the pre-determined context of
her parents’ love, was able to create meaning in her life by receiving and
loving the stray cat.
The same challenge faces us every day: to
take what has come to us...and to make meaning...make peace...and make a
difference.
***
I believe that it does matter that the people of the Ukraine are filling the
streets in protest of a fraudulent election process. I do not believe, however,
that their success is inevitable. They are up against enormous powers of
inertia, corruption, and winter weather. There is no telling how history—and
the international community—will conspire to resolve this matter.
I believe that it does matter how we shop
this month, which commercial and non-profit entities we choose to support. I
believe it does matter how we speak to one another, look at one another, and
touch one another through the long nights to come. And I believe that it
matters how we treat ourselves.
Winter holidays can be depressing,
isolating times. So consider bringing yourself, and a friend, to our solstice service next week, or to our solstice
drumming circle on Saturday the 19th. And know that I’m available
for you too, just give me a call.
After our gathering this week to remember
Megan Dean, I was about to tell one of her friends to give me a call if she’d
like to talk later about how she was feeling. But I realized that I might or
might not be the person she would want to confide in. So I asked her to look
around the room. There were about 30 of us there, all, I believe, who would do
whatever they could to make a difference for another soul in need. “Call me,” I
said, “or call any of these people. Because you know we love you.”
May
I have the Courage to change the things I can,
The
Serenity to accept the things I cannot change,
And
the Wisdom to know the difference.
May
I have patience with things that take time,
Appreciation
for all that I have,
Tolerance
for those with different struggles,
And
the Strength to get up and try again,
one
day at a time.
Allen Say, Allison
Robert Walsh, “It Matters,” in Noisy Stones
Judith Rich Harris, The Nurture Assumption
Malcolm Gladwell, [An excellent review of
The Nurture Assumption] in The New
Yorker (August 17, 1998)