Fight or ????
a sermon preached by the Rev. Dr. Tim W. Jensen
at the Second Congregational Meeting House on Nantucket Island
Sunday March 9th, 2003
***
I stumbled across another quotation from Fred Rogers this past week, which I want to share with all of you this morning. It goes like this: “Of course, I get angry. Of course, I get sad. I have a full range of emotions. I also have a whole smorgasbord of ways of dealing with my feelings. That is what we should give children. Give them...ways to express their rage without hurting themselves or somebody else. That's what the world needs.”
I also learned this past week, in David Goodman’s “Here and There” column in the Inky, that “March has often been called Hate Month here on the Rock.” He went on to write that “This is a tough month for a number of reasons, most of them related to lingering winter blues. We expect March to herald the beginning of spring, when it’s really just the end of winter.”
I guess that last March I was just so pre-occupied with the fortunes of the youth basketball team I was coaching over at the Boys and Girls Club that I missed out on this particular aspect of the Nantucket experience. It’s funny how a monomaniacal obsession with something at once so wholesome, and yet so ultimately trivial, as the game of basketball, can distract a person from the less wholesome, and ultimately less trivial, aspects of human existence. For me, March is typically not so much a month of hate as it is of madness -- “March Madness” -- the NCAA basketball tournament, which in years past I could generally count on to give me three good weeks of unmitigated excitement and delight.
But this year, for some reason, I’m having a tough time mustering up much enthusiasm for “the Big Dance.” Instead, I find myself pre-occupied with the spectre of a war against Iraq, an ill-conceived war which I feel powerless to prevent, and which I fear we may have already lost before it has even begun. I feel pre-occupied with the faltering economy, and the ways in which I already see the misery and real hardship of economic “hard times” trickling down into the lives of those who can least afford to bear them. And again, I feel essentially powerless to change things for the better. I feel frustrated by a government which seems unwilling to listen to anyone but its own ideologically-driven political spin-meisters, and which routinely dismisses its critics as irrelevant pygmies, even when they happen to be foreign heads of state.
About the only thing I’m NOT pre-occupied with is the threat of terrorist attack. Maybe I’m naive, or maybe I’m just cynical, but I feel that my cherished American freedoms, not to mention my personal safety and well-being, are far more endangered by the likes of Rumsfeld, Ashcroft, and Ridge than they are by Osama bin Ladin or Saddam Hussein. And that thought is a little frightening in itself; where does one turn to find protection from one’s so-called protectors?
I wish I had an answer to that question, because I know I’m not the only person who feels this way. And that knowledge in itself provides a small degree of comfort. There are lots of things in life that we cannot control, yet which threaten to disrupt our lives in ways that are, at best, unpleasant and disagreeable, and which in the extreme can be downright life-threatening. Yet the knowledge that there are others who share our concerns, and to whom we can turn for solace and support, helps make the unpleasantness at least a little more bearable. And when we understand this, it make it that much easier for us to become a source of solace and support for others as well.
This is why it is so important, at those times when we are tempted simply to duct tape all of our windows closed and pull the blankets up tightly over our heads, that we reach out instead to one another in order to remind ourselves that we are not alone. This is the miracle of community, of civil society, of civilization itself. We can’t always control what happens to us. But we can control how we chose to react to those events -- whether we lash out in anger, or draw back in fear, or chose instead to reach out to others with whom we share a common concern, and by working together calmly and rationally do what we can to mitigate the real damage.
Anger and Fear are two of the fundamental emotions hard-wired into the circuitry of our brains. Surprise, Happiness, Disgust, Sadness and Love are likewise all basic emotional states intrinsic to our very being, and easily recognizable to others even across cultural boundaries. From these primary emotional “building blocks” we are capable of generating vast numbers of other, more sophisticated feelings: pride, jealousy, grief, shame, guilt, embarrassment, trust, loyalty, even patriotism.
Many of these so-called “secondary emotions” are culturally-nuanced, but they all derive from more basic emotional states which are readily-understood even by many animals. Empathy and Compassion are likewise the means by which we are able to understand what other individuals are feeling, not in an abstract, intellectual manner, but literally “on a gut level.” Empathy and Compassion are what make true community possible, because they allow us to feel another person’s emotions as if they were our own, to put ourselves in their emotional shoes.
For the past 17 months, we Americans have been on an emotional roller coaster. We were surprised by the events of September 11th, shocked and disgusted by the carnage of the attacks, saddened by the loss of life, not to mention made fearful for our future safety and angered against those who attacked us. We’ve experienced emotions of love and happiness as well, as we have admired the courage of the rescuers, and reached out to the survivors and the families of the victims. As time has gone on, however, I’m not so certain that we have done as good a job as we might have of translating these emotions into a rational course of action that will allow us to recover our emotional equilibrium, and move forward with a reasonable sense of confidence and security.
Instead it appears (at least if you can trust the covers of the National news magazines) that many Americans now find themselves living in a constant state of anxiety -- still fearful of being surprised again, and angry not only at our enemies, but also at many of our friends. There are some who would even say (myself among them) that our leaders have tried to manipulate our emotions for their own political advantage and ideological aims, by attempting to keep us fearful, and redirecting our anger against troublesome foreign governments who had nothing to do with the September 11th attacks. And they’ve used this same technique in an attempt to silence or stifle criticism of their political objectives, both at home and abroad.
As some of you know, last Friday I appeared on one of the local public access cable talk shows alongside a young woman from the island who had written a letter to the Inquirer and Mirror in which she suggested that people like myself, who have been critical of the President’s intention of waging a pre-emptive war against Iraq, were somehow unpatriotic and “an insult...to each and every veteran who has ever risked their lives for all of us and the welfare of this great nation.” That’s her opinion, and she’s certainly entitled to it; but one of the things I noticed as I was listening to her talk on camera was that she seemed fixated on this notion that because we were attacked, we were compelled to attack. The mere suggestion that any other course of action might possibly be more appropriate was “a slap in the face, and a step towards espionage.”
It’s one thing for reasonable human beings to have differences of opinion about which choice of action is most likely to lead to an acceptable outcome. It’s quite another to go through life in a perpetual state of “fight or flee,” constantly on emotional edge, fearful of surprise, ready to lash out (or to run away) at a moment’s warning, and routinely sad about our perceived vulnerability, and the sense of loss, helplessness and futility which accompanies it. Stress and anxiety are biological conditions, triggered by our emotions; we can’t necessarily control the events, the “triggers,” which bring them on, but we can learn to control our reactions and minimize their effects.
And the first step, obviously, is to recognize WHAT we feeling, even if we aren’t particularly certain why. If we are aware of our emotions, if we can bring them to the surface and talk about them with people we trust and whom we know care about us, that is practically half the battle. Talking is good on another level as well. By learning to talk openly and honestly about what we are feeling, we also become more capable of putting those feelings into an appropriate context, thus avoiding the twin dangers of either denying and minimizing what we are feeling, or on the other hand catastrophizing and universalizing very specific and limited emotional triggers. (Don’t you just love that word, “catastrophizing?” Only a clinical psychologist could have thought of a word like that).
Because stress and anxiety are physiological reactions, it also helps to engage in some sort of appropriate physical activity. Thousands of generations ago, when our ancestors spent their days wandering across the savannah in search of food, and were more routinely surprised by hungry leopards and other predators than we are today, they evolved specific physiological mechanisms which allowed them to respond effectively to those threats, by either attacking or running away. Nowadays, when the perceived threat may be something so ethereal as an image on a television screen, it isn’t always appropriate to pick up the nearest stick or rock and shout at the top of our lungs, or to sprint a few hundred yards to the safety of a nearby cave or tree, and hunker down. But the adrenaline is still flowing, and unless we do something to help it dissipate, our stress reactions can create all sorts of on-going physiological problems as well. This is why it is so important to run away from the television on a regular basis -- to take a long walk, or (if you are so inclined) maybe picking up a ball and spending an hour or so running up and down a hardwood floor and leaping into the air every now and again.
Finally, in order to help rebalance our emotional equilibrium, I think it’s important to seek out experiences which will evoke (for lack of a better term) our more “positive” emotions, like Love and Happiness. Spend more time with people you care about, find activities that will make you laugh, or that give you pleasure, or a sense of accomplishment. It’s not “denial” to recognize that there is more to life than fear and anger, or that even in the face of real danger we can still do things which give us joy. To laugh in the face of danger is the definition of real courage, as well as an essential tool for differentiating between dangers that are real, and those which exist only in our imaginations.
You know, we don’t have to travel half-way around the world in order to find things that frighten us, or make us angry. We are often surprised and disgusted, not to mentioned saddened, by events much closer at hand. Yet if we can learn to talk openly with one another about our feelings, and to cooperate with one another in meaningful activity; if we can learn to differentiate between threats that are real, and those which are merely imagined, and to maintain our ability to take pleasure in one another’s company and the life we share together, there is very little that we have to fear. And the alternative to this is very frightening indeed. If we instead withdraw from one another, or lash out in anger, or express our disgust rather than our affection, and respect, and trust, we become in the long run our own worst enemies, and undermine the very compassion and empathy which make it possible for us to live together in community.
at the Second Congregational Meeting House on Nantucket Island
Sunday March 9th, 2003
***
I stumbled across another quotation from Fred Rogers this past week, which I want to share with all of you this morning. It goes like this: “Of course, I get angry. Of course, I get sad. I have a full range of emotions. I also have a whole smorgasbord of ways of dealing with my feelings. That is what we should give children. Give them...ways to express their rage without hurting themselves or somebody else. That's what the world needs.”
I also learned this past week, in David Goodman’s “Here and There” column in the Inky, that “March has often been called Hate Month here on the Rock.” He went on to write that “This is a tough month for a number of reasons, most of them related to lingering winter blues. We expect March to herald the beginning of spring, when it’s really just the end of winter.”
I guess that last March I was just so pre-occupied with the fortunes of the youth basketball team I was coaching over at the Boys and Girls Club that I missed out on this particular aspect of the Nantucket experience. It’s funny how a monomaniacal obsession with something at once so wholesome, and yet so ultimately trivial, as the game of basketball, can distract a person from the less wholesome, and ultimately less trivial, aspects of human existence. For me, March is typically not so much a month of hate as it is of madness -- “March Madness” -- the NCAA basketball tournament, which in years past I could generally count on to give me three good weeks of unmitigated excitement and delight.
But this year, for some reason, I’m having a tough time mustering up much enthusiasm for “the Big Dance.” Instead, I find myself pre-occupied with the spectre of a war against Iraq, an ill-conceived war which I feel powerless to prevent, and which I fear we may have already lost before it has even begun. I feel pre-occupied with the faltering economy, and the ways in which I already see the misery and real hardship of economic “hard times” trickling down into the lives of those who can least afford to bear them. And again, I feel essentially powerless to change things for the better. I feel frustrated by a government which seems unwilling to listen to anyone but its own ideologically-driven political spin-meisters, and which routinely dismisses its critics as irrelevant pygmies, even when they happen to be foreign heads of state.
About the only thing I’m NOT pre-occupied with is the threat of terrorist attack. Maybe I’m naive, or maybe I’m just cynical, but I feel that my cherished American freedoms, not to mention my personal safety and well-being, are far more endangered by the likes of Rumsfeld, Ashcroft, and Ridge than they are by Osama bin Ladin or Saddam Hussein. And that thought is a little frightening in itself; where does one turn to find protection from one’s so-called protectors?
I wish I had an answer to that question, because I know I’m not the only person who feels this way. And that knowledge in itself provides a small degree of comfort. There are lots of things in life that we cannot control, yet which threaten to disrupt our lives in ways that are, at best, unpleasant and disagreeable, and which in the extreme can be downright life-threatening. Yet the knowledge that there are others who share our concerns, and to whom we can turn for solace and support, helps make the unpleasantness at least a little more bearable. And when we understand this, it make it that much easier for us to become a source of solace and support for others as well.
This is why it is so important, at those times when we are tempted simply to duct tape all of our windows closed and pull the blankets up tightly over our heads, that we reach out instead to one another in order to remind ourselves that we are not alone. This is the miracle of community, of civil society, of civilization itself. We can’t always control what happens to us. But we can control how we chose to react to those events -- whether we lash out in anger, or draw back in fear, or chose instead to reach out to others with whom we share a common concern, and by working together calmly and rationally do what we can to mitigate the real damage.
Anger and Fear are two of the fundamental emotions hard-wired into the circuitry of our brains. Surprise, Happiness, Disgust, Sadness and Love are likewise all basic emotional states intrinsic to our very being, and easily recognizable to others even across cultural boundaries. From these primary emotional “building blocks” we are capable of generating vast numbers of other, more sophisticated feelings: pride, jealousy, grief, shame, guilt, embarrassment, trust, loyalty, even patriotism.
Many of these so-called “secondary emotions” are culturally-nuanced, but they all derive from more basic emotional states which are readily-understood even by many animals. Empathy and Compassion are likewise the means by which we are able to understand what other individuals are feeling, not in an abstract, intellectual manner, but literally “on a gut level.” Empathy and Compassion are what make true community possible, because they allow us to feel another person’s emotions as if they were our own, to put ourselves in their emotional shoes.
For the past 17 months, we Americans have been on an emotional roller coaster. We were surprised by the events of September 11th, shocked and disgusted by the carnage of the attacks, saddened by the loss of life, not to mention made fearful for our future safety and angered against those who attacked us. We’ve experienced emotions of love and happiness as well, as we have admired the courage of the rescuers, and reached out to the survivors and the families of the victims. As time has gone on, however, I’m not so certain that we have done as good a job as we might have of translating these emotions into a rational course of action that will allow us to recover our emotional equilibrium, and move forward with a reasonable sense of confidence and security.
Instead it appears (at least if you can trust the covers of the National news magazines) that many Americans now find themselves living in a constant state of anxiety -- still fearful of being surprised again, and angry not only at our enemies, but also at many of our friends. There are some who would even say (myself among them) that our leaders have tried to manipulate our emotions for their own political advantage and ideological aims, by attempting to keep us fearful, and redirecting our anger against troublesome foreign governments who had nothing to do with the September 11th attacks. And they’ve used this same technique in an attempt to silence or stifle criticism of their political objectives, both at home and abroad.
As some of you know, last Friday I appeared on one of the local public access cable talk shows alongside a young woman from the island who had written a letter to the Inquirer and Mirror in which she suggested that people like myself, who have been critical of the President’s intention of waging a pre-emptive war against Iraq, were somehow unpatriotic and “an insult...to each and every veteran who has ever risked their lives for all of us and the welfare of this great nation.” That’s her opinion, and she’s certainly entitled to it; but one of the things I noticed as I was listening to her talk on camera was that she seemed fixated on this notion that because we were attacked, we were compelled to attack. The mere suggestion that any other course of action might possibly be more appropriate was “a slap in the face, and a step towards espionage.”
It’s one thing for reasonable human beings to have differences of opinion about which choice of action is most likely to lead to an acceptable outcome. It’s quite another to go through life in a perpetual state of “fight or flee,” constantly on emotional edge, fearful of surprise, ready to lash out (or to run away) at a moment’s warning, and routinely sad about our perceived vulnerability, and the sense of loss, helplessness and futility which accompanies it. Stress and anxiety are biological conditions, triggered by our emotions; we can’t necessarily control the events, the “triggers,” which bring them on, but we can learn to control our reactions and minimize their effects.
And the first step, obviously, is to recognize WHAT we feeling, even if we aren’t particularly certain why. If we are aware of our emotions, if we can bring them to the surface and talk about them with people we trust and whom we know care about us, that is practically half the battle. Talking is good on another level as well. By learning to talk openly and honestly about what we are feeling, we also become more capable of putting those feelings into an appropriate context, thus avoiding the twin dangers of either denying and minimizing what we are feeling, or on the other hand catastrophizing and universalizing very specific and limited emotional triggers. (Don’t you just love that word, “catastrophizing?” Only a clinical psychologist could have thought of a word like that).
Because stress and anxiety are physiological reactions, it also helps to engage in some sort of appropriate physical activity. Thousands of generations ago, when our ancestors spent their days wandering across the savannah in search of food, and were more routinely surprised by hungry leopards and other predators than we are today, they evolved specific physiological mechanisms which allowed them to respond effectively to those threats, by either attacking or running away. Nowadays, when the perceived threat may be something so ethereal as an image on a television screen, it isn’t always appropriate to pick up the nearest stick or rock and shout at the top of our lungs, or to sprint a few hundred yards to the safety of a nearby cave or tree, and hunker down. But the adrenaline is still flowing, and unless we do something to help it dissipate, our stress reactions can create all sorts of on-going physiological problems as well. This is why it is so important to run away from the television on a regular basis -- to take a long walk, or (if you are so inclined) maybe picking up a ball and spending an hour or so running up and down a hardwood floor and leaping into the air every now and again.
Finally, in order to help rebalance our emotional equilibrium, I think it’s important to seek out experiences which will evoke (for lack of a better term) our more “positive” emotions, like Love and Happiness. Spend more time with people you care about, find activities that will make you laugh, or that give you pleasure, or a sense of accomplishment. It’s not “denial” to recognize that there is more to life than fear and anger, or that even in the face of real danger we can still do things which give us joy. To laugh in the face of danger is the definition of real courage, as well as an essential tool for differentiating between dangers that are real, and those which exist only in our imaginations.
You know, we don’t have to travel half-way around the world in order to find things that frighten us, or make us angry. We are often surprised and disgusted, not to mentioned saddened, by events much closer at hand. Yet if we can learn to talk openly with one another about our feelings, and to cooperate with one another in meaningful activity; if we can learn to differentiate between threats that are real, and those which are merely imagined, and to maintain our ability to take pleasure in one another’s company and the life we share together, there is very little that we have to fear. And the alternative to this is very frightening indeed. If we instead withdraw from one another, or lash out in anger, or express our disgust rather than our affection, and respect, and trust, we become in the long run our own worst enemies, and undermine the very compassion and empathy which make it possible for us to live together in community.
posted by The Eclectic Cleric at 5:11 PM
<< Home