Sermon-Memories of Sodom and Gomorrah

Memories of Sodom and Gomorrah; It Isn’t What You Think
Sermon to Countryside Church, Unitarian Universalist, May 29, 2011
Sermon to the Geneva UU Society, November 27, 2011
The Rev. Dr. C. Scot Giles


Expectation Creates Perception

My ministry is one of spiritual healing, primarily using the hypnotic arts and sciences.

Hypnotism is based on the fact that much of what happens to us is actually the result of an expectation we create in our minds.

Governments have known for centuries how to exploit this to use it to influence what people think. Today I’m going to show you how that is done. To prove that it has been done as long as governments have existed, I’m going to show you an example of it from the oldest part of the Bible. Then, I’m going to suggest what you might do about this to keep it from affecting you.

Along the way I’m going to share with you a bit of my radical reading of the Bible., and explain why I think the Bible is primarily about psychology not theology.

The Rules of the Mind

It’s actually very easy to put a person into hypnotic trance. I could teach any of you how to do that in an afternoon. The hard part is to know what to do once you have the other person entranced. That’s the craft Consulting Hypnotists study and it’s very, very difficult.

What we do is to create a Suggestion Patter, layers of words, images, stories and metaphors created by following a handful of rules. For example one of these rules is the Rule of Imagination. It says that “When Will and Imagination Conflict, Imagination Always Wins.”

As an example, I want every person in this sanctuary to not imagine that Ms. Sarah Palin, the half-term Governor of Alaska, is standing in the middle of the Church Hall right now. Do not think about her. Do not wonder if she has helped herself to a cup of your coffee. Do not ask yourself where in the room she is standing. Do not even consider what she might be carrying in her left hand. Most important of all, do not picture her in your mind wearing a dark blue mini-skirt and black fish-net stockings.

Can’t do it, can you? No one can. Some of your are probably feeling the urge to leave this room to check out what’s happening in the Church Hall right now.

Where Will and Imagination Conflict, Imagination Always Wins. No exceptions. All I have to do is paint a graphic picture in your minds and you will see it there; even if you don’t want to.

Another of these rules hypnotists know is the Rule of Dominant Affect. What it means is that stronger emotions always push out weaker emotions.. Very strong emotions can actually change patterns of thought because the desire to be reasonable is a weak emotion.

While I use this Rule for healing, it’s got a darker side known to every politician, advertising executive and marketing consultant.

If you want to fool someone, all you have to do is to put your proposition out there framed by things associated with strong emotions. The people who hear it will get so tangled up in the emotion that they will not notice that you actually pulled a fast one and said something that doesn’t make logical sense.

It’s called “Emotional Reasoning”--thinking that what you have heard makes sense because it also makes you feel a strong emotion.

This has a far-ranging impact on our lives that we underestimate, and is the very tool used by governments to keep us in line and prevent us from questioning what we’re told.

One of the places I most enjoy pointing this out is in our understanding of the Bible, because that’s the “authority” a lot of preachers and politicians use to justify what they want you believe.

Some of you are not going to agree with me in the Sermon, and that’s okay. I thank you for giving me a hearing.


The Bible

I love the Bible. I actually have some reasonably serious credentials as a Bible Scholar and routinely use its poetry and metaphors in my personal spiritual life. I take none of it literally, but view it as a book that tells me a lot about how the human mind works.

But we misunderstand it all the time.

Most of us were taught the Story of Noah’s Ark as the story of a God that lovingly sheltered people and animals from disaster. I’ve seen church school toys that are small copies of this Ark filled with cute statutes of animals and waving and smiling people. Because that’s what we expect it to be about, that’s what we perceive it to be.

Yet if you actually look at that story it’s not a happy story. It’s a story of divine genocide on a planetary scale. It’s actually a horrible story about a mean-spirited and unforgiving God.

We hear the Parables of Jesus like the Good Samaritan or the Prodigal Son, and think they have something to do with helping others or forgiving children. That’s what many of us were told they meant, and so that is how we read them. I recall the song from my Methodist upbringing, “Jesus loves me, this I know. ‘Cause the Bible tells me so.” I grew up thinking the Bible was a collection of nice stories about warm feelings and good thoughts.

That’s hogwash.

As Professor Jennifer Wright Knust, a Professor of Religion at Boston University whose recent work I draw on in this sermon, said in her book Unprotected Texts, “The only way that the Bible can be regarded as straightforward and simple is if no one bothers to read it.” (p. 10)

Those parables of Jesus I mentioned were not nice stories, and they meant something very different in Jesus’s time than now. The Good Samaritan was an outcast in 1st Century Society and no respectable person would have accepted help from one. It would be like accepting help from a group of terrorists.

The crime of the Prodigal Son wasn’t that he was greedy, but that he worked as a pig farmer and made himself ritually impure under the Holiness Code of Jewish Society.

The Parables of Jesus are actually about subverting the authority of the culture of the time, and we miss that meaning completely.


The Two Ways of Understanding the Bible

There are basically two ways of understanding the Bible. Theologian Brian McLaren, one of the leaders of what is called the “Emerging Church” movement contrasts people who think of the Bible as if it were a Constitution, and those who view it as I do, as a Library.

People who see the Bible as a Constitution believe that every word has authority. They believe that apparent contradictions can be reconciled into a uniform meaning, and that the document contains rules that we are supposed to live by. It’s a rule book. Just like the Constitution of the United States is supposed to be a rule book, interpreted and reconciled by a Supreme Court so that everything stays consistent.

This view of the Bible has many problems. In some cases the rules make no modern sense or become outdated with social changes. For example, the rule in Leviticus 19:27 that men should not trim their beards is one I routinely ignore. I can also verify from regular attendance at a Summer Renaissance Faire that the rule in the next verse that no one should get a tattoo is obviously ignored by many young women--to my absolute delight.

Then there are the contradictions. Such as when Isaiah 2:4 urges us to beat our swords into agricultural plows and our spears into pruning hooks, while Joel 3:10 urges us to beat our agricultural plows into swords and our pruning hooks into spears.

On the other hand people like me see the Bible as a Library of a particular culture. A culture is a group of people who have informally agreed to argue about the same issues over a sustained period of time.

Now, I argue that the library that is the Bible is actually a psychological library, because it tells us how the minds of the people who were, in most cases, our ancestors worked. Their psychological assumptions have become encoded in every facet of our civilization and government.

Now in any library, all the books will not agree with each other, nor is there any expectation that they will. If we collected a library of books on, say, Global Warming, the books would not all agree. Some would be proponents of the theory, others would be in opposition and few would exactly agree with each other.

So too the books in the library of the Bible. They fight, disagree and contradict each other.

But those books had in influence on the minds of the people who read them. The earliest of the books in this library were gathered at the end of a long literary dark age, and contain fragments of stories that are far older than the Bible itself. One of those stories is the Story of Sodom and Gomorrah. And it’s not what you think.


It’s Not What You Think

In our time, popular culture views the story of the destruction of these two cities in Genesis 18-19 through the lens of Victorian social mores. The sin of the people who lived there was supposed to be sexual immorality, and the the cities were destroyed in a cataclysm because that immorality offended God. That’s what we expect this story to be about because that’s what those of us who were taught anything about it were taught.

Therefore, when we read it now we assume it must be about sexual immorality.

Actually, that interpretation is nonsense.

In an era before kings and centralized government, the people who lived in the Fertile Crescent were ruled by warlords, called Judges, who would be singled out from among the people when there was a need to respond to some crisis. The Book of Judges in the Hebrew Bible is about them.

There were legends about one sort of warlord that never failed. These warlords were more than human. They were a race of Demi-Gods, and they were called “the Nephilim.”

To understand this you have to grasp an obscure section of the Bible found in Genesis 6: 1-2 that mostly puzzles people.

When people began to multiply on the face of the ground, and daughters were born to them, the sons of God saw that they were fair; and they took wives for themselves of all that they chose. ….The Nephilim were on the earth in those days--and also afterward--when the sons of God went in to the daughters of humans, who bore children to them. These were the heroes that were of old, warriors of renown.

What’s this about? There is little that survives in the Bible to explain it. However, we know from other old documents that the Niphilim were believed to be a race of semi-divine beings that were the offspring of union between humans and Angels (or, the Sons of God).

These offspring were immensely powerful beings who became invincible Warlords, enabling the City-States they represented to conquer and enslave their enemies. In an age before for creation of Kings, these Warlords were the ultimate political and military leaders.

Some of the legends say these Warlords, or Nephilim, were so powerful that God was afraid of them and set out to destroy the Angel-Human hybrids.

Perhaps that is why right after this passage, the text goes on to describe the Great Flood and Noah’s Ark. Some scholars think was more about the destruction of these semi-divine hybrids than people, who were after all, permitted to survive.

The tale of the Great Flood is ancient--it actually comes from a Sumarian text called the Epic of  Gilgamesh written about 2500 BCE, almost 1000 years prior to the writing of the Book of Genesis.

However the story was dusted off and re-written by people who had a vested interest in explaining why there were no more Angel-Human hybrids. These people were the early Kings in Israel who wanted everyone to understand that there were no more Invincible Warlords to be found. Therefore, you see, the institution of Kingship and central government made sense. As did everything that went along with them; like a royal court, a royal army, taxes, police and a moneyed aristocracy.

No more Invincible Warlords, so we have to tolerate kings.

A false proposition, we don’t have to tolerate kings, but put forward wrapped in a scary story of divine genocide that would frighten anyone who believed it might be true. Who would quake at any sound of thunder, lightning or rain.

So scary was it, that people didn’t notice that it actually was a rationale for the institution of an ancient monarchy. That’s the Rule of Dominant Affect. If you put it out there with enough of an emotional charge, people will not notice that is doesn’t make sense.

By an amazing coincidence, the writers who were putting all this down on paper are believed to have been scribes in the court of King David, the second King in Israel, or his son Solomon. They employed the best spin doctors and marketing professionals of the age. They dredged up the old Sumerian Story of the Flood and put it down in scripture in a way to shore up their own political position.

So what about Sodom and Gomorrah? Very much the same. Sodom was a beautiful city located in present-day Iraq. At the time it enjoyed a magnificent climate like the best of our Southern California Coast. It was a rich and prosperous city. But Sodom was locked in perpetual war with its sister city Gomorrah. The wars were mostly trade wars, but they cut into the profit margin and real estate values.

The story is that two Angels travel to the City of Sodom after visiting with Abraham, the Patriarch of Israel.  They come to the house of Abraham’s nephew in Sodom, a man named Lot.

According to the story, the citizens of Sodom realize that Lot’s guests are not humans, but Angels. They demand that Lot allow the citizens to rape the Angels.

Trying to protect his guests, Lot offers the citizens his daughters instead, but the citizens say no (what the daughters said has not been recorded; and don’t feel bad for them as they get even later in the story).

Finally the angels use their supernatural power to strike the citizens blind. Lot and his family escape. As they flee the city it is destroyed in a cataclysm, as Lot and his daughters flee to the hills. Lot’s wife looks back upon the burning Cities of Sodom and Gomorrah, and is turned into a pillar of salt.

This story is almost always presented as a tale of the dangers of immorality or a denunciation of homosexuality. That’s what we expect when we hear the names of those two ancient cities, so that is how we perceive the story. When conservative preachers condemn gay, lesbian, transgenered or bi-sexual people, they routinely use the story of Lot and the City of Sodom as their authority. But that’s not really what it is about at all.

The citizens of Sodom wanted to rape Lot’s guests because they knew they were Angels. Angels were thought to be androgynous. An Angel that appeared male could still take the female part and give birth. The story of the City of Sodom is really a story about an attempt to have sex with Angels. It’s about an attempt to create Nephilim.

The goal was not rape. The goal of the citizens of Sodom was to create what, in their time, was understood as the ultimate Weapon of Mass Destruction. They wanted to create Angel-Human hybrids that could become Warlords, and allow their city to conquer and enslave its enemies. We don’t see this because we are expecting it to be about something else, because we were taught to believe that it had a more risqué meaning. The Rule of Dominant Affect again. The emotional charge around sexual mores keeps us from see that the payload of the story is different.

God hates Invincible Warlords (the Angel-Human hybrids). Look what God did to the City of Sodom when they tried to create them. Because God destroyed them all in the Flood, there are no more Invincible Warlords around now. Therefore, we have to have Kings, and taxes, and police and nobility because there is no other way to hold society together in a world without demigods.

Said the government scribes, spin doctors and marketing consultants.


A Historical Basis?

The story of the destruction of the Cities of Sodom and Gomorrah probably does have some historical basis. Likely it was based on a dim ancient recollection of the destruction of two actual cities in a Pompeii-like volcanic eruption. If you look at how the destruction is described it’s very much like that--fire, explosions, brimstone, etc. At the ruins of Pompeii to this day you can find the petrified remains of its citizens whose bodies were covered in ash that calcified and look for all the world like salt.

Many scholars believe that the story of the destruction is actually a survival of an older end-of-the-world story just like the story of Noah’s Ark. Indeed, later when living in the hills, Lot’s daughters do something that makes it look very much like they believed they were the only surviving family in the world. However, I will leave you to read that part of the story on your own.

The stories of Sodom and Gomorrah and Noah’s Ark turn out to be ancient stories resurrected by Kingly-Appointed spin doctors to justify the imposition of centralized government on the people of Israel.

Much of what we have in the earliest writing of the Bible are prehistoric stories dusted off an given new life by kingly scribes because they provided a justification for the political life of the time.


Controlling Expectation

If you can control the emotional orientation a person has toward a story, you influence almost completely that person’s reaction to it. If the emotional orientation is powerful it can so influence opinion that people will overlook the fact that it is actually about something else.

The Story of Sodom and Gomorrah is about--gasp-- immorality. The Story of the Flood is about--gasp--divine genocide. Not. They are in fact scriptural examples of the Rule of Dominant Affect used to influence the minds in a culture.

A smart spin doctor can do a lot with the Rule of Dominant Affect. Governments have always used it, from ancient to modern times.

You can use this principle to justify a war fought to control oil production, by dressing it up in a claim to be “democratic liberators”--as did a former Presidential Administration.

You can break up the families of minority groups by dressing up the laws that prosecute them as laws intended to insure “public safety”--as did the Legislature of the the State of Arizona.

You can destroy a whole class of people by building walls through their neighborhood so they can’t get to work or find water, provided you justify those walls by saying they are there to “prevent terrorism”--as does the current government of the secular state of Israel.

You can bust unions and deny whole classes of workers job protection by claiming that your actions are intended to promote “economic responsibility” in a time of “fiscal crisis,” as did the Governor of the State of Wisconsin.

You can destroy wetlands, parks, forests and tundra by claiming that doing so is really about “promoting jobs.”

You can argue that people should be deprived of affordable health care if you put that claim out wrapped in the emotional language of “freedom.”

You can deprive people of a constitutional right by saying you are doing it to “make our streets safe” as do the more unreasonable advocates of gun control.

You can rig elections by creating a swollen public payroll of people who will vote for you provided they don’t have to work hard, by saying you are doing to to establish civic “stability,” as did the Chicago Political Machine for decades.

So long as the claim you put out there has enough of an emotional charge, the brain will work its magic and most people will not see that you are actually doing something else. The way the brain works can be our liberator, but it can be used to enslave us too if someone knows how.


Breaking the Bonds

How can we prevent this from hurting us and those we love. How can we stop the chemistry of our brain from being tricked?

As any hypnotist will tell you, that’s almost impossible. Where will and the mechanics of brain chemistry conflict, brain chemistry almost always wins.

I personally take refuge in the psychological counsel offered by the Bible, which when considered separately from the interpretations imposed on it by the traditional church often offers expert guidance.

In Ephesians 4:14 we read, “We must no longer be children, tossed to and fro and blown about by every wind of doctrine, by people’s trickery, by their craftiness and deceitful scheming.” That is, we should automatically maintain a skeptical doubt about any claim made in our hearing that also carries a strong emotional charge. We should automatically subject such claims to analysis, even if they come from people we trust.

Learning to adopt a pervasive skeptical doubt about any claim that also carries an emotional charge is an excellent policy. I do it myself. I never assume my emotional response to something is the same as a logical response. I separate them and when possible, give my emotions a chance to calm down before I decide an issue.

That is, I always doubt what my emotions tell me, at least at first. As an old Chinese parable puts it "With great doubts come great understanding; with little doubts come little understanding."

May we all come to have great understanding.

And that’s my sermon.

The Family

At one point I studied with someone who had been a personal student of Dr. Murray Bowen, the founder of Family Therapy in America.
 
My friend told me a definition of the family he claimed Dr. Bowen had devised. I’ve never been able to confirm it, but according to my friend Bowen said that the family was “a seething cauldron of pathology, from which, with a lifetime of effort, one may partially extricate oneself.”
 
That’s a pretty harsh definition, but I’ve noticed that when I share it with people they usually smile and ask me to repeat it so they can write it down. Obviously, it strikes a chord.
 
The same friend said that Bowen used to display the Norman Rockwell painting called “Freedom From Want,” which is a painting of an old-time Thanksgiving Dinner. The Grandmother brings a nut-brown turkey to a table presided over by a Grandfatherly man. The rest of the family sits at the table talking expectantly.
 
“Now,” said my friend, “imagine that the Grandfather has been abusing his niece for three years. Imagine that the woman on the left has been struggling with her addiction to Valium for ten years, while the guy on the right is wondering how he will pay his gambling debts to his bookie. The man at the end of the table is thinking about how he can slip away for a drink from his hip flask, and the woman closest to him has been having an affair with a co-worker and is getting ready to abandon her husband so she can be with her lover full-time. That’s the American Family.”
 
Not a very pleasant notion over a holiday is it? Still, my friend’s point was that we tend to gloss over human problems in order to enjoy a rosy-colored image of what things are like. While an understandable temptation, that’s not reality.
 
As I go through the holiday festivals I try to keep in mind my friend’s observations. I enjoy the many things that are there to enjoy, but at the same time keep mindful that things have a darker side and that other people are probably more wounded than they seem. I’ve found it a healthy meditation to maintain amid the clatter of tableware and the clink of glasses this season.

Steve Jobs

Goodbye Steve.

You were "insanely great." Right up there with Edison, Ford, Marconi, Tesla...

God bless

Victor of the Kitchen Sink-Overcoming Clutter

The Victor of the Kitchen Sink
Sermon to Countryside Church, Unitarian Universalist
Labor Day Sunday 2011
The Rev. Dr. C. Scot Giles

Introduction

Four months ago I selected a topic for my clinics called “Living Free from Clutter.
 
In the 1970s, the physician who was my mentor, Dr. Bernie Siegel at Yale, studied the people who beat the odds with life-changing medical problems. He discovered that they had certain personal characteristics in common, and that these characteristics could be taught.
 
He created a program based upon teaching those “survival skills,” and research continues to show that people who learn them do better medically.
 
Living an uncluttered life is in fact a characteristic of the long-term surviving people with a range of illnesses. I figured it was time I put together a program of self-hypnotism to assist people in learning how to do that.
 
Did I get a surprise.
 
Almost immediately the clinics were filled. I even received requests to let extra people in. I agreed, and was startled to realize that the “extra people” who wanted to come in were actually the staff of the hospitals and wellness centers where my clinics are based.
 
That’s when I realized that most of us live lives that have far too much clutter in them.
 
 
If You Came Into My Home....
 
If you were to visit me in my home, or in my office, you would not see clutter. In fact, the rule is that there can be absolutely nothing on any horizontal surface that is not there for some important reason. Everything has its place, and unless it is being used, everything is in its place.
 
I was not always this way. In fact as a kid I was routinely criticized by teachers and relatives for being messy and disorganized. However, as I got older I realized that I wanted to be effective. As I had only so much energy to go around, I found that I was more effective if I was organized.
 
I had some help. At an early age I went to work in restaurants, joining the culinary union and rising in its ranks from Apprentice to Journeyman Chef. I left professional cooking to enter the ministry, but had I wanted to stay in food service, an Executive Chef’s ticket was well within reach.
 
Being a chef isn’t an easy life. The hours are long, and you work them in volcanic heat usually at a fast pace. On my first day as an apprentice, the chef who was my trainer, a madman, showed me the most important place in any professional kitchen.
 
Any idea what that is?
 
It’s called the “misen en place”, French for “putting everything in place.” When a professional kitchen is in operation the first thing done is to put everything that will be needed during the shift into a particular place so it can be located quickly.
 
“I should be able to cook in this kitchen with my eyes closed,” roared my trainer. And God help you if you used something and didn’t put it back where it belonged. He would very likely call you over, dump it down your chef’s jacket and make you wear the stained jacket for the rest of the shift.
 
Like I said, he was a madman; but a madman who could makes sauces that were so etherial people would fly to New York to taste them. That’s why he could get away with being a madman.
 
Oh but I learned. In a professional kitchen every motion has to count, because every second does. I learned the value of organization and the peril of clutter. I put that lesson into use in other areas of my life and quickly saw it’s value.
 
 
ECaP
 
When I studied with Dr. Siegel and his Exceptional Cancer Patients Organization I was both pleased and surprised to learn that living free from clutter was one of the survival skills we found in our research.
 
“Every time someone walks by a pile of clutter that they were meaning to do something about,” Dr. Siegel said, “that pile reaches out and takes a little bit of their energy away from them. That’s deadly, because these people need all their energy in their own lives to heal.”
 
Think about that. Do you live in a world where there are stacks and piles of stuff you are meaning to get to?
 
Consult your feelings every time you walk by such a stack or pile and see what your feelings tell you. Very likely you will feel a resigned, downward emotion and experience a thought like “I got’ta do that stuff....someday....” and when you walk on you will notice that you are a little bit weaker than you were.
 
Try it. You’ll be amazed at what those stacks and piles are doing to you.
 
I’ve even encountered cases where getting rid of the stacks and piles of clutter was sufficient to help some people resolve actual clinical depression. The energy they recovered when the clutter was no longer draining was enough to reverse their mental state.
 
Physical clutter is only one kind of clutter. Some of us clutter up our bodies with excess pounds. Some of us clutter up our spiritual lives with too many practices instead of mastering just a few. Some of us clutter up our minds by not thinking ideas through to reasonable conclusions, and end up holding positions that are inconsistent and contradictory.
 
Clutter is a problem. I’ve found that by tackling physical clutter first helps bring the other in line.
 
I do need to say that my sermon today is about normal clutter. I’m not addressing people who have a clutter problem brought on by depression, obsessional disorders of attention deficit. Those are medical problems that have a medical solution. Today I’m just talking about having too much stuff.
 
 
The Flylady
 
When Lindsay and I got married almost 24 years ago, one of the issues I had to face was that I was marrying a handicapped person. Lindsay has had severe osteoarthritis since childhood and during the time of our relationship she has had three of the five major orthopedic operations that allow her to walk today.
 
And Lindsay also cannot cook...
 
What this meant is that I was marrying a partner who could not do any housework. As we could not afford a maid, If we wanted to be homeowners, all of the shopping, cooking and cleaning was going to have to be done by me.
 
Unlike some men whose idea of housework approximates to living in a cave, I’ve always kept my home in reasonable shape. I know that if you don’t stay on top of things they inevitably fill with clutter, and the the chores become far more difficult.
 
As I practice from a home office, every one of my clients was going to get to see how good, or bad, a job I was doing. I couldn’t afford to do a bad job.
 
Thankfully, I discovered the Flylady.
 
The real name of the Flylady is Marla Cilly. Her website is flylady.com and her best known book is Sink Reflections. If you like this sermon I suggest you check out her work. I swear by it, and honestly don’t know how I’d keep up my home without her ideas.
 
If you are not sure if you would benefit by her ideas, ask yourself how you would feel if I came over to your house today directly after church. Would you be okay with how things looked and smelled, or do you have what the Flylady calls CHAOS; an acronym for Can’t Have Anyone Over Syndrome. If so, get her book and check out her website.
 
Marla Cilly lives with severe clinical depression. In her book she describes how that illness caused her entire life to get out of control. As part of her recovery she created techniques to get her from one day to the next.
 
She started out with two daily chores. First, she would get out of bed and get dressed. Second, she would clean her kitchen sink. That’s it. That’s all she had the energy to do.
 
Over time that clean kitchen sink became a symbol of sanity for her. It was a beachhead of order in a home of chaos. Gradually she expanded that into a complete system to maintaining a home that took minimal time and effort. She became the Victor over her Kitchen Sink and you can be too.
 
Her system, everywhere called The Flylady System, is based on staying on top of things, cleaning as you go and tossing things you don’t need, so the clutter doesn’t even get started. That way things never get too far out of control.
 
She recommends that you create certain household rituals for yourself. Interestingly, the most recent motivational research confirms this. It’s as if all of us have a limited pool of energy that we can use to think our way through things. Every decision you have to make deceases that pool. Therefore, you just set up rituals that you do without thinking.
 
The Flylady wants you to have a Morning List and an Evening List of things that you do as routinely as brushing your teeth, along with an Outside List of things you do whenever you are outside of your home.
 
Here are some examples of such rituals:
 
-When you get out of bed in the morning, immediately make the bed.
 
-Once the bed is made, shower and dress yourself all the way to your shoes.
 
-When you fill the car with gas, use the time you are waiting for the tank to fill by cleaning all the trash out of your car and putting it in the trash can next to the gas pump.
 
-When you finish up your day, put the dishes in the dishwasher and clean your kitchen sink so it greats you in the morning in all its shinny glory.
 
-Just before you get into bed, lay out your clothing for tomorrow so you don’t have to think about it when you get up.
 
These are all simple things, and not all of them apply to everyone. But the basics of her system are:
 
Have a Morning, Evening and Outside list of rituals that you just do without having to think about them.
 
You divide your house up into five zones for the 4.3 weeks in each month. Each week you clean one zone. Every day, you set a timer, and do exactly 15 minutes of cleaning in the zone for that week. No more. No less. Just 15 minutes is all it takes and everyone can find 15 minutes. Apart from that, just try to clean as you go so nothing piles up.
 
Once a week you do a one-hour House Blessing, where you vacuum and mop the high traffic areas.
 
Have a three ring binder or a computer file where you list all the important reference information such as the phone number of your plumber, your kids’s soccer schedule, your mother’s birthday, etc. So there is only one place you have to look for find an important bit of information.
 
(This is the hardest one) If you are not really using something, get rid of it. Throw it away or give it away. Minimize the clutter in your home by getting rid of everything you don’t really need.
 
The hardest of her rules is the one about tossing the stuff you don’t need. A lot of people make the mistake of thinking they can organize clutter. But taking a big pile of clutter and using a system of bins and folders to break it into small piles of clutter doesn’t actually do anything. You have to let the stuff go. Throw it away of give it away or there will be no real progress possible.
 
As it says in the Bible, “there is a time for everything under the sun,” including “a time to keep and a time to throw away (Ecc. 3:6)
 
Now I’m not saying you can’t have collections of something or mementos. I’m talking about clutter, and the difference is obvious. Collections and mementos are neat and orderly. Otherwise they are not collections. They are a heap or a pile, and that’s clutter.
 
Well, that’s what the Flylady has to teach. Follow it religiously and you will never have CHAOS. Your home will always be orderly enough to have someone over. Millions of people have found this works, including me.
 
Of course I do other things. At my office I’ve followed a formal system for workflow management for decades called Getting Things Done, created by productivity guru David Allen.
 
David Allen argues that you need to get your tasks and responsibilities out of your head and into a simple external system that you can trust. Provided, he says, that any system you have is so simple that you can keep it up even on a rainy Monday morning when you have a bad flu. If you’re interested, look him up.
 

 
Clutter is a Symptom
 
Most of us have too much stuff. Comedian George Carlin had a wonderful 1986 routine about “Stuff.” Commenting that the “meaning of life is trying to find a place for your stuff,” and “your house is just a pile of your stuff with a cover on it.” Hey. Carlin knew his stuff.
 
As one looks at all the stuff most of us have laying around there is a question that comes to my mind. Why do we collect all this stuff in the first place?
 
So I began to ask people, mostly clients, but sometimes friends, why they were keeping all the stuff around them that they had? I looked for people who obviously had a lot of clutter in their lives (which wasn’t very hard) and asked what was in those piles and stacks that was so important they didn’t just throw it away? I got three basic answers.
 
Some people responded that they were “buried in treasures.” That is, they knew all the stuff they had around them has some value. They really didn’t want it themselves, but they knew that some idiot on eBay might pay a pretty penny for it if they ever got around to selling it on eBay, They were clinging to their stuff for fear of getting rid of something valuable.
 
Others responded that the stuff they had around had a sentimental value. They had their dead grandfather’s Chest of Drawers, and their departed Aunt’s tea service, High School yearbooks and the granddaughter’s kindergarten pictures. They were living surrounded by a sort of “deconstructed” shrine to other people. They were clinging to stuff because they thought that throwing it away would show disrespect about people they loved.
 
Finally, a third group, by far the largest of the three, responded that they held onto things because “they might need them some day.” They tended to be the hoarders who would throw nothing away that didn’t actively smell. They lived surrounded by books they would never read again, empty jars that might be useful to holding things if they ever got organized, old rugs, newspapers and magazines, and a long list of other things that might “someday” be needed. They held onto stuff because it had a hallucinogenic quality. It appeared to be an asset when actually it was mostly a liability. Some of their homes were so cluttered you could hardly move from room to room.
 
That’s when I figured something out. even after you have gotten a grip on your stuff by organizing the “misen en place,” using the Flylady System or reliably getting you paperwork under control, there is still another sort of stuff that you have to deal with. That’s the stuff in your head. If you don’t deal with the stuff in your head, you will live a life that is cluttered with stuff.
 
 
The Stuff in Your Head
 
Fundamentally, I have come to believe that there is only one reason why people live with clutter. They may have clutter in different degrees, but there is one reason.
 
I’ve come to believe that this reason is essentially a spiritual reason. People have clutter to the degree they do not feel safe. It’s a lack of religious confidence.
 
The word “religion” comes from the Latin word meaning “to connect.” Religion is that thing which connects us to a Higher Power and to the world that is the offspring of that power. When we really feel our religion we feel connected and supported. We have a place in the process. We’re part of the whole.
 
People who feel secure and safe about their place in the world are willing to let go of things that are really in their way, even if they might be valuable.
 
They know what they have what it takes to get their needs and responsibilities met, and the thought of “cashing in” on every little thing is outweighed by the thought of their own convenience and effectiveness.
 
While they may miss the people who have left this world, they understand that an appropriate way to keep a memorial going is at a cemetery, in a memory book or at an annual day of remembrance. Not by stacking stuff in the living room or elsewhere around the house.
 
People who feel safe about their place in the world have confidence in their own abilities to cope. Therefore, they don’t cling to old books, magazine, articles or objects that “might someday be useful.” They know that in most cases these things will not be useful, even if one could find them amidst the clutter.
 
They are confident that if they really needed to they could figure out a way to get the same information without turning their home into an obstacle course.
 
Fundamentally, people who have conquered clutter have also conquered their religious insecurity about being in the world. They don’t need stuff, and they don’t need their home to be a cover for their stuff. They know they are supported by a power greater than themselves and therefore don’t need to hold themselves up with piles of stuff.
 
Clutter is, I’ve concluded, a spiritual issue and it has a spiritual solution.
 
So how do we find that solution?
 
To answer this question I turn to the work of William James, the 19th century philosopher who many believe was the founder of modern psychology.
 
“Feelings follow behavior!” exclaimed James. If you want to feel a certain way, first you must behave in that way. Then, over time, your feelings will fall into line, and you will come to feel as if your behavior was completely appropriate.
 
If you want to feel more self-confident, act in the same way that the self-confident people in your world act.
 
At first it will feel strange, for you know you are playing a role, but over time your feelings will change to match your behavior. If you wait until you feel a certain way before you act that way, you never get there.
 
Feelings follow behavior. If you want to feel a certain way you must first act as if you already did feel that way.
 
People in this congregation who have had the chops to work a Twelve Step Program know what I mean. I admire such people, because Twelve Step Programs are among the most spiritually rigorous disciplines in our word today.
 
In such programs the principle I am talking about is called “Fake It Till You Feel It,” or “Fake It Until Your Make It.” They are all based on the same insight from William James. If you want to be different, act as if you already are. Then, things will change for you.”
 
This is true for the Great Spiritual War Against Clutter too. If you want to live free from the feelings that drive you to live a cluttered life, the best way to get there is to actually take the risk and declutter your home or environment.
 
Throw Stuff Away. Reduce your possessions to the minimum you need. This will feel weird at first, but Fake It Until You Make It. After a short while you will discover that you are happier in your uncluttered environment and that you would never go back to the way things were.
 
If you want the spiritual confidence that will let you lead an uncluttered life, start by tossing away the clutter. Soon you will feel like you too are the Victor of the Kitchen Sink and clutter is something that you will automatically remove from your world.
 
As the Bible says, “there is a time to throw things away.”
 
And I agree.  And that’s my sermon.

 

Motorcycles and Cars

A lot of people are surprised to learn that in my younger years I was a member of an outlaw motorcycle club. I drove a “chopper” or customized bike. I typically dressed in leather and wore a “cut” or vest with the “colors” or logo of the club on the back. My colors got me respect in a lot of places where I traveled and I was proud of them.

But I eventually ended that chapter of my life. Part of the reason was I grew up spiritually and wanted something different for myself. Part of the reason was three accidents, the last of which almost got me killed.

People who drive cars just do not see motorcycles. All three of my crashes were caused by the same issue--an approaching car driver making a left turn right in front of me. They looked ahead, didn’t see my bike and turned, giving me only seconds to react before slamming into them at speed.

Still, I loved riding and to this day salivate when I see a nicely cut bike. However, the second thing Lindsay said after she accepted my engagement ring was “if you ever get back on a motorcycle I’ll break up with you.” I don’t think she really means it but I’ve never been willing to experiment.

So my automotive adventures have been confined to driving the sort of cars I like--small frame European style cars. I hate the huge sleds many American car makers put on the road and don’t ever ask my opinion of an SUV or a Hummer.

Well, I needed to replace my former car. It’d served me well, but at 93,000 miles and a failed brake system it was not worth repairing. So off it went as a charity donation, and I had the fun of going shopping.

Heck, I turn 60 in a few months and I decided to get the car I’ve always wanted to own--a Mini-Cooper. I’m not even going to pretend that it’s a practical car. But it’s really cool and is the most fun to drive of anything I’ve ever owned short of a motorcycle.

Hey...ya’ gott’a have some fun. Right?