Springtime For Lucifer

Springtime For Lucifer

A Sermon to Countryside Church, Unitarian Universalist

September 1, 2024, Labor Day Sunday

The Rev. Dr. C. Scot Giles

The past two times I have been in this pulpit I’ve chosen to speak about New Testament scholarship. Today, having previously concerned myself with heavenly matters, I decided to give “equal time” to the opposition.

My sermon today, “Springtime for Lucifer.”

Of course, I am pulling your leg. My topic does not concern the biblical or mythological Lucifer. Instead I am focusing on only one point in a big book called The Lucifer Principle, written by historian and free-thinker Howard Bloom. Bloom is an interesting guy. He’s an academic who never pulls his punches to the point where his critique of Islam has gotten him sentenced to death in seventeen Islamic countries.

The Lucifer Principle

Lucifer is the Latin word for “light-bringer” or “morning star.” It shows up very early translations of the Biblical Book of Isaiah, although most scholars think that is a mistranslation.

The idea is that Lucifer was a fallen angel cast out of Heaven after an unsuccessful rebellion against God. The name became a synonym for the devil, or Satan, due to a passage in the Gospel of Luke where Satan is described as also fallen from Heaven.

But none of this is my focus this morning. My focus is on something else.

The Lucifer Principle is the idea that everything has an alternative  (and often darker) side, but we typically overlook it because that’s easier.

Progress is often the result of things we would rather overlook, because they make us feel uncomfortable if we notice them.

The Lucifer Principle asks us to “give the devil his due.” Because while it is easier to tell ourselves stories that make us feel good. That is intellectually and spiritually lazy.

We will always be better off if we look at the whole picture and consider that things are not always what they seem.

Let me give you some examples.

Technology

Consider that almost everyone in this room has a smartphone. You also likely have a computer of tablet at home.

At the heart of all of the devices, that are central to modern technology, is the Integrated Circuit - often called the computer chip. They are everywhere and in everything.

Why was the computer chip invented? Was it the product of an enlightened scientist trying to make the world better for everyone? Nope. They were developed by MIT in the 1960s as part of the Apollo Project - the push to have America be the first nation to go to the moon.

The Apollo Project existed because the Cold War existed. American was in a race to the moon because Presidents Kennedy and Nixon wanted American to get there first, in order to show the world that America was better then the Soviet Union. It was done for political propaganda.

As scientist James Lovelock would remark, “If it hadn’t been for the Cold War, neither Russia nor American would have been sending people into space.”

That’s why the early moon missions were largely stripped of scientific equipment. The astronauts brought back some rocks, but the heavy-duty scientific instruments were left at home. Apollo wasn’t about science, it was about showing the “Communists” up.

That is why you have a smartphone in your pocket today. The origin of the computer chip is in politics, propaganda and war. America needed to show the world our “know how” was better than the Russians.

As a later President, Ronald Reagan, said, “Here’s my strategy on the Cold War: we win, they lose.” That’s why you have a smartphone.

The Lucifer Principle is the idea that everything has a alternative  (and often darker) side, but we typically overlook it because that’s easier.

Video

A lot of us get our entertainment today by streaming shows and movies over the internet - Netflix, YouTube, etc.

The ancestor to our ability to show movies in our home was the Video Cassette Recorder (or VCR). Remember those? Probably all of the older members here today had one of these big boxes in their home at some point - and there was Blockbuster video store on every corner. The VCR allowed us to buy or rent movies on magnetic tape that we could watch at home.

Well, the VCR, was invented by a company named Apex in 1956, but the machine was the size of desk and cost about $500K in today’s currency. Almost no one had one.

Then Sony and Philips found a way to make VCRs smaller. Still, they were believed a “niche product” that only a few people would want, as the machines were expensive and not in mass production.

But then something happened in the 1970s to spark consumer demand. Suddenly a lot of people wanted these devices. Production was ramped up and prices fell.

What happened? According to most technical historians, it was the sexual revolution. It was the idea that moral behavior had changed, and previously frowned upon stuff was okay. People wanted to be able to view a certain type of movie in their homes. The result was that the VCR market exploded.

This got us all hooked on the idea of watching entertainment in our homes on or own schedule.Then came DVDs and now streaming. Even if your viewing habits are pure vanilla, it still has its beginning in the widespread social desire to indulge other interests. This is where your streaming video came from.

The Lucifer Principle is the idea that everything has a alternative  (and often darker) side, but we typically overlook it because that’s easier.

Medicine

I am a medical hypnotist, which means I help people use the power of their minds to cope with physical and emotional problems. No one has more respect for modern medicine than I do, and I am proud to be part it.

Don’t get me wrong. I have respect for Traditional Chinese Medicine and for the Ayurvedic Medicine from India and other modalities. I think they have a place. Further, I think there are problems with contemporary medicine.

But all that said, what traditional medical systems like Homeopathy, Chinese Medicine and Ayurveda accomplish, doesn’t hold a candle to what Western Medicine routinely accomplishes with imaging, surgery, medicines, chemo, radio and immune therapy.

What is it that has made Western medicine so much more effective than folk remedies or less-scientifically oriented philosophies? Was this progress fueled by deep contemplation and enlightened exploration? No. It was fueled by grave-robbing.

The thing that sets Western Medicine apart from other medical systems is a relentless quest to understand how the human body actually works.

That was new. In ancient times physicians worked with theories about how the human body functioned, but they never explored an actual body.

In ancient China people used to tell the physician what hurt by pointing to a part on an ivory doll where the acupuncture meridians were engraved. The physician never examined one’s actual body.

In Ancient Greece when the philosopher Aristotle wrote his book on medicine, called The History of Animals. He reported that men have more teeth than women. He thought this because he believed teeth were related to wisdom (that’s why we call some teeth Wisdom teeth to this day), and as he believed men were wiser the women, it would follow they would have more teeth. He published that.

This was an error the twice-married Aristotle could presumably have avoided by asking the current Mrs. Aristotle to open her mouth. But he didn’t do that. None of them ever did that. Ancient Medicine around the world didn’t look at actual bodies.

True, in ancient Egypt the embalmers worked with bodies, but they were a secret guild and had no contact with the physicians. The Romans did some things with minor surgery and herbs, but had no idea how the body actually worked. They thought illness was because of a disbalance in the body “humors,” substances called Yellow and Black Bile, Blood and Phlegm, that are actually completely unimportant

Western Medicine was unique. Every aspiring doctor learned anatomy first hand by dissecting a human body. They realized that enabled rapid process made over ancient times. Every doctor knew it which is why such disection is a standard practice today. Attending to actual anatomy was the defining characteristic.

However, at a time before refrigeration, and at a time where the church taught that unless your body was buried whole you might not arise when Jesus came, the medical schools needed a steady supply of cadavers they could not get legally.

Consequently a lively trade in bodies developed, lead by people who called themselves “Resurrectionists,” and whom we call “grave-robbers” today.

So common was this practice that people began too build stone mausoleums in cemeteries to hold the remains of their loved ones. That’s why when you look at such structures today you will see they have stout iron doors with elaborate locks and windows covered with metal bars. Less prosperous people were sometimes buried in metal cages that you can still find sticking above ground in older cemeteries. These things were there to stop the Restrictionists.

The success of scientific modern medicine (something all of us rely on) comes from its commitment to study actual human anatomy. But that success was fueled by the patronage of the illegal and horrible practice of grave-robbing.

The Lucifer Principle is the idea that everything has a alternative  (and often darker) side, but we typically overlook it because that’s easier. Giving the “devil his due” and remembering that things are not always what they seem, requires more intellectual work.

Emotions Can Be Dangerous

In over the forty-six years of pastoral ministry I have come to believe that there is an emotional state that carries a danger for everyone. That emotional state is self-righteousness. It results from believing that you are better than you are.

That’s easy to do. Most of us would like to believe it. I am reminded of Garrison Keillor’s Minnesota town of Lake Wobegon, from his radio show Prairie Home Companion, where “all the women are strong, all the men are good looking, and all the children are above average.” We all want to think we’re pretty good. Psychologists call this the “self-enhancement” illusion.

Everyone believes they are correct in what they believe. Everyone believes they are right. No one gets up in the morning and says, “I was wrong yesterday and by the Grace of God I’ll be wrong again today.”

Self-Righteousness happens when you forget that you could be mistaken. You do it because it’s easier. The difference between a healthy-minded confidence and an unhealthy self-righteousness is when you lose that perspective. The Lucifer Principle shows us that people tend to think ideas that are easy. Ideas that make one feel good. No one wants to consider that there might be an alternative side. That’s work.

No matter how convinced you are about something, there is always the possibility that there could be more going on than you realize. As we’ve seen with my little history lesson about technology, video and medicine, things are not always what they seem. In the grip of a “self-enhancement” illusion we can forget that and it encourages self-righteous thinking.

Othering

Why do we let ourselves feel self-righteous? Religion has been notorious for this. In theology there is a long-standing problem, which theologians call the Problem of Evil, or more formally the problem of Theodicy.

Simply, if God is all good, why do bad things exist? If there is an all powerful God out there, how come bad things happen? There have been many answers attempted

My favorite humorous attempt is by Comedian Woody Allen who takes this up in his book Without Feathers by proposing that maybe God is sort of an underachiever. You know, he means well but can’t quite get it together.

A much more serious treatment is found in the 1981 book When Bad Things Happen To Good People by Rabbi Harold Kushner. But this is an ancient debate which has been going on for as long as philosophy has existed.

One way to solve the problem about why bad things happen is to blame bad things on something else. Like a bad spiritual power.

This is the solution posed by most traditional religions groups - including the groups who meet in huge sanctuaries not far from us this morning. There is a Christian Lucifer, a Jewish Satan, a Buddhist Mara, an Islamic Iblis and many others. Bad things happen and there is someone to blame - a dark power actively working against the good. This is an easy answer to propose because it’s simple to blame something else.

Religious groups do this to other religious groups all the time. Politicians do it to each other. Racial groups do the same - White European culture uses the words “dark” and “black” to imply something bad. Other racial groups return the favor with other words. Just look at our national political landscape and you will see the same thing. Finger-pointing everywhere.

The easiest way to deal with something you don’t like is to point the finger of blame. We all have a part that wants to do this as a default. We can find ourselves blaming others as a reflex.

Even St. Paul in the New Testament Book of Romans says with exasperation “For I do not do the good I want, but the evil I do not want is what I do.” (Rom 17:19). He was in a situation where he knew better, but the part of him that wanted an easy excuse took over, and he said and did things he did not really want to say or do. It is so easy to do that.

The Eleventh Commandment

My wife, the Rev. Dr. Lindsay Bates, used to tell her congregation of forty years that she had an Eleventh Commandment. “Thou Shalt Not Other.” You should not blame other people for problems. It may make you feel better, but that’s not how you solve problems.

You solve problems by “giving the devil his due” and remember that things are often more nuanced and complex than they seem. Blaming others for what you don’t like is tempting. But it is lazy. Reality is always healthier than fantasy.

Politics

I don’t know about you but I’m not looking forward to the national election we are going to have in a couple of months. My concern is the amount of anger and vitriol I see out there in society. Because my work in cancer-care cuts across every political and socio-economic divide, I have clients of every political belief and lifestyle circumstance. So I hear it all.

Sometimes I get scared at the anger people in one political camp have toward people in another.

It’s gotten so bad that I began to joke that my hope is that I will be abducted by aliens prior to November.

At first people laughed. Now I have a list of people who would like me to pick them up along the way if that happens. (BTW, the list is full, so I will not be passing a clipboard around at coffee hour in case any of you were hoping.)

The fuel for this social problem is that people have become self-righteous. They believe their side is completely right and the other side is completely wrong. It leads people to talk past each other and nothing ever gets settled. This is why we hear talk of political violence and threats of civil war.

I am deeply concerned for the future of our nation and I have seen first-hand families divided over issues.

I’ve seen self-righteousness destroy businesses, corporations, church congregations and more. We have to get past this kind of thinking if we are ever to co-exist.

I used to make this mistake. I assumed my progressive ideas were correct and only dumb or bad people would disagree. I’ve had to learn that people on the other side of a political or philosophical divide are not bad or dumb. They are simply attending to different aspects of the situation than those I perceive. They may fall for an easy answer and not consider the situation holistically. But then I was often doing the same when I dismissed them.

Once upon a time I was a chef. The best restaurant I ever worked at was the one where the owner believed that a happy kitchen was a productive kitchen. “Therefore,” he said, “I’m making it part of your job to put up with some kinds of people. You have put up with them, and they have put up with you. Because that’s part of your job.” That’s a job we all have.

Give The Devil His Due

Obviously, there are some things about which we can always be sure. Abuse is always wrong. Oppression is always wrong. Hate is always wrong. Nor is that an exhaustive list.

But for most things a difference of opinion is not a bad thing. If you actually talk to people who may disagree with you profoundly, you may discover another aspect of the issue that you had not considered.

It’s hard. Like everyone else I think what I believe is correct. It takes fortitude to hear the other person out. When I try to do it I find myself biting my tongue and clenching my fists. White it’s painful to admit, sometimes the other person does have a fair point and feels as they do because there is a side to the issue that I didn’t consider. Everything has a alternative side, that we typically overlook, because that’s easier.

My very first parish ministry was a rural congregation at the tip of Long Island - The First Universalist Church of Southold. It was an old congregation founded by farmers. It had its heyday during the popularity of Spiritualism in the nineteenth century, and there were seances in the parsonage. During the McCarthy era they worried about Soviet spies, and during Prohibition it was said there was a still running on church properly. Every political belief you could imagine was represented, including some extreme even by today’s standards.

It was a point of pride in that congregation that all the members could find a way to co-exist - and had done so for more than a hundred years. It wasn’t always easy, but they pulled it off. They found ways to disagree, sometimes profoundly, while staying connected.

Let me suggest that the Lucifer Principle is helpful here. The idea is that everything has a alternative side, that we typically overlook, because that’s easier.

We are living in a tense and unsettled time. If we are to get through this well - with our friends, our families, or co-workers - we will need to remember that it is part of our job to put up with some kinds of people. And they need to put up with us. There will need to be a Springtime for Lucifer, or at least the Lucifer Principle. Otherwise, we may become self-righteous, and only pain will come of that.

The Lucifer Principle reminds us that we need to be willing to do what is not easy - remember that things are often complicated and there is usually another aspect that we tend to overlook. I hope we will manage it.

And that’s my sermon.

Apocalypse Now

Apocalypse Now

A Sermon to Countryside Church, Unitarian Universalist

Memorial Day Sunday, May 26, 2024

The Rev. Dr. C. Scot Giles

Recently after preaching to this congregation regarding the view taken by liberal bible scholars about the supposed resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth, someone asked if I would speak about the prediction of the Apocalypse in the Bible. They said they hear a lot about it from their more traditional friends, and were curious about what I might make about the stories of the End of Days.

“Nah,” I said. If I did that it would scare people.”

Then I thought about it and said, “Oh Boy!”

So, Apocalypse it is.

What No UU Minister Expects To Hear

In the 1980s, when I was serving as the parish minister to the Unitarian Universalist Church in Oak Park, Illinois, I had an experience that no Unitarian Universalist minister expects to have. I had a group of church members who were seriously worried that the apocalypse they’d heard about from scripture was about the happen, and wanted to know what they should do to prepare.

Now when someone talks about an apocalypse, you first need to figure out what they mean. The word “Apocalypse” comes from the Greek word for “uncovering of something hidden,” or more simply “revelation.” Revelation is the title of the final book in the modern Bible, and supposedly tells about the end of history.

But that’s not what most people mean by “Apocalypse.” If you spend a few minutes with Google you will discover that there is a whole literature out there about what the world would be like after the Apocalypse. But this post-apocalyptic literature, movies and programming tends to be about the invasion of zombies, a nuclear war, environmental collapse, or economic atrocity. Nothing to do with the Bible at all.

However, as I listened to my frightened parishioners, they were not worried about the end of the world due to the limits of resources, overpopulation, nuclear war or the proliferation of zombies. Instead, they were afraid that the Bible’s predictions were actually coming true.

Not A Small Matter

There are a lot of people who believe that the prophecies in the Bible about the End of Days are real. Some of these people are in high places, and we ignore that to our peril.

Many of you are old enough to remember the Secretary of the Interior during the Regan Administration - the person charged to oversee conservation. His name was James Watt, and at one point he actually dismissed the need for environmental conservation by saying, “I do not know how many future generations we can count on before the Lord returns.”

There are other politicians in power who believe the same. In fact, I suspect there are more of them today then when Mr. Watt told us we didn’t need to worry about climate change because Jesus was coming back.

Imagining that there is a divine plan for the End of Days, imagining that maybe we might get special treatment, that people we don’t like will get their comeuppance, has an attraction. It’s an emotional get-out-of-jail-free card to excuse people from having to make the choices that actually shape the world.

People use it to avoid considering the warnings science gives us about objective problems like world hunger, injustice and climate. That’s a shame because we can choose to do something about those problems. But not if we convince ourselves that the seals will break, trumpets will sound and everything will be made new, without our having to lift a finger.

Which is what a whole lot of people believe. I kid you not.

The Biblical Account

Well, with regard to my parishioners, it turned out that there had been a program aired on a Christian Television network that was a pseudo-documentary. Supposedly scientists had fed news reports into a super computer that also could access any book ever written.

The computer came up with the conclusion that world events were following the predictions of the biblical Book of Revelation, exactly, and that the end of the world was due soon.

After a bit of investigation I learned that the company that produced this program for Christian television used an advertising agency that employed a member of my congregation. He was a bit of a strange person (and with Unitarian Universalists that’s saying something). He had them over to watch it, and as a prank, he told them that such a computer actually existed - and that the conclusions in the show were believed correct by influential scientists.

Now…I hope you heard what I just said. He did this as a prank. There was no actual supercomputer.

I got everyone calmed down, explaining the whole thing was a hoax and sent them home to turn back into rational adults. But I began to ponder why the Biblical mythology about the end of world holds such fascination for so many people.

The Book of Revelation

The Bible is full of prophecies. There are four Major Prophets: Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel and Daniel, and twelve Minor Prophets.

If you are like me, raised in a traditional Christian Sunday School, you probably were taught that these prophets were making predictions about the problems and crises that would befall the Hebrew people, and which did come to pass.

However, what liberal scholars believe today is that all the “prophecy” in scripture was actually retrospective.

That is, the prophecies were written after, sometimes considerably after, the events they recount took place. They weren’t predictions. They were explanations.

We know this because modern archeology lets us carbon date the ruins and artifacts that have survived, and the rapidly changing language styles of ancient tongues allow us to know approximately when a text was written.

Something bad happened and people were shocked and uncertain.

The prophet would come along and minister to the spiritual needs of the people by coming up with a narrative to explain why the calamity occurred. This was comforting because it provided an explanation. And it explained what could be done to prevent such things in the future.

Think back to when you learned about the fall of the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001. Many you probably were glued to your televisions, astonished and shaken, wondering how such a thing could happen.

At first you could hardly believe it. Such things were not supposed to happen in America. But then leaders, functioning much like the ancient prophets, explained it to you.

You learned about al-Qaeda and Osama bin Laden. You learned about the temperature at which jet fuel burned and steel melted. You learned about the poor security at airports.

Gradually you assembled these into a narrative and you understood what had happened. The Transportation Security Administration came into being, and we all got used to taking our shoes at the airport. This provided a measure of comfort, because we now felt we understood what had happened and what we could do to avoid such things. It worked. There has not been a hijacked aircraft since.

That’s the service the Biblical Prophets provided to the people of their time as well. But the service was explanatory, not clairvoyant.

The Interpretation of the Book

The Book of Revelation is the final book in the New Testament. We have no idea who the author of the Book of Revelation was, as the only thing he calls himself is “John.”

Traditionally, people thought he was the apostle John who knew Jesus of Nazareth, but more recent scholarship casts doubt on that because of the style of writing. These days he’s typically referred to as “John of Patmos,” after the Greek island the Aegean Sea where he said he was living in exile.

From the style of the writing we can date the book to the reign of the Roman Emperor Domitian, who reigned between the years 81 and 96 CE.

If you’ve ever tried to read the Book of Revelation you probably gave up. The book is a jumble of prophecies, symbols, metaphors, including a Seven-Headed Dragon, the Beast, the Antichrist, the Serpent and many others. It is so confusing and vague that one can argue for almost any interpretation.

That said, the book contains some of the most amazing religious imagery ever created. There shall come “A new heaven and a new earth.” “The trumpet shall sound and the dead shall be raised, incorruptible.” The image of a “New Jerusalem” and much more.

Scholars classify the book as an example of “the cosmic combat archetype,” or a primordial battle between order and chaos.

This is an archetypal theme found in religious literature around the globe. We see it in this book, in the battle between Jehovah and someone called The Beast 666. We also see it in the Mesopotamian battle between Marduk and the dragon Taimat from 1000 BCE. We see it in Luke Skywalker taking on Emperor Palpatine in the Star Wars movie. An archetypical theme.

But if you have orthodox or mainstream friends or family, they probably believe the Book of Revelation foretells the end of the world, the final victory of Jehovah, the return of Jesus of Nazareth and the resurrection of the dead.

Here is what they believe will happen.

The Traditional View.

The tale begins with the Time of Signs and Wonders, when things will happen that hint at the coming End of Days. Events are said to unfold with the breaking of seven seals (think of wax seals on an official proclamation).

This is what got my former parishioners so upset. The fake computer was supposedly looking at things that were happening - wars, famines, plagues, which were all supposed to happen during the Time of Signs and Wonders.

Then the seals break.

The breaking of the first seal will result in the rise a white horse, ridden by a man wearing a crown and holding a bow. This first horseman of the Apocalypse is Conquest.

The breaking of the second seal will result in war. The symbol is a red horse made from fire with the rider holding a large sword.

The breaking of the third seal results in Famine. The symbol is a black horse whose rider holds a pair of scales (the way food would be measured).

The breaking of the fourth seal results in Plague, symbolized by a pale horse ridden by Death. There would be a massive die off.

The breaking of the fifth seal results in something called the Tribulation. The world will become a dark place with crime, disorder and lawlessness. Prior to this 144,000 Orthodox Jews will be lifted off the earth, avoiding the Tribulation as their reward. Also will come the Rapture, when a vast number of faithful people will ascend from the earth into heaven and also avoid the Tribulation.

I should note the Rapture is an interpretation of a verse from 1 Thessalonians in the New Testament. It is not explicitly mentioned by name anywhere in the Bible, regardless of what some might tell you.

The breaking of the sixth seal ends the Tribulation. There will be massive destruction including a meteorite impacts, followed by the breaking of the seventh seal which brings with it an immense silence.

Then there will be a series of trumpets. The first six are a wake-up call for sinners to repent. More woes will come. Each trumpet blast brings with it some new calamity.

The final trumpet allows the rise of three beasts. The first beast is a red dragon with seven heads. This is Satan himself. The second beast emerges from the sea and also has seven heads. For some reason people worship it. Then, there arises a third beast from the ground in the shape of a lamb, who announces how wonderful the second beast is. This is the Antichrist. He brands his followers with a mark, the number 666.

Then come seven bowls poured out on the earth, each bringing a new hardship.

There will be a tremendous battle between the forces of the Antichrist and the forces of Jehovah, and it will take place at on a mound in northern Israel called Migiddo, and the battle will be called Armageddon. The sun will turn black, the moon will turn red and the stars will fall to earth. The sky itself will be rolled up and every mountain and island leveled.

Jesus himself then appears. After a thousand year gap, time ends and a new world begins. All people will be living with God in a New Jerusalem.

My Personal View

Let me be transparent here. I do not expect anything in the Book of Revelation to happen because I believe that it already has.

I am one of the Bible scholars who believe that the events recounted in the Book of Revelation were retrospective, just like every other prophecy in the Bible. It was written to explain the persecution experienced by the Christian community in the first century under Emperor Domitian and his predecessors.

The Jesus people didn’t know what to think. Jesus had supposedly triumphed over death and everything was supposed to be better. But it obviously was not. Everywhere they looked they were persecuted. The Emperor Domitian was on the throne in Rome but his predecessor, Nero, persecuted the follows of Jesus without mercy. That was not supposed to happen.

The apostles of Jesus had predicted a time of good will and peace to come in the wake of Jesus. Instead, Rome became yet another example of a dominator culture - there was political oppression, there was economic oppression, there was theological oppression. All good things in the world were being gathered into Rome and distributed to a privileged aristocratic %1. That was not supposed to happen.

Just like in our time, the fall of the World Trade Center was not supposed to happen.

Like prophets everywhere, John wrote to provide a retrospective explanation. His purpose was to offer hope.

To scholars such as myself, the Antichrist was non-other than Nero. In ancient alphabets, letters often were used as numbers (think of Roman Numerals) and if you work out the number for Emperor Nero, it is 666, the same number as the Book of Revelation gives to the Antichrist.” The Seven-Headed Dragon, and the later seven-headed Beast, were nothing other than the Imperial City of Rome itself, with its famous seven hills.

John was proposing Rome’s downfall and what he hoped would be the eventual triumph of the followers of Jesus. He was trying to symbolically explain why things had gone wrong and that the future would be better.

He was mistaken. Rome would continue it’s oppression for another 300 years. Jesus did not return. Things did get better, but not for a long time. But people would cling to the hope of a better tomorrow. I think we can understand that desire with empathy.

So there you have my view. The Book of Revelation was not a prediction. Like prophecy throughout the Bible, it was a retrospective explanation for what had happened, and offered an interpretation that could give hope for the future. That’s no small thing.

Predicted Events

Were you to share my opinion with more orthodox believers they would dismiss it. They would point to things happening around the world now, which they would claim were predicted to happen during the Time of Signs and Wonders. Wars. Rumor of Wars. Fame. Plague.

But there is trick the brain plays on us. Your brain evolved to keep you safe, not to make you happy. One of the ways it keeps you safe is encouraging you to overlook the past in favor of focusing on the possible danger of the future.

Years ago in the cancer care movement there was a popular theory that most people who got cancer had experienced some major loss within two years of diagnosis. There were books written that cancer was really a profound grief response.

However, social scientists realized that that just about everyone has experienced some major loss within any two-year time slice. Loss is just part of life. So, yeah, cancer patients reported such losses, but so did people who did not develop cancer.

That’s the problem with all the popular predictions of an imminent apocalypse. There have always been wars, and rumors of wars. There has always been sickness. There has always been famine. There have always been authoritarian leaders. These things are not unique to our time.

The Apocalypse Is Popular

So, there really isn’t anything to the belief in the End of Days. But we get hooked.

A year doesn’t go by when I do not encounter some religious movement or preacher announcing the the Apocalypse is coming and we need to “get right with God” by giving them money and doing what they say.

There have literally been hundreds of end-time declarations - Christian and otherwise.

Remember the Harmonic Convergence? How on December 12, 2012 the Mayan Calendar was supposed to run out of dates and for some reason that was important?

There were people everywhere predicting that the equator would realign, the poles would switch, a rogue planet would crash into the earth or a massive solar flare would happen. Remember? I do. I was a parish minister at the time and there were people who showed up at church to wave crystals, burn sage and pray. Nothing happened.

Ever hear about the Millerites, followers of William Miller who declared the Apocalypse would happen in 1843? It didn’t, and his followers declared what they called “The Great Disappointment,” and founded the Seventh Day Adventist Church. Something similar happened with the Church of Jehovah’s Witnesses. Even Billy Graham thought the End Times were close. You do not have to look hard to find these folks. You probably have them in your own family.

The Hold On The Mind

On this Memorial Day when we remember those we’ve loved and lost, especially those who died in service to making this world better, choosing to risk their lives. Let’s all resolve to take care of the world they, and others, protected. And let us honor John of Patmos, mistaken though he was. He was upset about oppression in the world of his time. We should be too. However, we should try to do something about it. Not wait passively for the trumpets to sound, or someone else to solve our problems.

Remember that. Especially in times like these. And that’s my sermon.

Was The Tomb Empty?

Was The Tomb Empty?

An Eastertide Service to Countryside Church, Unitarian Universalist

March 31, 2024

The Rev. Dr. C. Scot Giles

Although we Unitarian Universalists came out of the Judeo-Christian tradition and are arguably very much a part of it, our ministers are sometimes unsure what to say about the mainstream Easter stories involving betrayal, torture, suffering and death. So a lot of my colleague will gloss over that by talking about the Springtime themes of flowers, bunny rabbits and the cycles of nature.

I like all of those things too…but I am not a flowers and bunny rabbit sort of person, at least in my sermons. So this morning I will be speaking about the Jesus stories, in my usual heretical way.

Eastertide

It was said that a married couple, who didn’t really like each other, in fact they pretty much hated each other, went on a vacation to the Holy Land. While there, the husband died.

The widow had a choice of shipping his body home or, for considerably less money, having him buried right there in the Holy Land. Despite the extra cost, she had him shipped home even though they had no family to attend a funeral in any case. Her reason? She’d heard that some people who were buried in the Holy Land didn’t stay dead. And she didn’t want to take the chance.

More seriously, for most Christian believers, Easter Morning is the date around which their religion pivots. It is the date when reportedly a lay-rabbi named Yeshua ben Joseph of Nazareth, more commonly known today as Jesus of Nazareth, was said to have risen from the dead, and emerged from his tomb on Easter morning.

His empty tomb was said to have been seen by six women:

Joanna, the wife of Chuza an official in Herod’s court;

Mary Magdalene, a Galilean follower of Jesus, who was from the town of Magdala;

Mary, his mother and the widow of Joseph of Nazareth;

Mary, the mother of James the Younger;

Mary, the wife of Clopas, who some say was a relative of Jesus; and

Salome, the mother of the apostles John and James, a Galilean.

Writers of the time, such as Flavius Josephus, a famous Roman historian, argued that the whole account of the resurrection should be dismissed because it was only witnessed by women. These particular women, he believed were known for “the levity and boldness of their sex.” In other words, he thought they were probably making a joke.

Modern believers reverse this argument, saying that if the resurrection was a fabrication, the plotters behind it would never have allowed only women to be the witnesses. Because, at that time, no one took what women said seriously. If the followers of Jesus were pulling a fast one, they would have used men.

I mean, if one were going to tell a Big Lie, you’d try to do a better job.

To this day, believers in the divinity of Jesus gather on Easter Morning at sunrise to re-enact going to Jesus’s tomb, and finding it empty. This is important because one of the central promises of traditional Christianity is the claim that death could be overcome and that our end is not final.

As it was written in 1 Corinthians 15:14, “If Christ has not been raised, then our preaching is in vain and your faith is in vain.”

Over the many years since the first Easter Morning, believers have formulated argument after argument trying to convince a skeptical public that the resurrection happened and that the promise of their faith is real.

When I was a student there was an amazing and charismatic preacher on the West Coast named the Rev. Gene Scott. He was quite a colorful figure. He built a huge church by doing almost nothing except fundraising on television. I used to watch his late-night broadcasts, which he called “festivals,” where he would angrily demand his follows donate lots and lots of money. He was fond of silly hats and always wore one while fundraising.

He married a porn star forty years his junior, lived a lavish lifestyle complete with classic cars and thoroughbred horses. Clearly, he was a popular nut. But he did preach a sermon on the Resurrection of Jesus that became famous. It listed all the arguments for believing that Jesus rose from the dead at Easter.

Rev. Scott tried to debunk a lot of the claims made by people who didn’t believe that.

One of these was the claim that the women just had a poor sense of direction and went to the wrong tomb.

Another was that Joseph of Arimathea, a follower, stole the body of Jesus to give the early Christian Church a boost.

A third was that Jesus didn’t actually die on the cross but was simply unconscious. In fact, Rev. Scott argued that in any court of law, the testimony contained in the New Testament would be adequate for a fair judge to rule that the Resurrection had happened.

The problem is that serious scholars of religion know that it almost certainly did not.

Why The Story Is Suspect

First, it is simply not the case that Jesus of Nazareth was a unique religious figure who died and was claimed to come back to life. A few years ago in a different sermon I actually listed a number of them, from the Babylonian god Tammuz to the Egyptian Osiris; from the Buddhist Bodhidharma to the Hindu god Ram, who has recently been in the news because the government of India has just put up a huge temple to him.

In the history of religious anthropology there are more than a hundred stories about dying and resurrected gods. It’s actually a common theme. Devoted followers of religious leaders often say such things, because in bereavement the mind wants to put people back where it thinks they belong.

In recent times there are people who claim that Amy Carlson, the leader of a cult called Love Has Won, was resurrected after her death in 2021 and now runs her organization from a hidden fifth dimension.

There were some followers of the modern ultra-orthodox Chabad Rebbe Menchem Schneerson who held that he was the Messiah, and hoped he would defeat death. That didn’t happen, but who knows where that story will be in five hundred years. His grave is already a site of pilgrimage.

Second, there are huge holes in the biblical account of the Crucifixion contained in the New Testament that believers simply gloss over.

We know from abundant historical material that under the laws of the time, people who were crucified were allowed to rot on their crosses as a warning to others. That’s not unique. Dead bodies have been allowed to decompose on stakes, crosses and gallows for centuries, right up to the present day in some places.

If Jesus of Nazareth was crucified (and I suspect he was) his body would not have been taken down from the cross and laid in a tomb. If anyone had tried to do that they would have ended up on crosses of their own, curtesy of the Roman soldiers who were standing right there. If you were crucified you never came down from your cross. If you owned a tomb, it would be empty, because you would not have been allowed to fill it.

If you know someone who claims to believe every word of the bible, and I’ve met many such people, you will also probably discover that they never actually read the bible in any sort of disciplined way. Because it is full of historical contradictions.

The nativity stories in the Gospels of Mathew and Luke cannot be reconciled. As far as the crucifixion goes the Gospel of Mark says he was crucified at the third hour on the day of Passover (Mark 14:12, 15:25). But the Gospel of John says it was the day before Passover at the sixth hour (John 19:14-160. In the Gospels of Matthew, Mark and Luke, Jesus is said to have refused to drink while on the cross (Mark 15:23, Matthew 27:48, Luke 23:36) while the Gospel of John says that he does drink (John 19:29-30).

The Apostle Paul, who never met the living Jesus, claims in a New Testament letter (1 Cor 15:6) that the resurrected Jesus was seen by over 500 people, but the Gospels themselves make no such claim, nor is there any historical corroboration for such a phenomena. And on and on.

The Gospels are Literary Creations

It is now generally accepted that the Gospels, as we have them, were written long after the life of Jesus of Nazareth, at a time when women were gaining more rights in society, that that’s probably why the story has women going to the tomb.

As the language of the time kept changing, we know the Gospel of Mark was written first because it is in the oldest version Greek. The Gospels of Matthew and Luke quote it, but were written far later for they are in a more recent version of Greek.

The Gospels were not written at the same time as the life of Jesus.

I Love The Bible

But don’t get me wrong. I love the Bible and know it well. I am inspired by what Jesus taught as I understand it, and despise what the institutional church has done to his ideas. The mistake a lot of people in our time make is that they think what is in the Bible is history, or at least an attempt at it. It’s not.

Actually, the Bible is a collection of books, and the books are of many different sorts.

There are some attempts at history, the Book of Numbers is basically a census. But the Book of Genesis is mythology. The Book of Leviticus is a volume of laws. The Psalms are a hymnal. The Proverbs are wisdom sayings while the Song of Song is erotic poetry.

When we get to the New Testament what we have in the Gospels is spiritual biography, not history.

Spiritual biography is when you tell the story of some person with an editorial slant intending to emphasize a spiritual theme. Sometimes that requires bending the truth a bit, or glossing over embarrassing narrative problems - such as when in the his spiritual biography, Confessions, we read that St. Augustine prayed, “(God) grant me chastity…, but not yet.” Hardly a holy saying, and so no one talks about it. It is seldom mentioned even in Roman Catholic seminaries.

Spiritual biography is written to illustrate something, not to create a historical record. That’s what the Gospels are. It wasn’t important to the writers that some things were left out, or that the storylines do not agree. Because that wasn’t the point. They are attempts at storytelling in order to make clear what Jesus believed and taught. They were intended to be illustrative, not historical.

Sure the stories were elaborated and embellished. What story isn’t over time?

That happens to all stories if they are told enough. Abraham Lincoln didn’t actually grow up in a log cabin. George Washington didn’t chop down a cherry tree and he didn’t stand up in the boat at Valley Forge because if he had it would have capsized. Stories are always elaborated with the telling. That is the nature of stories. As every gossip in High School knows.

The Transient and Permanent in Christianity

In 1841 the person who was probably the greatest American Unitarian minister who has ever lived, the Rev. Theodore Parker, delivered a sermon at the ordination of a colleague in Boston. The sermon was titled,“A Discourse on the Transient and Permanent in Christianity,” and it became famous. Students preparing for the Unitarian Universalist ministry study it to this day.

In this sermon Parker argued that what was temporary in the Christian story was the traditions and legends that had grown up around Jesus of Nazareth.

Stories of a miraculous birth, or a star that moved across the sky in violation of all known laws of physics, and yes, the story of a literal resurrection were not, in Parker’s view, important. They were transient, temporary. Because, tomorrow we could learn of an authentic document hidden away in the secret archives of the Vatican where some lost apostle confesses he’d made the whole thing up. If ideas can be discredited that easily, they are not permanent ideas.

What was important about the prophet Jesus was none of those things. Nor was church doctrine, tradition, creeds or rules important.

The permanent in the Christian movement was the essence of what Jesus taught.

And what Parker believed Jesus taught was the possibility of a direct relationship between the individual and a higher power, whatever a person believed that higher power to be.

That was a radical idea in it’s time and it directly challenged the Roman state religion which said that all transactions with a spiritual power went through the Emperor.

It directly challenged the Hebrew state religion which said that all transactions with a holy power went through a hereditary priesthood.

You did not, in the ancient world, try to relate to what you thought was sacred and special on your own. Instead you were supposed to believe what you were told by authorities. Jesus taught the opposite.

Parker believed the Jesus stories taught the value of fairness, and “government of all the people, by all the people, for all the people,” an idea from Jesus that was later quoted by Abraham Lincoln in the Gettysburg Address.

Parker believed that Jesus spoke of an ethical power that would change society, saying that the arc of fate “bends toward justice.” Words that would later be quoted by the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King and former President Barack Obama.

Ideas such as these, Parker believed, were what was permanent in the story of Jesus. And he said he tried to follow the religion of Jesus, not the religion about him - a distinction lost today.

The Work of Marcus J. Borg

In 1994 distinguished professor of religion, Marcus Borg, published a book titled Meeting Jesus Again For The First Time. Professor Borg, who died in 2015, was a New Testament scholar and a Fellow of the Jesus Seminar, one of the foremost groups of religious scholars in modern times.

The thought of Dr. Borg about the life and ministry of Jesus has been both persuasive and influential to me, and if you are finding my reflections today of interest I recommend his book to you.

Basically, using the scholarly apparatus of modern textual analysis, Borg argues that there are two Jesus figures that people have in their minds.

The first he calls the Pre-Easter Jesus. This was the fellow I mentioned at the beginning of this sermon, a lay-rabbi named Yeshua ben Joseph of Nazareth. Very likely this was a historical figure. Very likely he was highly charismatic and created an important following among the Roman-occupied Hebrew people. Very likely he got into trouble because of his radical beliefs which challenged the corrupt government of his people, and they in their turn collided with the Romans to have him silenced.

He could well have been crucified, and if so his tomb, if he had one, was empty on the first Easter morning because people who were crucified stayed on their crosses as warnings to others. The tomb was empty because it had never been occupied.

But then there is the Post-Easter Jesus, commonly called the Christ, which is not actually a name at all. It is a Greek word for the phrase “Chosen One.”

This Jesus, Borg argued, never actually lived at all. This image of a symbolic Christ was actually a literary creation of the early church. Probably loosely based on what was remembered about Jesus of Nazareth, but elaborated to illustrate the ideas his followers had come to hold as they developed and extended the ideas of that deceased lay rabbi.

The followers apparently worked from collections of “The Sayings of Jesus” or a list of remembered precepts, parables and ideas. One such list has survived. It didn’t get into the New Testament but a copy, somewhat misnamed as The Gospel of Thomas, was found in the hidden library of the Dead Sea Scrolls in 1945 CE. It’s not a gospel at all. It’s just a list of sayings: “And Jesus said….,” “And Jesus said…..” “And Jesus said…”

Over time the Sayings of Jesus, and the later ideas of his followers were assembled into spiritual biographies intended to make the ideas more memorable. But they were never intended as history. They are teaching tales. No more historical than the story of George Washington and a Cherry Tree or of Johnny Appleseed, or Davy Crocket being “The King of the Wild Frontier."

So, was the tomb empty on Easter morning? Of course it was, if it even existed, because no one was ever placed there. But there was a kind of Resurrection that happened. That was a literary resurrection as the ideas of Jesus were writ large and elaborated by his followers into impressive tales that would be remembered for thousands of years.

I cherish that, because death will come to us all. But perhaps the hidden meaning reflected in the empty tomb of Easter morning is that the good we did during our lives can survive us in our reputation, and in the influence we had on others.

We may not rise from our tomb at the so-called End of Days. But we may have an influence on others if we strive to live our lives as caring and compassionate people, in touch with whatever Higher Power we claim. If so, the space we have come to occupy in time will not be empty. It will be full of the good we have created.

And that’s my sermon.

Why Conspiracy Theories?

Why Conspiracy Theories?

A Sermon to Countryside Church, Unitarian Universalist

January 28, 2024 for Community Ministry Sunday

The Rev. Dr. C. Scot Giles

I find conspiracy theories entertaining. You shouldn’t take them too seriously, but entertaining the idea of some completely different explanation for events is sort of fun.

But these things do sort of nag at the brain. That’s why by the time I’m finished with this sermon this morning, some of you will be worried. And that’s a good thing.

What’s showing here is my training as a philosopher (my first two degrees are in philosophy - pray for me).

Philosophers routinely run thought experiments to look for unexpected ideas and nuances. So we’re always asking if there is a different way to consider something, or if there might be some other explanation that accounts for what has transpired.

Perhaps like me you were a fan of the show The X-Files created by Chris Carter, and which aired over eleven seasons from 1993 to 2016. Some of the slogans from the show because memes: “The truth is out there;” “Trust no one;” “I want to believe.”

The plot of the series was that what people believed to be true about history was fake. Kennedy was assassinated by Men In Black. Aliens from outer space invaded long ago and control people all the time. Magic is real. The world is actually governed by a hidden shadow government.

The writers actually had more fun putting that show together than it ought to be legal to have, because they hit pretty much all the conspiracy theories that were common at the time.

Yet is gives me pause to realize that the theme from the show - that the country is actually run by a secret cabal; that there are aliens among us with their own agenda, and that the government is keeping all that secret, is not too different from what a lot of people believe in contemporary politics.

The Air Force keeps reassuring lawmakers in Washington that there is not in fact a secret fleet of crashed alien spacecraft stored at Area 51 in the Nevada dessert. The problem they keep having is that a lot of lawmakers do not believe them, preferring to believe that there is a military conspiracy to hide the truth.

The Deep State. A hidden base at Area 51. A worldwide network developing age-reversing drugs by torturing children. An unlikely messiah who will put it all to rights using a secret army - all of this can actually be found in contemporary politics right now.

Why do people keep creating farfetched tales that others are in control? Such things are corrosive to the love and connection that is supposed to tie us together. I will try to explain that, and how a loving and generous spirit can be a remedy.

What Are Conspiracy Theories

Conspiracy Theories are claims that deny the consensus opinion of events. Things are said to be different from how they appear.

Conspiracy Theories are not falsifiable. That it, it’s not possible to disprove them, because they employ what philosophers of Science call Grande Theory. That is, they are circular and keep referring back to themselves.

An example would be the claim that a secret corporation controls all of the media, and so attempts to expose their manipulations cannot happen because the secret corporation controls the media one would have to use to expose them.

There are lot of Conspiracy Theories, both great and small.

Black helicopters was a theory that was popular during my boyhood. It was a creation of a political group called the John Birch Society and predicted an attempt by the United Nations to take over the world. It comes back every so often.

There is the classic (and completely fake) book titled the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, proven a forgery created in Imperial Russian in 1903. It tells of a supposed international Jewish conspiracy to dominate the world. Hitler was fond of it. Neo-Nazi websites give away free copies in electronic format. You can download a copy this morning if you know where to look.

Then there are the claims about chemtrails. Those linear clouds you see in the sky caused by water vapor from jet engines, are really are chemical or biological agents released under a secret government policy and make people into unquestioning sheep.

When I was serving the First Universalist Church of Southold, Long Island, there were people in the congregation who sincerely believed that there was a governmental installation called the HAARP (which stood for High-frequency Active Auroral Research) at Brookhaven National Labortory that used electromagnetic energy to make people believe what the government wanted.

They had plans to make devices called Holy Hand Grenades that you could throw at cell-phone towers to block the evil governmental signals. The plans to make those things can still be found all over the internet, and these days you can order them ready-made from Etsy. They are not explosive. They are said to work by means of “etheric vibrations” - whatever that is.

And on, and on, and on. The current Q-Anon Conspiracy Theory is only the latest instantiation of the human tendency to entertain conspiracy theories, and is recycling a list of old conspiracies in modern dress - from anti-Semitic blood liable to the claim that the world economy is being manipulated by Hungarian-American investor George Soros. Not to mention satanic pizza parlors.

And those are just some of the big ones. There are lots of little conspiracy theories too.

In fact, religious congregations are hotbeds of such things, and I don’t mean just about political causes.

“Did you hear what the Board decided at a secret meeting they had last month!”

“I hear the Finance Committee has a plot to make everyone give more! They have found a way to take money directly from your bank account”

“If you knew what they are really teaching our children in that church school you’d object!”

Let me say clear, I just made those up. But that sort of rumor mongering is so common in congregations that I bet church leaders in this congregation today were clenching their abdominal muscles when I said all that. They know that in every congregation there are always some people dumb enough to believe that sort of thing. And who will continue to think it might be true, even though I just said I made the whole thing up.

But of course I’m a minister. So naturally I’d say that. But you know…”where there’s smoke. There’s fire.”

Let me repeat. I made all of those things up. There is no truth to any of them. But the ideas nag at you don’t they? And there is a reason for that.

The Negative Brain

One of my baseline principles in my professional work is to remind people that your brain evolved to keep you safe, not to make you happy. The way your brain tries to keep you safe is to exaggerate anything that might be a threat. Because that will make you cautious and cautious creatures survive better than those that are not cautious.

Conspiracy Theories play directly into this biological trait we all have.

If you encounter an idea that sounds threatening, deep structures in your brain that are part of your information processing system activate, just in case the idea is correct and a danger is approaching. It is far better for your evolutionary prospects to make any mistake in the direction of over-reacting than in the direction of under-reaction.

The trouble is that, in our interconnected and unfiltered world, this is no longer true.

As far as we can tell by examining skeletal remains, the human body has not evolved much since the Late Stone Age when we harnessed fire and invented clothing. Therefore, our brain structures evolved to help us with the social complexities of a Neolithic tribal campsite.

Our cognitive mechanisms are now being overwhelmed by inputs from cable television, the internet, streaming videos, the 24-hour news cycle where every bad or worrisome thing is punched up to encourage clicks, ratings, likes, or social engagement.

What has happened is that we have lost the ability to effectively filter signal from noise. We no longer can easily determine what is valid from what is manipulative clamor, intended to grab our attention but which lacks real meaning.

That’s what Conspiracy Theories are. Clamor.

They are popular because they grab our attention because that is how the brain is wired. The witch hysteria, claims of plots by Freemasons, Stolen Elections for which no evidence can be found. Voting machines influenced by the family of the late Hugo Chavez, and on and on.

There Is More

But wait. There’s more. Yes, Conspiracy Theories get a lot of their power because they unintentionally trigger the brain’s arousal mechanism. But they do something else, even more worrisome.

We live in a time of high social anxiety. Much of that results from the overstimulation our society inputs into our nervous systems. I suspect some of it results from our technology outpacing our emotional and psychological ability to cope with the stress of our civilization.

When you visit a mental health professional and they administer any of the standard psychological tests, those tests are usually sent to centralized computer scoring services. Because of that it is possible to de-identify the data and extract what is called “meta-data” from the mass of information submitted. This data tells us what is happening in the psychology of the population in general.

People are far, far more anxious today than they used to be. If you don’t believe me, talk to your kids.

Back in my day when I was a young man we were all worried about a nuclear war but took comfort from the claim that a professional and trained military were on the job.

We did worry anyway, but we did not have to worry we would be shot by a random person while at school, or while attending a concert. We did not have to worry that our food was full of microplastics. Yeah, there were drugs, but they were no where near as powerful as what is on the street now. Sex couldn’t make you sick for life like it can now.

We knew that higher education always paid off. Well, people today are not sure. Back then we knew that a hospital stay might cost you a couple of week’s pay, but it would not create debt that would wipe you out. There used to be serious job security and a meaningful social safety net. Talk to your kids. They don’t see those things anymore.

The result is that people live with a toxic baseline of worry in a way people have not lived with before. Conspiracy Theories help people cope.

Alan Moore

There is a 70ish year old graphic artist in Great Britain by the name of Alan Moore. He’s a colorful and interesting guy. You may never have heard of him but he is the creator of the stores Watchman, V for Vendetta, Swamp Thing, and The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen.

Conspiracy Theories play a role in his graphic fiction so Moore has done some serious thinking about the hold such things have on the human mind. He has come up with an idea that I believe is spot on.

One of the reasons why people are attracted to Conspiracy Theories is that they lower anxiety.

That may seem counter-intuitive. How could an idea that there are secret plotters running the world do anything except may us more worried! Moore’s point is that they do the opposite.

You see, if you believe in a Conspiracy Theory, by definition, you believe that someone has a plan. You may not like the plan you think someone has, but the essence of a Conspiracy Theory is that someone is in charge. They have a plan. There is an order to things, and life is unfolding according to a program run by powerbrokers.

Believing that lowers your anxiety. There is not chaos. There is order. The secret cabal in charge as a plan.

The reality, argues Alan Moore, is actually much more frightening than a secret cabal with a plan. The reality is that actually no one is in charge. No one actually has a plan. Things are just happening. That is infinitely more stressful than believing in a Conspiracy.

Therefore, people will adopt the most absurd ideas, the most outrageous chicanery, because that makes the world seem less stressful.

Such theories are dangerous. At the risk of sounding like a Conspiracy Theorist myself, there are political operatives who think that fostering Conspiracy Theories is helpful because the keep people distracted. Distracted people don’t notice what is really going down. While there may not in fact be anyone in charge, and there may not be a plan, there are people who are happy to take advantage of you if you’re not careful.

Anyone who has gotten burned because they didn’t read the fine print can tell you all about that.

The Four Loves

In 1960 a well-known writer by the name of C. S. Lewis published a book called The Four Loves. Some of you may be familiar with Lewis’s work as he is also the author of the popular young adult novels called The Chronicles of Narnia, the best known story of which is The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe.

In this book, drawn from a series of radio talks he gave in 1958, Lewis pointed out that in classical times people recognized that there was more than one word for love. In fact, he argued, that in scripture, there were four different sorts of love and they are marked by four different Greek words. When the New Testament was translated from its original Greek into Latin (and then German and later English) the distinction was lost. His point was that we need it back.

Lewis was writing for a popular audience and so he used English names for the four loves: Affection, Friendship, Eros and Charity. In this sermon I return to the original Greek words because that makes me sound more intelligent.

The first sort of love Lewis identified goes by the Greek name Storge. This is the sort of love one feels when there is an empathy bond. It is the sort of thing a parent may feel for a child or a child for a parent. It is what siblings might feel for each other. It is also what might unite a military unit that works as a team, or a group of physicians in a trauma center. It arises naturally among those who have found themselves bonded together by circumstance.

The second sort of love goes by the Greek name Philia. This is the sort of love you feel toward people who are like you. It’s friendship. Lewis argued this was one of the highest forms of love as it is not based on biology, need or activities. It’s the love you feel for someone you might call your Best Friend, even if they are quite different from you.

The third form of love is called Eros in Greek, and we take our modern word “erotic” from it.

Yes, it denotes that sort of connection that makes adult videos possible - a purely physical attraction. However, Lewis means far more by it than that.

Eros is the basis of romantic love between people. It is also the basis of love of an artist for their creation and a professional for their work (which is why some professions are said to be “callings”). It can have a very dark side too, and some people in its grip will stay together when they would be better off apart. It is one of the most powerful forms of love.

The final form of love takes the Greek word Agape. This is the attachment one might feel for another that is independent of friendship, attraction or blood connection. It’s what you feel toward the suffering homeless person, the orphan, the person displaced by war. It’s the love you feel for someone when there is nothing that is coming back to you for feeling it.

The form of love called Agape is more an act of will than of feeling. It would be easier to look the other way when you see someone in need that you do not know. You have to will yourself to pay attention to that person. It is a decision to think better of someone than external circumstances might suggest.

Agape is an effort of will. You have to decide to respond to it rather than look the other way. Agape is the key to breaking the biologically determined hold on your mind that comes along with conspiratorial thoughts.

As columnist David Brooks said recently in the New York Times:

“I’d argue that we have become so sad, lonely, angry and mean as a society in part because so many people have not been taught or don’t bother practicing to enter sympathetically into the minds of their fellow human beings.”

What he means by that is we take the easy way out of our worries and complexities. It is easier to blame than to give someone a break that doesn’t pay a benefit toward oneself.

Because Conspiracy Theories quickly attract our attention they provide an excuse dismiss other people who have an opinion that is different from our own.

“Well, they’re in the grip of a dumb Conspiracy Theory and therefore we can just laugh at them because they can’t have anything important to say.” Or, we buy into a Conspiracy Theory of our own and don’t take seriously that someone else may be sincere in their disagreement with us

The ancient Greek philosopher Epictetus observed that if you put a piece of lit charcoal next to an unlit piece, one of two things will happen. Either one will ignite the other or one will extinguish the other. He believed we have better lives and a better society if we try to be like the piece that shares it’s energy.

To do that you have to be willing to try. To regard the other person with Agape. You hear them out. You think about what stress they are under that is driving what they say. You don’t just walk away. You try to stay engaged.

This may work and things might improve. You may convince them. They may convince you or, more likely, you agree to disagree, but without anger or disrespect.

In this election year, and in this society, where Conspiracy Theories are everywhere. It will take an effort of will by each of us to not fall for the con. To ignore the biological alarm, or the false sense of order conspiracy theories provide. Instead, we need to respect people who may differ from us profoundly. For only then can we set them alight with Agape. I suspect this is the only way forward.

And that’s my sermon.

Why You Never Get Caught Up

Why You Never Get Caught Up

A Sermon to Countryside Church, Unitarian Universalist

September 3, 2023, Labor Day Sunday

The Rev. Dr. C. Scot Giles

The World Is Too Much With Us

Work never seems to end does it? As the poet Wordsworth put it, “The world is too much with us; late and soon. Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers…”

He wrote that sonnet back in 1802 and what he was protesting was the First Industrial Revolution as society moved from being based on agriculture to being based on industry. He believed that the uptick in technology and the focus on structured labor had destroyed something important in the human spirit.

And I think he was correct. There is a huge dark side to technology and what our culture of work is doing to us all. The cause is straightforward and simple. Your task list can be infinite, but your calendar is not. All of us have more that we think we should do, then in fact, we will never have time to do.

Smart people figure that out.

Perhaps you have heard of a medical condition called Karoshi? It is a Japanese term for a condition officially recognized in Asia and it translates as “death by overwork.” Typically, it manifests among people who work an insane amount. Sometimes the deaths are due to heart attacks or strokes, there have been a few cases caused by malnourishment in victims who worked so much all they ate was junk food.

In a lot of cases no cause can be found. On autopsy the body is found to be normal. Apparently the sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous systems got out of sync due to psychological stress and the heart just stopped. According to the World Health Organization there were 745,194 deaths due to Karoshi in 2016 alone.

First described in Asia in 1969 after the stroke-related death of a 29 year old man who worked from Japan’s largest newspaper, we started seeing Karoshi world-wide in 2013, after worker stress hit all-time highs due to forced resignation, layoffs, bullying and increased workloads due to recession. And it’s here too. According to authorities, workplace stress now ranks as the fifth leading cause of death in America, Think about that this Labor Day.

In the entire history of our species human beings have never worked as much as we do now. As far as can be determined our bodies stopped evolving in the Late Stone Age when we harnessed fire and developed clothing. So our bodies are evolved to cope with the stress of a Neolithic campsite, where the biggest worry was the availability of game, roots and berries. But our social systems have continued to evolve and become ever more complex, so that we expose our bodies to stressors they were never evolved to handle.

There is a reality that if your boss ever tells you to “have a good day,” the best way to do that may be to immediately go home.

Works Righteousness

Yet somehow we feel we should be able to keep up with all the tasks and responsibilities we are expected to do. I’ve noticed that when a client begins to tell me about limits and boundaries they are setting in their lives to keep themselves healthy they are always apologetic. They never proudly say that it’s a sign of good character and personal strength that they limit the amount of work they do. It’s always the other way around. They feel sheepish and seem to expect me to object.

But I don’t object. I understand the thought expressed by Robert Frost in his poem, “Provide, Provide.” Everyone knows they need to look out for themselves and working hard is the way we’ve been encouraged to do that. The problem is that we seem to be required to do too much of it these days.

I think I know where this inner drive to over-function comes from. You might think it comes from corporations and employers, and they do benefit and encourage it. But actually, the inner drive to over-function to the point of self-destruction comes from the church. That’s right. The church. Us. Or, at least our spiritual ancestors.

In Protestant Christianity, which has formed the philosophy for a lot of American Culture, there is a theme that comes out of the theology of John Calvin.

Calvin was a French theologian who died in 1564. He developed most of what has come to be called Puritanism, and the people who came to American in 1620 and settled at Plymouth were his followers. Therefore, his thinking was infused into American culture very early and regretfully, hangs on.

An important part of Calvinist thought was something called the “Puritan Work Ethic.” That is, the belief that diligence, self-reliance, self-discipline and frugality were the signs of a good person.

Not surprisingly, the clergy preached that these qualities of being a good person, resulted from the religious practice of Protestantism. Every job was to be treated as a divine calling, and the path to a good life was discernible through study of scripture and other important things - such as the preaching of Calvinist clergy who urged everyone to work harder.

There was a famous American writer named Horatio Alger who wrote more than 100 books that were serialized in the popular press all over America in the years around 1870.

I’m sorry to say the Alger was in fact a failed Unitarian minster. As an alternative he set himself up to write motivational books. Abandoning Unitarian theology he embraced the popular Calvinism, and his books all center on a young boy from poverty who was able to elevate himself to a respectable lifestyle through - you guess it - hard work, diligence, self-reliance and frugality.

Inspired by Alger people of means began to claim that the reason other people were poor is they lacked character and discipline, and the solution to poverty wasn’t economic, educational, class or political reform, but the values of Calvinism.

If you were poor you were lazy. If you were a person of substance it was because of your good character. These ideas still inform politics today and if you listen for them you will hear them in political speeches.

This view has been enormously influential in the development of American Culture, for both good and ill. As a recent example. give a listen to the song “Rich Men North of Richmond,” by songwriter and performer Oliver Anthony. It has recently gone viral and become almost an anthem for people who feel betrayed by the way of thinking promoted by the good Reverend Calvin. I’ve heard it called “Everyman’s Anthem.”

If you have not heard the song, check it out. You will find it on YouTube and lots of other places.

Here are some of the lyrics:

“I've been sellin' my soul, workin' all day

Overtime hours for bullshit pay…

It's a damn shame what the world's gotten to

For people like me and people like you…

Lord, we got folks in the street, ain't got nothin' to eat…

Wish I could just wake up and it not be true

But it is, oh, it is.”

The songwriter believes that people have bought into a con job. And that con job is that if you just work harder, just apply yourself more, there will be a payoff. The song and it’s viral popularity tells us that a lot people think that payoff has been too long delayed.

More enlightened theologians than John Calvin (and let me drop a foot note here to say the Unitarian Universalism developed, in part, as a reaction to, and rejection of, Calvin’s theology), have taken a different line. In fact, they have given a name to Calvin’s way of thinking, calling it “works righteousness.” That is the mistaken belief that simply doing a lot of work will somehow make you better in a spiritual sense.

It won’t. That’s a myth. And hard work will not necessarily bring you material success either.

To be fair, Calvin himself didn’t believe that good works alone were sufficient for a person to be pleasing to God, but that is how his ideas were absorbed into popular culture. Want to get ahead? Work hard. Not able to get ahead? You need to work harder. The songwriter says that’s nonsense, and regretfully, I think he is right.

The Body Sets A Limit

I don’t know about you, but the idea that I can solve many of my problems by just working more has staying power. I grew up in the Protestant Work Ethic, and in fact I do work hard. And it has mostly paid off for me. But I also own my own business and therefore can set limits to keep things humane for myself that others can’t, because they are working for someone else.

All to many employers have ceased to care about the welfare of the people they employ. I originally came out of the culinary industry, and that’s a workforce plagued by demands for uncompensated overtime and wage theft by employers. It’s an industry where Minimum Wage is often regarded as an aspirational goal, not as something the restaurant owners intend to pay.

I’m no fan of the politics of Henry Ford, the guy who first developed the assembly line, but he paid his people well. When asked why he was paying so much above market rates he said “I have to pay my employees that much. Otherwise they can’t afford to buy my cars!” The Ford Company was, in Henry Ford’s day, a good place to work. But too many employers and corporations try to take advantage instead.

A recent study from Deloitte found that three fourths of all companies report they are dealing with errors and efficiency issues from overwhelmed employees. Workers in those companies are realizing they could work 24/7/365 and still not be caught up.

In healthcare, an industry I know well, I’ve seen this dramatically. It used to be people went into healthcare because they wanted to be healers. Most physicians owned their own practices and most hospitals were run by physicians.

Not any more. Everything is owned by medical corporations or private equity firms and they care only about profit. Medical professionals are leaving the field in droves because they are not allowed to do the work love to do. Instead, they find they are more like salespeople, pressured to upsell by ordering unnecessary tests and making referrals.

The reason physicians are leaving medicine is because they are required to spend most of their time doing something other than medicine - paperwork, pre-approval claims and looking at a computer screen instead of at a patient.

Oh…and congregation…note to self. This is the same reason why parish ministers are everywhere leaving parish ministry. Because instead of doing ministry they are required to spend most of their time on administration and marketing. If you want to know what happens when they get fed up with that; look at me. Because that’s why I left parish ministry.

So what do we see? A massive increase in every disease category that has a behavioral component. The abuse of food, alcohol and drugs are sky-rocketing as overworked people try to numb themselves to the pain they are in. Stress related diseases - of which Karoshi is only one example - are also increasing. Our bodies cannot handle the stress of our culture, and it shows.

Now, as someone who is in a stress management profession I know that all this is really good for my business; but it’s not good for people.

Somehow, somewhere I believe we need to stop working ourselves to death, and to put John Calvin’s notion that hard work makes you a good person in the grave - right along with John Calvin.

Our culture of trying to catch up with an ever escalating set of tasks and responsibilities isn’t just unwise. It’s a spiritual corruption, because self-destruction is never spiritual.

The Myth of Someday

This gets me to the Myth of Someday. You know that myth. It’s that belief that there will come a time - someday - when you are all caught up. When your bills are all paid off. Then, you’ll have time to take care of yourself. That’s when you will have “me” time and when you can focus on your family, Significant Others and friends. There will come a “tomorrow” when things will get better.

The hallmark of this is when you hear a person start to play the game of “if only.”

If only I had an extra hour in the day. If only I had an extra day in the week. If only I had an extra week in the month - then! I would be caught up.

And that is all B.S.

Because that’s not how things are structured for most of us. For most, the people in charge will keep the workflow pipeline full. And as fast as you complete one thing and it moves out of the pipeline, they’re loading something else in.

The rub is the workflow pipeline will never be empty for most of us. There will never come a “someday” when everything is caught up and you can take care of yourself then. We need to stop buying the Calvinist con.

The workflow pipeline will never be empty until you retire, if you retire, and even then, a lot of people find that it has a way of staying full.

Therefore, the wise give up on the Myth of Someday. Instead, they realize that trying to work your way out of overwork makes as much sense as trying to borrow your way out of debt. It can’t be done. Instead, you have to find a way to be happy, healthy and functional in the midst of our responsibilities.

In my life I have a To Do list. I also have a Do Not Do list. That’s where I put all the things people ask me to do that I really don’t think are relevant to my happiness. Every month, on the last day of the month, I go through that list and cross off most of those things. Because mostly, they never were really worth my time, and at least once a month I remember that.

I believe some of the younger generations have an idea that may work. They are using the Power of Choice and starting to say “no.”

Many years ago a writer in the positive thinking movement wrote a book that quickly became a classic. The writer was J. Martin Kohl and the book is titled Your Greatest Power. In that book the writer pointed out that the greatest power a human being has is the ability to make choices. I am not determined by things that have happened to me in the past or what I’ve been taught or told. I have the ability to choose how I will be in the world. We all have what counselors today call “agency” or the ability to take control over our lives.

Now, this control is not absolute. I can’t choose to have intelligence, sensitivity or athletic ability I do not have. I can’t choose not to have a disability. I can’t demand my employer do things my way, nor that other circumstances of my life change if they are not under my control.

But that said, there are often things I can do to insure than I make time to be happy and have a life, despite ever-increasing demands to work more.

Young People May Be On To Something

There is a phenomena going on right now in the workplace called Quiet Quitting, mostly championed by the younger generations. I think that is an bad term, because it is not about quitting. What is meant is simply doing the job you agreed to do and are being paid to do. And that’s all. Recognizing that if the person doing the work doesn’t call a halt when the job description has been fulfilled, the employer never will.

It’s popular with people of my generation to poke fun at younger people who are setting better limits with work than our generation did. I think we are unwise to do that.

This approach is becoming popular with the younger workforce because, quite frankly, they’ve looked at their older colleagues (like many of us here today), and realized that working above and beyond the call often isn’t rewarded at all. Or, that the reward is a deteriorated family and ill health.

Instead, they want to stop the Puritan-inspired practice of always trying to do more and work harder. The claim used to be that doing that really made you shine, except today the reward for great performance and hard work is, typically, more hard work.

And the body keeps score. Oh yes it does. And the body is not going to let us keep doing what we are doing.

In order to be spiritually as well as physically healthy, most of us need to try something else. We ned to say “no” to the spiral of escalating demands.

There is a lot of power in saying “no.” It’s not an easy power to use, but there is nothing aggressive in saying “no” to a demand to over-function.

There have been times when I was an employee and I got fired for saying “no,” but there were more times when the boss backed down - because good people are hard to find. And the jobs I lost because I wasn’t willing to work at a self-destructive pace - everyone one of those jobs was replaced by a better job. If you demand good treatment you will often get it.

A Way Forward

In my personal life I follow an ancient philosophy called Stocism. Basically, the core idea is to take responsibility for life events by making a sharp distinction between when I can control and what I cannot.

There is a principle among Stoics called Momento Mori - or to remember that life is fleeting and all must die. Therefore, the counsel is to try to live each day knowing that it could be the last. In the case of someone like myself with a heart problem, that’s especially literally true, for I know my life could end suddenly with no warning. But all of us are mortal. As I’ve often said, being alive is a sexually transmitted terminal disease.

As a solution to the realization that we all must die, I advocate for thinking through and making decisions about how you want to be in the world; Proactive rather than reactive about how you want your life to go.

Decide if you want to be partnered or not. How much time are you prepared to devote to your occupation or other responsibilities. When do you give yourself permission to let that go so you can have other things in your life? Don’t let your life disappear into the black hole of someone else’s plans.

As I have been with people at the end of life, no one ever says they wish they worked more or longer. They say the opposite. Use your power of choice. You will never be caught up. Learn to be happy regardless by not trying to do the impossible and finding ways to say “no” instead.

And that’s my sermon.

Travel Agents For Guilt Trips

Travel Agents For Guilt Trips

A Sermon to Countryside Church, Unitarian Universalist

Sunday, May 21, 2023

The Rev. Dr. C. Scot Giles

To the young people who are with us this morning I offer a bit of an apology that this sermon is on an adult topic. However, let me suggest that their might be something in it for you if you choose to stay with my words. If you’ve ever been bullied or blamed, perhaps you will gather some help from my remarks this morning.

The Dave Ramsey Show

I have a strong suspicion that I am probably the only person in this room today who regularly watches Christian Television. But, being a true Universalist at heart and sincerely believing that all spiritual paths are valid and tend to converge over time, I do tune in from time-to-time.

Among my favorite shows is The Dave Ramsey Show. Ramsey is an evangelical consultant who focuses on helping people manage money. And no, his solution isn’t to tell everyone to just give money to their church. Oh, he is quite sure people should support the church of their choice but he actually has dug down into what the Old and New Testaments teach about money and spending. It may not be what you think.

Ramsey is best known for his flat recommendation that everyone avoid debt. He knows that some debt is unavoidable - a mortgage, education loans, a car payment, etc. But he aims to help people manage consumer debt, believing that it is far too easy to get in over one’s head and end up in serious trouble. He believes that God doesn’t want that for anyone.

If you are curious about Ramsey and his six-step program for living debt free, you can find a lot of podcasts he’s made on YouTube and I suggest you check them out. I think he goes a bit far, but believe that much of what he says is sound.

But I like the additional sort of advice he gives as well. Advice about families, unsuccessfully launched children, abusive workplaces, and finding a place of comfort and peace in your life.

He says a lot of people try to control others by the use of guilt. He calls such people “Travel Agents for Guilt Trips,” and I stole the title of this sermon from him. And if you want to learn his advice for dealing with relatives and friends who think you should finance their lifestyles, or who believe you should do everything, while they do little, check him out.

What Are Guilt Trips

A guilt trip is when someone seeks to encourage you to feel guilty so that you will do what they want. It is a form of manipulation.

So what are some common strategies someone might use to put you onboard a guilt trip they have planned? I share some popular favorites from the book Boundaries by Henry Cloud and John Townsend:

•​“How could you do this to me after all I’ve done for you?”

•​“It seems that you could think about someone other than yourself for once.”

•​“If you really loved me, you would make this telephone call for me.”

•​“It seems like you would care enough about the family to do this one thing.”

•​“You know how it’s turned out in the past when you haven’t listened to me.”

•​“You know that if I had it, I would give it to you.”

•​“You have no idea how much we sacrificed for you.”

•​“Maybe after I’m dead and gone, you’ll be sorry.”

People may be passive-aggressive. “Well, I’m glad you FINALLY did your housework.

People may attempt to enforce a contract you never signed. “You should do this for me because I work so hard.”

Or there may be attempts at blackmail. “You need to take me on an expensive vacation, because I heard the way you talked to my mother!

Or there could be an attempt to claim an authority that is not real. “I’m the eldest in the family, so you have to listen to me.”

Probably everyone in this room has had people who have tried to control them with one of these strategies, or something like them. Such things always hurt, because in order for someone to do them they have to believe they know you well enough to hook you. So, every attempt to put you on a guilt trip is, in fact, a relationship betrayal.

And ultimately, trying to put someone else on a guilt trip is a fool’s game. Even if it works temporarily, it will cast a shadow. The other people will feel manipulated and that will corrupt the relationship.

While I now regard the story with humor, here’s a personal tale.

Many years ago at Christmas a relative presented me with a Christmas Stocking full of small gifts. I thought that was kind of cute until the stocking was unpacked in front of a room full of other people. Other than a small selection of hard candies the stocking was full of lumps of actual coal, wrapped in cellophane.

The relative then pulled out an actual list of times I had disappointed her by not doing what she wanted. She had one item on the list per lump of coal, and expected that I would sit there why she publicly recited a list of my perceived faults.

Well, I’ve been open about the fact I come from a family that is something of a train wreck. I wasn’t kidding.

I stopped that relative so her strategy failed. But afterwards I realized I had been the target of a Travel Agent for Guilt Trips on steroids. It was one of my most valuable life lessons. I resolved I would never let such a thing happen again. If someone turns out to be that sort of Travel Agent, I have no place for them in my world.

Study after study shows that when you become the target of a guilt trip it will worsen any anxiety you feel. Ditto if you have any tendency toward depression, obsessional compulsive feelings, shame or envy. It’s toxic stuff.

When I distribute a copies of this sermon through my website, I’ll actually footnote the studies. They are well done and scary.

Notice how all of these strategies are presented as something supposedly said for your good or betterment. But are actually expressed as an effort to manipulate.

If it is an occasional thing it’s probably just a careless slip by someone who meant well. But if it happens all the time, there is a toxin in your relationship and the sooner you deal with it the happier you will be.

My personal take on people who make it a habit to guilt trip others is a bit different from the financial management guru. I’ve come to this understanding by trying to better grasp the phenomenon of guilt tripping.

Dave Ramsey and others like him take the view that when someone tries to manipulate you it’s all about control, trying to achieve their dominance and your submission. I’m sure that’s part of it.

But deeper then that understanding, I came to realize that when someone wants to be a Travel Agent for Guilt Trips they disclose that they are the person who has a problem. Not you.

Or, as I’ve come to say it in my Consultation Room, “Someone trying to guilt trip you shows they have a problem. If it works, it shows that you have a problem.” You need to work on your boundaries so that the only person who gets to control your behavior is you.

Why Do People Guilt Trip Others?

As laying a guilt trip on someone is such an utterly toxic thing to do, and even if it succeeds it will stir up trouble downstream, why do people do it?

I think an attempt to lay a guilt trip on someone is actually anger in disguise. That’s why if the guilt trip does not work to control you, very often the situation devolves into threats and a relationship cut-off if the guilt doesn’t work. What is really underneath the attempt to lay on a guilt trip is a deep unconscious rage being indirectly expressed.

The Theology of the Scapegoat

In your spiritual explorations I am sure some of you have heard of the theological concept the the Scapegoat. For those who have not, you may be surprised to learn that it is one of the most ancient concepts in the Old Testament. It is also relevant to my topic today, which is why I put a photo of a goat on the pulpit screen when I began this talk.

The Scapegoat first appears in the Book of Leviticus, 16:10. It was the name given to a goat who was allowed to escape into the wilderness of ancient Judea, there to perish by starvation or predation. Before being allowed this fictional “escape”on Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, the High Priest would lay his hands on the head of the goat and transfer to it all of the sins and iniquities of the people of Israel. As the goat perished, so it was believed, perished the sins of the people of the past year.

The idea was that the sins of a person, or group of people, could be spiritually transferred to another, who by being punished discharged those sins. Much later with the rise of Christianity, this theme would become basic to the theology of the Christos, or Christ, who by being crucified lifted the sins of all. Jesus was the idea of a Scapegoat writ large.

Today we often do not want to think of how primitive and bloodthirsty much of ancient religion was. Long before the Hebrew religion was a gleam in Moses’s eye, peoples even more ancient believed that it was important to sacrifice to appease the gods. As the world appeared hostile and scary to them, they assumed the gods were hostile and scary too and had to be appeased with sacrifice.

The typical sacrifice in the ancient world was of what was called “the first fruits.” Our modern holiday of Thanksgiving is a distant echo of this. The Sacrifice of the First Fruits meant one would offer as a sacrifice the first round of produce from the harvest. One would offer as a sacrifice the first animal successfully hunted in the season. And, for millennia, people would sacrifice their first born children, sometimes horribly.

We know that the ancient people who would eventually become the Hebrews did this too - in deference to the young people present this morning I will not go into detail, but suffice to say the archeological evidence is persuasive.

The Old Testament was written at the end of a thousand year literary dark age in the ancient world. By the time the scribes began their task the practice of human sacrifice become one that people regarded with horror (although traces of it can still be found in a careful reading).

It is widely believed by modern Bible Scholars that the story of Abraham intending to sacrifice his firstborn son, Isaac, but being stopped by God was inserted into the text as a way to justify ending the practice of human sacrifice. I think we can all agree it was an advance for human civilization.

So the tradition of the Scapegoat is an ancient one, pivotal to the progress of a barbaric ancient religion into a civilized one, and that basis of much Christian theology. Regardless of whether one considers oneself a Christian or not, it cannot be denied that Christianity has had a massive impact on the development of our culture.

In a more enlightened and evolved time a lot of us would like to believe that ideas such as the Scapegoat have outlasted their utility, and we’d all be better off if they could be allowed to fade away.

But I think the theme of the Scapegoat - holding others responsible for one’s own failings - is very much with us still. We see it in all those people who try to manipulate others by making them feel guilty if they do not what is wanted.

You see the Travel Agent for Guild Trips is someone who is trying to hold another accountable for how they feel. They feel you should do what they want. You are not doing that, so they feel anger.

Anger is a secondary emotion. When we have a primary emotion like fear, loss, sadness, etc. those emotions cause us to feel vulnerable and endangered. One way to cope with feeling endangered is to shift into anger, because then the brain will produce a surge of energy which helps us feel better, and we instinctively try to establish control to lower of sense of risk.

Manipulating others is one of the easiest ways have a sense of control, and trying to make them feel guilty is a very easy way to do that.

The Travel Agent for guilt trips is always someone compensating for inner feelings of vulnerability. By getting you to do what they want, they make you into a Scapegoat for their own fear and weakness. If you do what they want, they feel better. The Scapegoat has carried away the darkness just as in days of yore.

The Travel Agent for guilt trips is feeling anxiety. They have selected you to be their anti-anxiety drug.

The archetype of the Scapegoat is still with us. It’s just gone under the surface of things. People still want to hold someone other than themselves accountable for what they desire. When the guilt trip comes out, that’s the agenda.

Don’t let yourself be a Scapegoat. It never ends well.

The End of the Scapegoat

One of the very few things advice columnist Ann Landers had to say that I agree with, was that “No one can take advantage of you without your consent.” Like a lot of things she published this is something of an overstatement. Anyone can be victimized or deceived, and one doesn’t give permission for that.

Still, there is a level where, frequently, when someone is trying to take advantage of you, make you a Scapegoat if you will, they need you to play along. If you will not get hooked, the guilt trip can’t start.

Therefore, the wisdom from the ancient religious theme of the Scapegoat is not to get hooked. That is the spiritual skill to acquire if you want to deal with the Travel Agent for a guilt trip.

In this matter I can only speak for myself about what has helped me deal with those in my life who sought to control me by trying to make me feel guilty

First, I do try to have empathy. I’m not a soft person but I do try to be a compassionate one. Therefore, when someone tries to pull a manipulative stunt I remind myself that what they are doing says a lot about them and not much about me.

They are in pain, or scared or weak. That doesn’t mean I will roll over, but it does mean that I will not be cruel if there is any other option open to me, besides confrontation or capitulation. I might speak with a softer voice. I might find a polite way to decline the attempt, or just ignore it. If I know what my guilt trippers is scared of, I may try to speak to that. Sometimes this works. But not all the time.

The other thing I do is to remind myself that I don’t need anyone’s permission to live my own life. If someone doesn’t like a decision I’ve made that is their right. But I don’t have to go along with them, nor do I need to explain myself.

I see this one a lot. You say “no” to an inappropriate request but still feel you need to say more. So you try to explain yourself, give excuses, or try to convince the other person that it’s okay for you to decline what they are trying to get you to do.

That is a mistake. You don’t need anyone’s permission to live your own life. You do not have to explain yourself or give reasons. No means no. You may, in the interest avoiding future misunderstandings choose to explain your thinking to another person, so they have that as information against future requests, but you are not obligated to do so.

For example, I sometimes get requests to loan money. I’ve learned such loans are a very, very bad investment because they are never repaid. So I simply say no, and that it’s a personal policy not to loan money. And then I shut up. I do not engage further in conversation about that, even if it means I’ll need to get up and leave. I don’t need anyone’s permission to live my own life. I don’t have to explain my “no.”

Nor do you. You do not want to be a Scapegoat for someone else’s anxiety. Just as the ancient Hebrews created the story of God staying the hand of Abraham so he did not Scapegoat his son Issac, it is the testimony of the ages that scapegoating is wrong. Nothing good ever comes from it. As was said by a computer in the movie Wargames, the only way to win that game is not to play.

And that’s my sermon

Sources

Carlos Tilghman-Osborne, David A. Cole, Julia W. Felton, Definition and measurement of guilt: Implications for clinical research and practice, Clinical Psychology Review, Volume 30, Issue 5, July 2010, pp. 536-546.

Nicole C Overall, Yuthika U Girme, Edward P. Leman Jr., Matthew D. Hammond, Attachment anxiety and reactions to relationship threat: the benefits and costs of inducing guilt in romantic partners, Journal of Personal Social Psychology, 2014 Feb;106(2):235-56. doi: 10.1037/a0034371. Epub 2013 Sep 30.

Hypnotism as Soul Medicine

Accessing the Spiritual Core of Hypnotism; Hypnotism as Soul Medicine

Keynote for the Heartland Hypnosis Conference, April 29, 2023

The Rev. Dr. C. Scot Giles, DNGH

Introduction

Good morning colleagues. For those of you who do not know me, I am not only a Consulting Hypnotist, but also a clergy person. I am a Unitarian Universalist minister in Full and Final Ministerial Fellowship, and a Board Certified Chaplain - a specialized training program for clergy who work in healthcare.

I am also a member of the Advisory Board of the National Guild of Hypnotists and the chairperson of its Ethics Committee. In the ranking structure of the Guild I am a Board Certified Diplomate. I have been in full-time hypnotic practice in the Chicagoland area for more than thirty-five years with a strong emphasis on hypnotic health coaching, mostly around issues related to cancer or fertility.

I have been interested in hypnotism from the time I was ten years old when I saw the great hypnotist Ormund McGill perform his Concert of Hypnotism on the Art Linkletter Show. I sent away for my first book on hypnotism which was advertised in the back of Superman Comics - using a graphic of a hypnotist in a tuxedo mesmerizing a voluptuous woman reclining on a couch wearing a dress she had put on using a brush and roller. There were lightening bolts coming out of the hypnotist’s fingers. I would later learn that this graphic was actually done by Ormund McGill who owned a graphic design company at the time.

The book wasn’t bad for something I saved up for by collecting quarters from my allowance to buy. The theory the book articulated we now know was false, but the basic techniques were the same as those taught in basic training today.

The book gave me everything I needed to get myself into trouble. I really did hypnotize my schoolmates to sing the Star Spangled Banner whenever the teacher turned her back to the class in order to erase the blackboard.

Yeah. That actually happened. I got in a ton of trouble and my parents forbade me from having anything to do with hypnotism going forward. You can see how well that worked.

I would grow up. I got formal training from some of the best. Became a hypnotist for real, but also a minister. My interest in spirituality is as deep as my interest in hypnotism. Therefore, I was pleased to receive the invitation to talk about the spiritual aspects of hypnotic practice here today.

The Spiritual Side

Reflecting on experiences I have had as a hypnotist, and those that colleagues have reported to me, when we do our hypnotic work with our clients, something else seems to happen. It is something that cannot be explained as resulting from hypnotic patter.

In this keynote I suggest that there are two things going on. First, the client may hear something the hypnotist did not say, and which spontaneously arises from the deeper mind of the client. That is a profound thing which guides the client towards individuation and wholeness. That certainly seems spiritual to me.

The second phenomenon is that the hypnotist, in deep rapport with the client, may spontaneously say just the right thing, often unplanned, that turns out to be the key to the client’s unlocking. That is unquestionably a spiritual thing.

If you are in this profession long enough you will have the experience of something “more” manifesting in your hypnotic work that you may find hard to explain. This, I believe, shows that the hypnotic encounter actually has a spiritual aspect as well as a mental, physical and emotional aspect. There is a spiritual core to hypnotism. Hypnotism is Soul Medicine.

As hypnotic technicians, we know something about the way the human deeper mind works. For the purposes of this talk I will refer to that deeper part of the mind using the Ericksonian term, “unconsciousness.” Others, who may embrace a different school of hypnotic thought may prefer to use the term “subconsciousness.” That’s fine. For the purposes of this address, I consider the unconscious and subconscious mind to be synonyms.

While there are some practitioners who simply ask a client what their goals are and confine the hypnotic work to a narrow focus on those specific goals, many practitioners (and I am one) will add a more general effort to help the client not just with specific goals, but also to achieve a higher level of functioning as a person.

Simply, while we work with the goals list in mind, we also want our clients to become better versions of themselves.

Some wag has said the secret to success in business is to underpromise and overdeliver. That is, to do more than is expected. I think that is true. Helping a client become a better version of themselves in an ethical way, as well as achieving the stated goals, is an example of being successful by doing more than is expected. Getting a reputation for doing that will give your practice long-term security because your clients get more than they came for in a good way.

The client may have come for weight control, smoking cessation, stress management or any of a number of other reasons. And I will address all of those concerns that the client may bring. But I also seek to get to know my clients as persons, and I always ask about how their life is going, and what they want for themselves in the longer term. And then I slip material intended to facilitate that into the work.

In my own practice, which has now spanned more than three decades, I have found this has paid huge benefits. And it is amplified by the two phenomena I mentioned and about which I have more to say.

Sneaky and Deceptive

I often remark that the reason there are so few hypnotists in practice isn’t that there is a shortage of people who want to do it. No. Hypnotism instructors train a lot of people. Many instructors make most of their living teaching classes rather than working with individual clients. There should be a ton of hypnotists out there. But there are not.

I believe the reason there are so few hypnotists is that really good hypnotists are born, not made. That is, to really prosper in this profession you need to have a specific sort of personality. Those that have it do well, those that don’t often move on to some other area of work or professional practice. We lack a calculus that can tell use which students will prosper and which will not, but in my experience that becomes obvious once a new hypnotist hangs out the shingle and gets to work.

I said this to a group of physicians when I was presenting to Grand Rounds at LaGrange Memorial Hospital some years ago (I had a program to help cancer patients with hypnotism based at that hospital for thirty years). One of the nurses raised her hand and asked, “So, Dr. Giles. What sort of personality does a hypnotist need to have?”

It may be a stain on my soul but I have a very dry sense of humor and so I replied “Well, you have to be a sneaky and deceptive person, willing to manipulate others with no compunction whatsoever.” I got a round of laughter. But I was only half-kidding. There is something subversive about hypnotism, because you are subverting the client’s resistance and any ill-formed defenses in order to help the client.

I mean the client already knows what they need to do. If you want to stop smoking, do not put a cigarette in your mouth and set it on fire. The client knows what to do. The problem is they can’t bring themselves to do it. Our power is that we enlist their unconscious mind to impel them to do what they do not want to do, in order to achieve what they truly want to achieve.

Every successful hypnotist knows this. However, some of us go further. It’s not just helping a client achieve a limited goal. We also help a client conduct a deeper appraisal of themselves and discover what they need to do to become more fulfilled as a person generally. In addition to helping with the specific goal, we also help them do a piece of interior work and become more fulfilled.

The Blueprint Hypothesis

Much of the work I do in my own hypnotic health coaching focuses on hypnotically enhanced fertility and on oncology (cancer care). At the core of the work I do are insights I learned from Dr. Bernie Siegel, with whom I have studied.

Born in 1932, Dr. Siegel was the Assistant Clinical Professor of General and Pediatric Surgery at Yale/New Haven Medical Center in Connecticut before he retired from medicine in 1989 to write books (he once told me his goal was to ultimately die of writer’s cramp). He would come to found ECaP, or the Exceptional Cancer Patients Organization and I have taken their training program.

Dr. Siegel’s first and best-known book is titled Love, Medicine and Miracles and was published in 1986. The book had a huge impact on me and was the reason I went to study with him. At its essence, Dr. Siegel’s theory is that every human being has a spiritual core in their unconscious mind. That is, the deeper mind contains an image of who that person should be.

Depending on your theology you might think this image, which I will call the “inner blueprint,” might be a gift from a spiritual power. But some of the colleagues who trained with me thought that previous lives and reincarnation may play a role. Others believed it is something that arises from a Collective Unconsciousness that we all share together. What one believes doesn’t matter.

The empirical finding is that everyone appears to have an inner blueprint for who they were created to be. To the degree that a person figures out their inner blueprint and creates a life for themselves that captures some of that inner plan, is the degree to which that person will be happy and fulfilled. And, as Dr. Siegel found, that is the degree to which they become physically and emotionally resilient to life-changing medical problems like cancer or other aliments.

To the degree that a person has not actualized their inner blueprint in their day-to-day lives is the degree to which their physical and emotional resilience is flawed. They appear to become susceptible to a whole range of medical and emotional problems. Dr. Siegel found that if you can help a person discover what their inner blueprint is, then they would not only do better medically, but also in every other arena of their life. That is a holistic focus. That is Soul Medicine.

Dr. Siegel developed a program using a support groups, guided imagery and self-hypnotism as well as dream and drawing interpretation to help people look for and understand their inner blueprint.

People often have no idea of what the inner blueprint in their unconscious mind for themselves might be. Usually they start out their lives with some clues - childhood fantasies, heroes in movies or literature, their own remembered dreams. But far too often people move away from that inner guidance because it seems impractical.

So the person who was supposed to be a poet becomes an accountant, because that is easier. The person who really wanted to be a chef becomes an insurance salesperson instead, because they discovered that culinary work doesn’t pay well. But the inner urge is still there, and if no way can be found to move toward it, at least to some degree, frustration builds and resilience plummets.

For thirty years at LaGrange Memorial Hospital in LaGrange, Illinois I ran a program called I Can Act Now (abbreviated ICAN). It was the first medically approved, hospital based program in the United States for hypnotic interventions into cancer.

Because we were based at a single institution for three decades we were able to follow our participants. If you are curious you will find an analysis of our findings in the download directory of my website. But briefly, we showed that adding hypnotism to conventional medical care produced, reliably and over time, improved outcomes when our participants’s results were compared to the national cancer outcomes database.

Yet, other programs of doing hypnotism with people who were living with cancer, such as the original programs by Dr. O. Carl Simonton, did not produce this sort of result. I suspect the reason is that the other programs confined their focus to specific problems - nausea, loss of appetite, discomfort, etc. We covered those bases too, but we also included the search for the inner blueprint in all of the hypnotic work we did. That is what, I believe, did the trick. We didn’t just work with symptoms. We looked for the spiritual core and helped our participants find it.

I’m encouraged in this belief by noticing that many of the other approaches, including the more recent work of those following Dr. Simonton, have been evolving in exactly this direction - perhaps proving that all worthwhile helping techniques tend to converge over time.

So how does one help a client find their inner blueprint? I suggest there are two tools we use which plumb the deepest level of the client’s mind, and also that of the hypnotist. These are spiritual tools.

Spirituality and the Unconscious Mind

I believe that spirituality, the sense of connection between oneself and something greater, arises in the unconscious process.

This is an insight that comes from depth psychology. The great analyst Dr. Carl Jung based his whole therapeutic system on helping his patients discover who they were supposed to be, as opposed to who events had made them become. He identified that process as the core of his therapy. Further, he believed that the unconscious mind of one person was connected at a deep level to a Collective Unconsciousness which contains a wisdom and a structure that we all have access to.

I have come to agree. My evidence for this comes from a phenomena I have observed as a minister and as a hypnotist. I call it “Hearing A Word No Mouth Has Spoken.”

As a minister I have delivered many sermons. It is not uncommon to have someone come up after and say something like, “That was fantastic. It changed my life! You have to give me a copy of what you said.”

So you give them a copy. Then, later you ask if they received it. And they say, “Yeah, but it wasn’t the right one.” But it was the right one. They heard something in the sermon that was not actually there. They were ready to have an insight or awareness, and their unconscious mind used the occasion of my sermon to let that awareness manifest in their mind. They thought it was something I said. But it was not. It was something they said, to themselves. I just provided the occasion for their unconscious mind to guide them.

This phenomena has been known for a very long time. In the spiritual classic, the Tao Te Ching the ancient sage Lao Tzu wrote “when the student is ready the teacher will appear.”

He didn’t mean that there was a celestial backlog of insightful teachers, and somehow one would be supplied to a seeker on a schedule by an Amazon delivery driver.

He meant that when the mind is ready to have an insight, it will find a way to let that insight manifest. My parishioner was ready to understand something about themselves. In the words of my sermon the parishioner found a way to manifest that insight. They did the work. My sermon just provided the opportunity, because I did not actually say what they heard. They heard a word no mouth had spoken.

Well, hypnotic work with a client can do exactly the same thing. Many of us will have the experience of a client reporting how wonderfully our hypnotic work helped them, how insightful they found our words, and how as a result of the session whole new areas of their lives were pulling together or taking a new direction.

When this first happened to me I said to myself, “Wow! I must be really good at this.” The trouble was when I listened to the recording I’d made of the session I realized that I had never said anything intended to cause changes like that in my client’s life. But the session did cause that change. Not because of anything I did, but because the client had heard something I did not need to say. What the client heard came from the client’s deeper mind, or their soul, if you prefer. It did not come from me.

The student was ready. The teacher appeared. The teacher wasn’t the hypnotist. the teacher was the unconscious mind of the client who heard in the hypnotist’s words something the client needed to hear. The hypnotist was just the vehicle.

The hypnotist allows the client to discover something the client knows at the unconscious level, and that allows the possibility that the client will make it real.

This is a profound thing, and many would call that level of profundity a spiritual thing. I do. Yet essentially I am describing a psychological phenomena - the client gives birth to an awareness from their own unconscious mind. Certainly it has a spiritual aspect in that it can be deeply moving, but the action is occurring within the psychology of the client him or herself.

Spirituality implies something more than a purely psychological phenomenon. While the client realizing something profound about themselves may in fact arise from a power deeper than their own mind, there is something more.

Transpersonal Spirituality

There is more going on at a spiritual level in the hypnotic consultation then just what I have said so far and builds upon it.

Every hypnotist knows that what makes hypnotism effective is not just the hypnotic induction itself. What adds the power is that the hypnotic induction occurs in the context of a relationship between hypnotist and client. If the hypnotist does their work well, they will have excellent rapport building skills and forge a powerful connection with the client. This is what Ericksonian hypnotist Dr. Stephen Gilligan calls “the Cooperation Principle.” The hypnotist and client enter into a mutually transformative relationship, cooperating together on the common goal of helping the client.

Yes, I did say the relationship is “mutually transformative.” You will find that as a person you change when you start to practice as a hypnotist. In order to achieve the sort of deep rapport good hypnotic work requires you will find yourself changing. In order to work with someone who is quite different from yourself you will need to call into question and rethink things you had believed or not understood fully. The hypnotist helps the client change. The client helps the hypnotist change.

In 1991 Grove Press published a book titled Doctor Sleep by Madison Smartt Bell. If you don’t know the book I do recommend it, as the story is told from the perspective of a working hypnotist who moved to London to set up a practice and escape a troubled past. At one point he is hypnotizing his client and he actually nods off into self-hypnotic trance himself in the middle of his hypnotic patter.

That is something that has happened to more than a few of us, I know.

In the story the hypnotist was startled to hear himself insert into his patter something he had not planned to say, but it turned out to be exactly what his client needed to hear to trigger a healing insight.

In this case it wasn’t exactly the client “hearing a word no mouth had spoken,” because the hypnotist did speak it. But there was no reason for him to have done so. The words came drifting up out of his unconscious mind because of a connection that existed between himself and his client.

Brought to the fore by the hypnotic rapport, the unconscious minds of the hypnotist and client were, I propose, linked through a collective awareness and a shared wisdom came to be. The words the hypnotist said in the patter actually didn’t amount to much, but somehow in a shared state of consciousness, something emerged that cannot be explained as mere psychological connection.

Hypnotism and Spiritual Consciousness

Most hypnotic inductions involve some sort of synchronization to the client’s breathing rhythm. Different systems do it differently but often one will count the client down in time to the client’s breath, or one will parse suggestions so they are recited in time to the client’s respiration. This is a standard technique, used since the time of Mesmer.

Yet, the next time you do it pay attention to your own breathing as you work with your client. I find, as have most of those I have taught, that you will regulate your own breathing in time with the client. During the hypnotic induction, very often the subject and operator are in sync. They breathe in unison, words flow in time to the beat of the breath.

As a clergy person and chaplain, as someone trained in spiritual techniques from around the world, I can point you to systems of spiritual development all over the globe where exactly this technique is used.

The shaman chants in rhythm to the supplicant’s breath. The Russian Orthodox Starets (one of whom, by the way, was Rasputin) recites prayers in rhythm to his or her breathing in the monastery or convent, and when in a group, the whole group breathes as one. The Dessert Mothers and Fathers of Christianity taught the importance (in 1Thessalonians 5:17) of “pray without ceasing,” which meant to pray while breathing. The Buddhist and Sufi Meditation Masters teach much the same thing, as does the yoga adept.

It is said that on average, you will take a billion breaths in your lifetime. Your breathing does more than just oxygenate your blood. While your heartbeat is controlled by a pacemaker (natural or artificial) located within the organ of the heart itself, your breathing is controlled by your brain.

The ancient Greek physician Galen noted that gladiators whose necks were broken at the angle to damage their brain stem could no longer breathe. We now call the part of the brain stem that controls this the preBötzinger Complex. The brain-breath connection works in both directions. If you damage the brain, breathing can be stopped. But if you control the breathing, you also change the brain. Every advance-level martial artist learns breathing rhythms that overcome fatigue, quiet fear, improve clarity of mind and boost an awareness of what the opponent might do next.

Modern science teaches us the value of mindfulness meditation, a sort of present-moment focus that is created by centering attention on the breath.

While the technique has been known for centuries, the medical value of the practice has been documented in our time. Dr. Jon Kabat-Zinn wrote about the technique in his book Full Catastrophe Living after teaching it at the University of Massachusetts Medical Center, and Mindfullness Based Stress Management is now taught in hospitals around the nation.

I believe all of these spiritual techniques amount to Hypnotism Lite. What we do with our clients in our consultation rooms is a more powerful and structured version of what spiritual directors and teachers the world over have been doing since time immemorial.

Those same spiritual directors and teachers talk about how, in the deep inner place that breath work brings them to, they sense a connection to something larger than themselves. Some call this something “God.” Some call it “Buddha Consciousness.” Hermetic practitioners call it “Cosmic Consciousness.” The Sufi call it “Nearness to Allah.” Psychologist William James called it “Something More.” Dr. Carl Jung called it the “Collective Unconsciousness.”

Call it what you will. That many people describing what is obviously the same thing, are unlikely to be wrong. There is a deeper something that is contacted during the immense rapport of the inner state of mind that hypnotism can harness and during which “Something More” becomes manifest. And the hypnotist finds themselves saying exactly what needs to be said to meet the hunger in the client for meaning. And the hypnotist often does not know why.

Ah…but the result is there. The key to the client’s opening is found. The client discovers what their deepest desires are, and resolves to somehow manifest a part of the inner blueprint.

Like “Hearing A Word No Mouth Has Spoken,” this is a profound thing. But it is also a thing that transcends the individual psychology of the client. Something more has manifested in the deep rapport of subject and hypnotic operator.

If that is not a spiritual connection, I do not know what is.

The Complete Hypnotist

Sadly, not every hypnotic practitioner gets good at this. But many do. The best do.

As a hypnotist of many decades standing I believe one can sort of tell, and one can get a sense of what the hallmarks are of those who are good at this. Here is what I have noticed.

The best hypnotists, the colleagues who practice Soul Medicine, work with clients.

That may seem odd, but you’d be surprised how many colleagues out there have abandoned client work and while teaching classes about hypnotism, have ceased to practice it themselves. Perhaps they have gone as deep as they can go in their own self-transformation. Perhaps they no longer care. Perhaps money has become more important to them than helping. But you can tell. After a time what they have to teach feels shop-worn and dusty. They have lost passion. The best hypnotists work with clients, at least some of the time.

The best hypnotists, the Soul Doctors (if you will) regularly practice self-hypnotism in one of its many forms.

Simply, they do their own inner work. They attempt to deal with there own stuff - their traumas, resentments, hurts and pain. They learn by regular practice how to self-sooth and as a result become deeper and wiser people themselves. In hypnotism, more than in any other helping profession, what you do has to be who you are. Your methodology needs to flow from your personality and temperament. If you don’t have yourself together, your clients can tell and they will not trust you to accompany them to the deeper realms. You can’t take your client to a place you have never been.

In Conclusion

We are all works in progress. I look back with chagrin at some of my early hypnotic work and realize that I’m so much better now. That’s okay. I hope I keep learning and becoming better as a hypnotist until the moment I leave this world. We never know it all and there is always something new to learn.

But I want to make my hypnotic practice Soul Medicine. I want to stay in touch with the spiritual core of the hypnotic arts and sciences. I hope you agree. For there are rewards - to both you and your clients - for so doing.

And that is what I have to share with you in this keynote today. I hope you have a fantastic conference experience.

And Lead Us INTO Temptation

Lead Us INTO Temptation

A Sermon to Countryside Church, Unitarian Universalist

March26, 2023

The Rev. Dr. C. Scot Giles

Want to Misbehave?

So…Can I tempt you to misbehave? It shouldn’t be too hard. In my experience Unitarian Universalists are pretty good at misbehaving. Just ask any minister.

Oscar Wilde, the famous writer, is quoted as having said that “the only way to get rid of temptation is to yield to it.” I guess that’s true. After all, if you do it, the temptation goes away.

But if you don’t give in, you will still feel the temptation and that’s something of a drag.

Religion is Big on Temptation.

But most organized religions are big on temptation. Oh, they don’t want to you take Oscar Wilde’s advice and give into it (and neither do I). Instead, they want you to feel guilty because you think giving into it might be fun. They’ll tell you that’s a bad thing.

I’ve shared with you before a snippet from my favorite routine by comedian George Carlin. But it bears repetition. He said…

“Religion has actually convinced people that there's an invisible man living in the sky who watches everything you do, every minute of every day. And the invisible man has a special list of ten things he does not want you to do. And if you do any of these ten things, he has a special place, full of fire and smoke and burning and torture and anguish, where he will send you to live and suffer and burn and choke and scream and cry forever and ever 'til the end of time!….But He loves you.”

Carlin is not making this up. The sort of Hellfire threat is exactly what a lot of preachers issue, and it is the fuel that allows some forms of religion to thrive.

The classic trope on this was the 1741 sermon by the Rev. Jonathan Edwards which kicked off the First Great Awakening Revival in the United States. His vision influenced the direction of American religion, and civil law, for hundreds of years.

It was his stern pronouncements that were behind the Blue Laws that forced stores to close on Sundays, that fueled laws against homosexuality or sexual freedom of any kind, that outlawed gambling (at least until the government figured out they could use that to make a buck, then it was okay), and it is what is behind a lot of the culture wars that we struggle with today.

Titled “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God,” Jonathan Edwards’s famous and influential 18th century sermon contained such soothing passages as…

“The God that holds you over the pit of hell, much as one holds a spider or some loathsome insect over the fire, abhors you, and is dreadfully provoked; his wrath towards you burns like fire; he looks upon you as worthy of nothing else, but to be cast into the fire ... you are ten thousand times so abominable in his eyes, as the most hateful and venomous serpent is in ours.”

Great stuff that. In the sense it was effective. But it is also, in my opinion, spiritually and psychologically abhorrent.

In its time Jonathan Edwards’s fear-filled vision of the human condition was very influential. It emphasized everything I regard as wrong about the Puritan heritage.

To my mind someone who behaves morally primarily because he or she is afraid of eternal punishment is not a moral person. If you need to be threatened before you behave well, you are not really good. You are simply a person who is afraid.

The Lord’s Prayer

Those of us who were raised in the Christian spiritual tradition learned something called The Lord’s Prayer, taken from the New Testament. It occurs in two places, Matthew 6:12 and Like 2:14.

I’ve always thought the prayer was somewhat ironic - because Jesus of Nazareth spoke it when asked to teach people how to pray. At that time, the standard was to pray only using formal prayers which were written down and/or memorized. Jesus basically said, “don’t do that” and instead composed a simple, heartfelt prayer on the spot. The implication is that he wanted his followers to also pray that way - from the heart, spontaneously and simply.

So of course the Christian church ignores that completely and everyone is taught to say the Lord’s Prayer from memory, rote, word-for-word; doing exactly what Jesus said not to do. Go figure.

In any case, one line of the prayer is “And lead us not into temptation." So what do we make of that?

To my mind that request is something of a cop out, and I suspect something of a mistranslation because I don’t think Jesus of Nazareth was naive.

The gutsy prayer would be something along the lines of “give me the courage to resist the temptation, when the opportunity to do wrong presents itself.”

That is, I know I’m going to be tempted to do bad or selfish things - therefore may I have the strength to rise above that and not give in. Gutsy. That is taking responsibility for my actions and the consequences of my actions.

But that’s not what the Lord’s Prayer says. The prayer isn’t for the strength to resist temptation. The prayer is that temptations not present themselves in the first place.

That’s like someone bragging they never cheat at cards because they don’t know how. Okay…I guess that’s a good thing, but if they ever learn how we’ll be having a heck of a poker game next Friday.

There isn’t much of a moral victory in hoping that the opportunity to do something wrong never manifests. A much weaker position.

But let’s be honest. Temptation is everywhere.

My Two-Year Rule

The word “temptation” means the desire to do something wrong or unwise. We’ve all felt that from time to time. So how do we deal with it?

The opposite of temptation is self-control. That’s when we know that we’re attracted to something that might be pleasurable, if only in the short term, but we do not give in because we look beyond the momentary satisfaction we might achieve, in favor of a larger view of ourselves.

It might be tempting to cheat at cards and have the fun of winning a hand. But, we don’t do it because we do not want to think of ourselves as a cheat, and we certainly don’t want others to think of us that way. So we exert self-control and play the cards honestly in order to preserve our reputation and long-term sense of self.

Many years ago I formulated a rule for myself about how to maintain self-control in difficult situations.

Basically, the idea is that when you are struggling with what you should do - being tempted to do something unwise (lose your temper, say something mean, etc.) instead of doing what might bring momentary pleasure, ask yourself how you will feel about this when you look back at it about two years in the future.

Ultimately, unless we have the misfortune of dementia, we take our memories with us into the future. We always can recall what we did or did not do.

Every significant memory you have will be one of two things. Either it will be an asset, because you will look back and be proud of what you did or resisted. Or, it will be a liability because you will look back and be ashamed of what you gave in to and did.

Now, all of us mess up from time to time, and self-compassion and self-forgiveness are important things. But, it’s far better not to do things that we need to self-sooth or forgive ourselves for in the first place.

So whenever I am in a position of not being sure what I should do about some issue or event, I ask myself how will I feel about this two years in the future. Will I be proud or will I be embarrassed?

The result is that I may keep my mouth shut when I would really like to put someone down. I may take a deep breath and not express anger. I may forego something that might be fun in the moment, but I know I would regret in the long-term. This simple rule has kept me out of a lot of trouble and enabled me to resist a lot of temptations.

When you are not sure what to do, do what you will be proud of, when you look back at the memory from the future. That will help keep you from temptation and will help you achieve moral victories in your life.

Your Shadow Self

Yet the philosophical and psychological theme of temptation is one that interests me, because I agree with those philosophers who have explored depth psychology. What they propose is that we find ourselves tempted by those things that resonate with the dark side of our personalities - a part most of us don’t want to believe exists.

There is a reason why something that might tempt me may not tempt you. We’re different people with different internal issues. While there are some common themes, we are as individual in what tempts us, as we are individuals as persons.

But here’s the thing to get. Here is the thing that keeps depth psychologists in business. The things that tempt you point to part of yourself that you might want to deny. And there is a tremendous amount of personal and spiritual growth that comes from looking at the part of ourselves that we may want to deny.

And knowing what tempts you, even if you resist it, is a good thing.

I can assure you that you do have a dark side. In some forms of psychoanalysis it is called the Shadow Self, or more simply, the Shadow.

You see you have two sorts of consciousness inside your cranium. The first is your conscious self. Mostly this is what you think of as you. But you also have an unconscious mind, sometimes called the subconscious mind.

As someone who is a hypnotist as well as a clergy person, the unconscious mind fascinates me. In fact, I believe your unconscious mind is the greatest goal achieving mechanism ever evolved. If it believes something, it will try to make it happen regardless of what you consciously wish. That is why learning how to manage your unconscious mind can pay benefits.

But our unconscious mind can be a trickster.

Ever say what you actually meant, instead of the more polite thing you intended to say? Sometimes this is called a “Freudian Slip,” although the technical term is “Parapraxis.”

When I was in Grad School for my Master’s Degree I had a meeting with the Head of the Philosophy Department. For a variety of reasons, some of which still make sense to me, I disliked that man. But only an idiot would say that.

So I shook his hand and intended to say, “I’m pleased to meet you.” Instead, I looked him right in the eye and said “I’m sorry to be here.” I didn’t even realize I’d said that until later when everyone told me what I jackass I was. My unconscious mind was not willing to fib. I said what I meant instead of what I wanted to say.

A Deeper Connection

There is even some reason to believe that the unconscious mind of one person is connected at an even deeper level to the minds of others. This is sometimes called a Collective Unconsciousness. At a fundamental level of the mind we are connected, and there are similarities that unite us and shape our view of the world.

This is why the scripture and mythology around the world tend to contain similar themes and plot lines.

In 1949 a philosopher named Joseph Campbell published a work of comparative mythology called The Hero With A Thousand Faces. In this masterful book Campbell showed the ancient stories from around the world, even those written thousands of years apart, share a fundamental structure. That structure recounts, in different ways, the journey of a person from ignorance to self-knowledge.

You can see this structure in the stories of Prometheus, Buddha, Moses, Mohammed and Jesus. You can see it in the ancient Mesopotamian Epic of Gilgamesh, written a thousand years before the first word in what would be our Old Testament was crafted.

Dr. Campbell argued, as have many other thinkers, that the immense similarities in all of these ancient stories can’t be accidental. They are far too similar. There has to be something upon which they are based. The thinking is that they are founded on common themes in a collective unconscious awareness that we all share, but only some come to know.

And in every one of these stories the person making the journey to a deeper self-awareness and wisdom has to confront an opponent. The opponent is imaged differently in different stores, but that opponent always turns out to be something inside of themselves. The mythological hero must face their own limitations, failures and mistakes. We must face part of ourselves that we’d like to deny exists. We must confront and somehow befriend our Shadow. The dark part of the mind that resides in us all and tempts us to do dark things.

What is really important about your unconscious mind is that it uses the things that tempt you to point to something we all need to pay attention to - that none of us are perfect. It does this to protect us from the spiritual danger of arrogance and the behavioral mistake of projecting our own inner darkness onto others because we can’t face it about ourselves.

In your imagination make a list of every good and praiseworthy trait you’d like to think you have. That you’re honest, kind, insightful, generous, and so on. That is your Aspirational Self. It’s who you’d like to be.

But we all fall short of that. We all mess up at times.

Next take every single one of those praiseworthy attributes and imagine someone who has the opposite. Who is deceptive, cruel, superficial and stingy (or whatever applies to you when you do this mental exercise). That is your Shadow Self. It is everything you try not to be.

As psychoanalyst Carl Jung put it in 1938:

“Unfortunately there can be no doubt that (people are), on the whole, less good than (they) imagine (themselves) or (want themselves) to be.  Everyone carries a shadow, and the less it is embodied in the individual’s conscious life, the blacker and denser it is” (Jung, 1938, Psychology and Religion, pronouns adjusted)

Your Shadow is an awareness the resides in your unconscious mind. It contains ideas about every path you did not take in life, it know every temptation you resisted and those you gave in to, and it knows why.

It is every part of yourself that you would like to deny. It is every fantasy you have entertained, even those you would be embarrassed to tell others, or that you might scoff at yourself. It is the primitive and uncivilized part of your nature. All of these things are your Shadow.

And we know the Shadow is there not just because it shows up in mythology, but because when we work with a troubled person we find that it is the Shadow Self which has broken through the defenses and manifested in an uncontrolled way. Most of us have had the experience of doing something other than what we wanted to do. Sometimes it’s something we desperately want to keep private.

It was precisely this reality that caused St. Paul to lament in the New Testament Book of Romans:

“I do not understand my own actions. For I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate….For I do not do the good I want, but the evil I do not want is what I do.” (Romans 7: 15 and 19, NRSV)

In fact depth psychologists believe the entire purpose of therapy is to help someone admit that their Shadow Side exists, and to find some mature and orderly way to deal with it.

If you do not, then you end up like Jonathan Edwards when he preached that hate-filled sermon, “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God.” What he was doing was projecting - and it is what everyone does who will not face the fact that they contain bad things as well as good. Instead of doing the inner work, they project the things about themselves they want to deny on others, and accuse them as a way of denying part of themselves. Often the things we object to in others are actually things we are tempted by ourselves, and our condemnation of others is a way of dealing with our own denial.

In my opinion we have a former President of this nation who does quite a bit of that.

You may desperately want to believe there is absolutely nothing wrong with you and that you never make mistakes. Heck, we’ve all met people who are so defensive they will never acknowledge they have done something wrong.

But if that is the claim you make you will never know inner peace and calm.

Your temptations point to your darker side. I’m not urging you to indulge that darker side, but know that it is there. In your mind you stand midway between the Aspirational Self and the Shadow Self.

Knowing that constitutes the place of mental and spiritual health, for it is the position of internal balance. You are neither in denial nor are you arrogant. It helps you understand the real, imperfect and wonderful person you are. We all contain good and bad, and balancing between them helps us find the light, and keeps us from arrogance and error.

And that’s my sermon.

Unenforceable Rules

Unenforceable Rules

Community Ministry Sunday, January 29, 2023

Countryside Church, Unitarian Universalist

The Rev. Dr. C. Scot Giles

Forgiveness

I’m going to talk about forgiveness. But don’t tune out just yet, there may be a surprise in store.

In the Gospel of Luke we’re advised that if we forgive others, good things will come our way. Or as the text says,

“A good measure, pressed down, shaken together, running over, will be put into your lap;(Luke 6:37-8)”

Sure. I believe that.

Ever Been Ticked Off At Someone?

Are you a badass? I hope so. I am. If you are not a badass, I will attempt to motivate you to become one by this sermon.

Let me explain.

I have a box where I do my daily meditation and self-hypnosis. In this box I have a collection of small objects that mean something to me. In fact, were I so inclined and someone cared to listen, I could basically sketch out the story of my life by going through those objects.

I still have my High School and College rings. They are in that box. So is the garter that Lindsay wore at our wedding. My father’s military dog-tags and his Masonic pin are in the box too. There is a shell given to me by my very first girlfriend - I’m embarrassed to say I don’t remember her name, but I’ve still got her shell. Items from my childhood, education and so on. Precious memories, precious things to me personally.

But there are also things that are not markers of happy memories. There is a cuff link that my family gave me when I was a freshman in college that actually reminds me of a deep betrayal. And a few other things like that.

It would be easier to toss that negative stuff out and never look at it again, but I keep it. Not because I cherish those memories in any way, but because they remind me of a mistake I made that I do not want to make again.

You see, I used to believe that people were somehow obligated to treat me the way I thought they should. The darker items in that box remind me that I need to be careful about what I expect. Because other people do not always do what we want.

But we think they should, and therein lies the rub. Because that expectation is what is called an unenforceable rule. The more unenforceable rules you have in your head is directly tied to your overall level of happiness. The more unenforceable rules, the less happy you will be.

Unenforceable Rules

As a Community Minister who specializes in helping people using hypnotism, I actually spend a good amount of time helping people to figured out what unenforceable rules they have in their minds, and finding ways to knock that off.

What are some of those rules? Here are a few common ones:

• I can’t get cancer, I’m too (fill in the blank - too young, too healthy, too busy, etc.)

• Everyone should like me.

• My romantic partner should never let me down.

• My hard work should be rewarded.

• People should tell the truth.

• Life should be fair, and many more.

These are all understandable things to desire. The problem is that one cannot control any of the circumstances. Therefore, these rules are unenforceable. You can’t make them happen because you can’t make other people follow them.

But if you think they are really rules, you will be perpetually frustrated. Because they are not actually rules. Something can only be a rule if people have agreed to it. You can’t make up rules all by yourself and then expect other people follow them. All you really have is a list of desires

People get this wrong all the time. The result is we can feel upset, angry, cheated, and a host of other negative emotions that corrode our mental, spiritual and emotional resilience like battery acid.

From birth on we are programmed to be what others want us to be. A lot of the times our parents or other authority figures project their unenforceable rules on us - and that’s the point of the poem “The Be The Verse.” by Phillip Larkin that I shared earlier.

As an example, a parent announces that no godly child should feel sexual feelings or have sexual thoughts - and there is something wrong with any child that does. We see this in the Purity Movement among some religious denominations where young girls are expected to suppress natural feelings to please parents.

Does it work? Nope. It can’t. No matter how sincerely a parent believes in their moral principles they have no meaningful way to enforce those rules on a child. They may be able to control the child’s behavior for a time, but as any kid who has ever snuck out after curfew will tell you - that’s not really going to work. All you get is a pretense. But that does not stop from parents from trying.

That cuff link reminds me not to make that mistake. As a very young person my unenforceable rule was that families would treat family members with affection and kindness. Nope. Wrong on that one. Maybe some families do, but not all of them.  I started feeling way better when I dropped that expectation. Unenforceable rules are a bad idea because all they do is make us feel bad.

The Stamford Forgiveness Project.

Stanford University Medical Center received a grant in the late 1990 from the John Templeton Foundation to explore the meaning and therapeutic benefit of forgiveness. The Templeton Foundation gives grants to people who want to explore the intersection of science and religion.

Obviously, the theme of forgiveness is one of those universal religious themes that can be found around the world. Here in the United States most of us learned about its importance in church school.

As an example, Jesus taught that “If you forgive others their transgressions, your heavenly Father will forgive you (Matthew 6:14)” and Jesus emphasized that the act of forgiveness is unending. One has to keep doing it over and over as intrusive unforgiving thoughts arise - saying we have to forgive “seventy times seven” (Matthew 18:22), meaning that it is an ongoing sort of thing.

In Buddhism we have the whole Loving Kindness theme where one is advised to repeat phrases of forgiveness toward oneself, toward those who have harmed you and those who whom you have harmed.”

As any member of the clergy will tell you, working with someone to help them forgive some perceived wrong done to them is hard. The reason it is hard is that, in my humble opinion, most people do not want to forgive. They want to get even.

Mark Twain said something along these lines. “I have never killed anyone,” he remarked. “But I have read certain obituaries with an amount of pleasure.”

I once talked to a parishioner who said, “I really believe in karma. Problem is that karma can take too long. So I have another plan - I call it ‘sweet revenge.’”

My standard counsel on this is to remember a quote by the 16th century poet George Herbert who said “Living well is the best revenge.” There is a lot of truth to that - I’ve often taken comfort in it as I reflect on how upset the people who tried to hold me back must feel when they learned they couldn’t. So, the best revenge is just to go be happy despite them.

But that is hard to do because of the way the mind works, so I’m interested in any technique that can move the process along. So I was interested in what the social sciences had to say.

Now I am a cynical guy, and when I learned about the Stamford Forgiveness Project I assumed that it was another case of secular psychology stealing ideas from the religious community and repackaging them in order to make a buck.

There has actually been quite a lot of that in recent decades.

However, as I took a good look at what the Forgiveness Project was up to, I came to have a real appreciation for it.

First, they enlisted some of the best researchers and philosophical minds to come up with a definition of forgiveness.

If any of you have ever had to explain the concept of forgiveness to one of your children, you know how hard that is. Kids can be really good at holding a grudge and because children, by definition, do not have mature social skills, they sometimes are cruel to each other.

To just announce to a young person they should forgive someone who had trashed them is not likely to do much. You might not get verbal opposition, but any family therapist will tell you that people do not forget about malicious harm done to them.

The Stamford Project came up with a thoughtful definition of forgiveness that is probably different from any other definition you have encountered.

They held that forgiveness consists of taking less personal offense to the behavior of another.

Remember that. Forgiveness consists of you finding a way to take less personal offense.

You still hold that whatever went down was wrong, blameworthy, even nasty. The definition says nothing about the other person at all. What it says is that in order to be a forgiving person we simply need to not take bad things personally, even while continuing to regard them as bad things.

Headed by Fred Luskin, a psychologist I’ve actually met, the Project focused on the effects of forgiveness on a person’s health and sense of well-bring. The ability to forgive appears to produce statistically verifiable improvements in health outcomes. As a medical hypnotist, that immediately got my attention. A ministerial colleague who also studied this material came up with a wonderful saying about it which I promptly stole. She said “Forgiveness is Badass.”

Forgiveness is Badass.

Now when one says that something is “badass” what one means is that something is uncompromising, powerful and worth noticing. It can be either negative or positive. When my colleague said “Forgiveness is Badass” what she intended to communicate was that it’s not something to dismiss or overlook. In fact, being really good at forgiveness is something of a superpower.

You don’t forgive someone because you’ve decided to let them off the hook, or changed your opinion of how blameworthy their conduct may have been. You forgive someone so that the energy of harboring negative thoughts and feelings stops hurting you. Stops impairing your immune system. Stops raising your blood pressure. Stops clouding your mind and stops preventing you from thinking clearly.

As Mark Twain is said to have put it, “refusing to forgive someone is like taking poison yourself and then waiting for your enemy to die.” It only hurts you. You don’t forgive to help the other person. You forgive to keep whatever happened from hurting you on an on-going basis.

Forgiveness is badass because it makes you stronger and wiser.

Dr. Luskin tells the story of two business partners who discussed buying a block of stock that one partner really liked and the other thought was too risky. They agreed not to buy. But the partner who liked the stock really was convinced he was right and so made the purchase on the “down-low.” When the stock dropped in value the other partner discovered that his agreement with his partner had been broken.

Rage ensued. A long term business relationship was thrown into question. You see, the partner who felt betrayed had an unenforceable rule in his mind - that rule said “business partners must be trustworthy all the time.” Trouble is, they’re not.

Fortunately, the partner in question didn’t act rashly. He cooled down, remembered that even good friends and associates do things we may not like. Such behavior can be tolerated within limits. He didn’t break up the partnership which was otherwise a good partnership.

But how easily it could have gone in the other direction. How many romantic relationships that are basically right relationships go off the rails because someone over-reacts due to an unenforceable rule that their partner didn’t agree to and may not even understand.

Such unenforceable rules keep us from thinking clearly and move us away from good things in our lives that would still be enjoyable if we had been thinking better - free of the emotional fog created by our own unenforceable rules.

Self-Correction

The Stamford Forgiveness Project findings are that we get into this mess by taking things too personally. Here is where becoming more philosophical can help a lot.

It is normal to experience your life as something that is happening to you.

You wanted to go to Disneyland over Christmas but apparently Elon Musk purchased Southwest Airlines without telling anyone, because the performance of that airline over the holiday was a complete dumpster fire. Thousands of flights canceled, including yours. Anyone would feel upset and disappointed. You experience that as something personal. It hurt your plans and prevented your enjoyment of something you had looked forward to.

But actually you got that wrong. The bad stuff that happened was not really something that happened just to you. It was something that just happened. There was nothing personal about you involved. Thousands of others were in the same boat. It was just the way the world was at that time. The airline was not out to get you.

While it may feel otherwise, the reality is that the world isn’t trying to pick on you. The world does not revolve around any of us. The things that happen are just the things that happen. It’s a mistake to personalize them.

While it is natural to weigh events on the basis of how they impact us as individuals, the reality is that what happens really doesn’t have a lot to do with us. Things that happen are mostly driven by things we do not comprehend and cannot control.

Someone might do something mean to you in particular, the cause for their behavior is probably something you have no idea about. It comes out of their own world and their own pain. Their nasty behavior says things about the pain and weakness in which they live. The Stamford Forgiveness Project findings are that it’s a mistake to think that anything mean someone did says anything about us.

Forgiveness consists of you finding a way to take less personal offense.

Stop Trying to Enforce Unenforceable Rules

You can’t change what happened in the past, but you can alter what is happening now and your feelings are happening now, and you’re upset because you have an unenforceable rule.

What someone did may stink, but is there actually a meaningful rule that says people can’t do it? Is there a rule that says someone can’t be a cruel jerk, or a bad parent or an incompetent boss? No such rules exists.

Insisting that no one ever be cruel, or a lousy parent or a screwed up boss is a formula for failure - because there will always be such people.

You think, “No one can be cruel! All parents must be skillful! Every boss should be wise!” Great things to desire, but rules they are not. And no one is obligated to do them. Other people are entitled to be really rotten people if they want to.

As Dr. Luskin would put it, “None of us has the power to expect other people to always do what we want and therefore people often break our rules.”

Instead of focusing your energy on trying to get others to do what you want (an enterprise that will always fail), focus on what you can control. Often this will be to simply dismiss the behavior of others as a sign of their own weakness.

If my supervisor at work appears to be an idiot it makes no sense for me to cling to a belief that there should be no idiots at work. Instead, I can try to not act like an idiot myself. That may not always help, but the odds of it doing so are better.

If I do this I will not take things as personally, which means I will experience less personal offense. That’s what forgiveness is, and it’s badass because you will experience much less emotional pain.

So, I’m a badass and I hope you all become one too. Become a badass at forgiveness by learning how not to take things personally. It is a superpower, and will make you healthy and strong. That is what the writer of the Gospel of Luke promised when he said that if you can forgive, good things will come to you.

“A good measure, pressed down, shaken together, running over, will be put into your lap;(Luke 6:37-8)”

And that’s my sermon.

The Wisdom of Genghis Khan

A Labor Day Sermon at Countryside Church, Unitarian Universalist

September 4, 2022

The Rev. Dr. C. Scot Giles

A Seeker After Wisdom

And so there was a young man who sought to become wise. Learning that there was a skillful teacher of wisdom living atop a mountain, the young man slowly, and laboriously climbed to the place where the teacher sat in perfect repose.

“Oh wise teacher,” the young man said. “Tell me the secret of life.” The teacher looked at the young man for a long time, and then said “The secret of life is like a cup of tea.”

“What!” exclaimed the young man. I dropped out of college to come here. I have climbed up this whole fracking mountain, and all you have for me is that life is like a cup of tea!”

The teacher paused and said, “Well, perhaps life isn’t like a cup of tea.”

We chuckle at stories like this. One interpretation of this story is that sometimes things are not what they seem. The wise teacher you’ve always heard about may not actually know squat. Appearances can be deceptive. Rumors are not always true. Past interpretations of history may be profoundly flawed.

A few months ago I delivered a sermon here about What Rasputin Believed that some people found interesting because it encouraged them to rethink what they believed about a Russian spiritual leader who is usually portrayed as a villain. After that sermon a member of this congregation asked, “What’s next? A sermon about Genghis Khan?”

“Of course not,” I said.

Genghis Khan

His birth name was Temujin, and it is estimated he was born in about1162 and died in 1227 at the age of about 65 years. According to world historian, Marco Polo, he died of an arrow wound from his final battle. There is some variation in the historical accounts. The spelling of his name can be given in a variety of ways, often spelled with a “G” in the West while in Asia and China you will often find it spelled with a CH sound. 

Born to an aristocratic family, his father fell from political grace and died, and Genghis and his mother were reduced to poverty. They lived by hunting and foraging. Angry at this treatment, Genghis realized he must not become bitter. There is an old Mongol saying, ‘the teeth in the mouth eat meat, the teeth in the mind eat your happiness.”

But his mother was a warrior, as some women were in that culture, and she raised her son to be a warlord. He came to believe that a person had some control over their destiny. One could accept drought or search for water. One could surrender to the wolf or fight it and survive. If you accepted defeat, more would come. He rose in power. 

He was the founder of the Mongol Empire, and was called Emperor or Khan in that language. That empire was the largest contiguous empire in the world to this day. It encompassed all of Asia, and it spread all the way to modern Russia and Poland in the West, and to Gaza in the Near East. The only time such an empire has been created.

Every soldier among the Mongols was Calvary and the army moved at lightning speed. There was no supply chain. The Mongols could ride for days, sleeping and eating in the saddle without needing to make camp or build a fire.

Genghis created the Yassa, or the civilian and military code, one of the earliest systems of law. While tales of military conquest and battles abound, Khan enhanced and protected the Great Silk Road, a trade route that linked China, through Afghanistan and the Near East all the way to Rome. 

By bringing the entirety of the Great Silk Road under a uniform political system, he stabilized it and it became a highway of information and learning as well as silk and spices.

He created a uniform system of writing, the Uyghur Script. He enlarged Great Silk Road which fostered the spread of culture, technology and philosophy throughout the world of its day. His government was a strict meritocracy. It didn’t matter who your parents were. You would be judged on your abilities.

The Great Khan had many wives and concubines, as was common among powerful Mongol men. Perhaps inspired by his competent and strong mother, Genghis valued the wisdom and intelligence of women, and often made his wives and concubines leaders in their own right. Scientists tell us that 8% of male Mongols today are his descendants, and that .5 % of all men alive today have some of his genes. As my wife likes to say, “he was a busy boy.” 

Genghis asked to be buried simply without markings, as was the custom of his people. But legend has it that he was actually entombed in a vast complex as fitted the greatest leader in the world of that time. It is said that the funeral escort killed everyone in their path so no one would know the location of his grave - although there is a belief among archeologists that the modern Chinese government has found the site using ground-penetrating radar, but forbid its excavation in an effort to block Mongolian nationalism from rising again. In fact it is illegal in China to speak or write about Genghis Khan in a positive way. 

Genghis Khan believed in and practice religious toleration. Most believe that he practiced the shamanic religion of his ancestors - worshipping the Eternal Blue Sky as a sign of the eternal powers. Just as your personal problems might interfere with your personal happiness, the shaman of Khan’s time taught that such things were like smoke in the Eternal Blue Sky, that would always clear. 

It was an optimistic faith and still lives on. It was practiced by one of my professors at the University of Chicago who kept a Mongolian Spirit Mirror (where one was said to see visions) and a large offering spoon for the spirits on his desk.

But chief among all Khan’s works and ideas there is one theme that stands out. He was a tolerant man. While other world leaders before him had made moves toward religious toleration, Genghis Khan was the first to make it a universal law. 

Rather than establishing an approved state religion and then giving people freedom to not practice it. Khan declared that every person was free to find their own way of belief. There would be no established state religion at all. That was unique. In a way he was the first true Universalist.

Everywhere he went, Khan would summon the religious leaders to meet with him, and he would flatter them until their caution abated. Then he would listen to what they said and noticed what they did. He had no interest in hearing about the divine origin of their scriptures. He judged religions based on the deeds that religion inspired people to do. 

In this is anticipated the saying by Alex Trek, “Don’t tell me what you believe. I’ll observe how you behave and I will make my own determination.” I once said that at a church Board meeting. It didn’t go over well. (It wasn’t this church).

Khan even gave the clergy of various religions in his empire a tax exemption (huzzah!), which he would extend to teachers and doctors as well. We know nothing of his appearance as he forbade any image of him to be created. The statues you may see are artistic imaginings. 

So while the image you may have in mind of Genghis Kahn is of a warlike barbarian who conquered by atrocity. The reality is that he rose from poverty to be the leader of the world in his day. While he fought wars, he also united the world creating a common system of law and written text. He protected and expanded the trade route that allowed civilization to flow from East to West. Was an egalitarian leader who valued the leadership of both men and women, regardless of family or class.

While the religious and political leaders in Europe were calling for bloody crusades, burning people at stakes or drawing and quartering people because they disagreed, the Great Khan was uniting the world, fostering trade, laws, fairness and learning. And everyone could believe whatever that wanted. The wisdom of Genghis Khan was that tolerance of difference among people was a good thing. 

Not what you may have thought. Sometimes life isn’t a cup of tea.

The Influence on American Society

It was Khan’s doctrine of absolute tolerance that enabled him to build his empire. So long as you had some common sense and didn’t challenge established law, you could do what you wanted and believe what you wanted. 

Political scientists call this image of a unified Eastern European power from China to Russia, Eurasia. Khan created the first, and so far only, Eurasian Empire.

Establishing such a political empire is a dream among several contemporary world leaders. There is one school of thought that China hopes to establish a modern Eurasian Empire. 

There is a prominent Russian political philosopher named Aleksandr Dugin. (if that name sounds familiar it is because his daughter, Darya, was recently assassinated). Durgin wrote for years that it is the “duty” of Russia to re-establish an Eurasian Empire united by the vision of a strict version of Russian Orthodox Christianity. He is one of the primary advisors to Vladimir Putin, The political vision of Genghis Khan persists to this day, and is as real as the warships on the Black Sea off the coast or the Ukraine this morning. 

Yet I believe these efforts to re-establish Eurasia in modern times will fail, because the only time that has ever been achieved was under Genghis Khan, and it was built on tolerance. Today’s efforts are built on anything but. 

You may notice some similarity between the religious universalism of Genghis Khan and some of the emphasis on religious toleration upon which America was founded. That similarity is not a coincidence.

Martha Washington gave her husband a biography of Genghis Khan, titled Zingis, by Anne de La Roche-Guilhem. George Washington, a learned person and avid reader, kept the book in his library at Mount Vernon, where it is to this day.

Another biography of Genghis Kahn, titled The History of Genghizcan the Great, by Francois Petis de la Croix, was published in 1710. The book was promoted by Ben Franklin. But the person who purchased the most copies was one Thomas Jefferson, who often bought copies to give them as gifts. One copy, inscribed by Jefferson was presented to his granddaughter, Cornelia Jefferson Randolph on her 17th birthday, and the inscription urges her to study it with care. This book lifted up and stressed the Great Kahn’s Law of Religious Toleration.

As the founders of our nation were in many cases Unitarians or Universalists, know that the philosophical roots of our Republic, and of our Unitarian Universalist faith, were nourished by the ideas Genghis Khan.

Things are not always what they seem. Maybe life isn’t like a cup of tea.

Tolerance As A Value

Back in my day, everyone who was preparing to enter Unitarian Universalist ministry was required to read the two volumes of Earl Morse Wilbur’s A History of Unitarianism. The essence of Unitarian history that Wilbur distilled from his research was that the essential genus that drove our religious movement forward was its faith in three values” Freedom (there was to be no creed), Reason (we decide things by discussion and vote) and Tolerance (one did not try to control what other people believed). Of these values, even the first - Freedom depends on the third - Tolerance. You can only have freedom if people are tolerated and not compelled.

Of the Unitarian values, Tolerance was the foundation. If anyone asks what is one of the main spiritual disciplines of Unitarian Universalism, I’d argue it’s toleration.

The Random House Dictionary defines tolerance as “a fair, objective, and permissive attitude toward those whose opinions, beliefs, practices, racial or ethnic origins, etc., differ from one’s own.” Basically, it is a way you treat anyone you regard as “other” than you. 

It doesn’t mean one just puts up with stuff. We don’t tolerate crimes, unethical or immoral behavior. No one should tolerate racism, sexist or forms of oppression. But I believe we should tolerate disagreement without needing to demonize someone else. 

You can seek to convince, argue, negotiate or agree to disagree. And everyone will have their personal list of things they cannot tolerate, but the shorter that list, the happier you will probably be. The longer that list the more drama you will have.

One of my professors in theological school once said, “You know, churches don’t break up over the great issues of theology. They break up over what color we decided to paint the nursery.”

It is better to be tolerant. You will have less drama. 

At its basis, tolerance implies humility (because I realize I could be mistaken) and respect (because I understand you are the star of your own life and have a right to live it as you see fit, subject to law and ethics). 

History teaches that tolerance is a requirement for greatness.

We see this in scripture. Most of us know the story of the Exodus of the Hebrews from Egypt under the leadership of Moses. The plot is that the Hebrews were enslaved by the Egyptians because of a famine (that’s what the story of Pharaoh and Joseph is all about). They were lead from slavery by Moses into a pilgrimage of forty years.

We know that the literal story of the Exodus in the Old Testament could not be true. When we read the story and do the math, supposedly about three million Hebrews were involved in the Exodus. If that were true it would have devastated the Egyptian economy - but no historical account of such an impact exists. 

Instead, it is likely that some Hebrews escaped from Egypt (“Moses,” is after all, an Egyptian name) and while they wandered in the wilderness they were joined by other nomadic tribes and their numbers grew. 

Some scholars even believe that the ritual verse used in the tribal adoption ceremony was preserved in Deuteronomy 16:5, “a wandering Armenian was my father, he went down to Egypt and sojourned there, few in number, but there he became a great, mighty and populous nation.” As that verse was ritually recited a tribe was adopted into the Hebrews by affirming that narrative.

How did the ancient Hebrews unite so many different tribes into one nation - tolerance. It was commanded in Exodus 22:21, “Thou shalt neither vex a stranger, nor oppress him: for you were strangers in the land of Egypt.”

“Thou shalt neither vex a stranger, nor oppress him,” In short, you tolerate them. That allows people to come together. 

Today

As I look at the world today, as well as at our own great land, I sort of wish we remembered that ancient lesson of tolerance. For that lesson was the great wisdom of Genghis Khan.

We do not live in a tolerant time. Our politics has become tribal, and I have actually listened to people in my consultation room who think a perfectly acceptable solution to the unrest of our time is for half the nation to murder the other half. It’s as if many have concluded that if you disagree with someone you must also fear or hate them. In fact, nothing could be further from the truth. You don’t have to compromise your convictions in order to be compassionate or tolerant. You just need to stop demanding that others agree with you.

But we live in a time where people are contemptuous of each other and they keep expanding the definition of what constitutes the “other.” As I watch the news I have to struggle to remember not to do that. 

And if the other person isn’t tolerant, you show them the way. You don’t take “BS,” but you don’t descend to their level either.

But the ancient victories of Genghis Khan show that success cannot be achieved by division, only by tolerance. Somehow we are going to have to find a way to get along without killing each other. Khan reaches from beyond his hidden grave to remind us that tolerance is a prerequisite for greatness. It’s centrality to Unitarian Universalism is the reason why ours is a great faith, despite its size.

It’s hard. I have to remind myself that tolerance is a discipline that requires practice. But I sincerely believe we get a richer brew when the many voices are allowed to speak. 

Like you, I worry about where things are going in this great land on this Labor Day Sunday. But if there is hope, it lies with tolerance and the people who are willing to practice it.

Unitarian Universalism is a tiny religious community, but we do carry the torch of religious tolerance high, and that is something to be proud of. As our society continues to be troubled, we at least know that we are the heritors of the Great Wisdom, echoing down the years though the founding of our nation to this day. 

And that’s my sermon for this Labor Day. 

What Rasputin Believed

What Rasputin Believed

A Memorial Day Sermon to Countryside Church, Unitarian Universalist

May 29, 2022

The Rev. Dr. C. Scot Giles

Grigori Yefimovich Rasputin

Memorial Day is a time to remember and to put departed people into context. We do this to honor them and to learn from them. 

This morning I want to talk about a person who died long ago, but who I have learned from - so this is a bit of a self-indulgent sermon. I want to remember someone who might surprise you; Grigori Yefimovich Rasputin. It’s probably not going to be what you think.

You undoubtedly have an image of who Rasputin was drawn from the stilted history you may have picked up in school, or from the lurid movies made about him. The image of him in popular imagination really fills the eye, and he makes a convenient foil for all sorts of things.

You may have seen the first Hellboy movie, where Rasputin appears as an immortal, risen-from-the-dead villain serving Old Gods that writer H.P. Lovecraft would recognize. Rasputin also recently showed up in the humorous action movie The King’s Man, where Rasputin is portrayed as a covert agent of an evil mastermind trying influence the outcome of World War I.

There is a West German musical group called Boney M, that created a catchy rock tune called “Ra, Ra, Rasputin” in 1978. Lately it has shown up on YouTube as the background for videos about the war in the Ukraine.

The reality is far different. In fact there is an academic movement to rehabilitate and reconsider Rasputin’s reputation and role in history. In Slavic nations (Russia, Ukraine, Yugoslavia and elsewhere) Rasputin has come to be honored as a spiritual man who was a patron of Slavic national identity. 

You can actually buy religious icons of Rasputin these days (I have a collection) and there are Orthodox Churches where his icon is displayed prominently at the altar. In 2004 there was an effort to formally canonize him to make him Saint Rasputin. It didn’t happen because world events interfered, but I will not be surprised if he is elevated to sainthood within Christian Orthodoxy during my lifetime. So, he was not the person you might think at all. It’s been said that reputation is about what others say about one, while character is about who one is. I’m speaking to Rasputin’s character today. His reputation stinks, although there is improvement.

His Story

Born on January 21, 1869 in a Serbian village, Rasputin would grow to be a big man, standing 6 feet, 4 inches tall. At the age of eighteen he married a childhood sweetheart, Praskovya Dubrovnik who adored him and remained his wife even after he moved away to assume a role with the Russian government. She would bear him seven children, three of which lived: Maria, Varvara and Dmitri. She died the same year he did, probably of a broken heart - what we would now call emotional cardiomyopathy. Keep in mind his long and successful marriage when you hear comments about him.

Rasputin was assassinated by agents of the Russian aristocracy on December 30, 1916 in St. Petersburg.

The legend is that they poisoned him with pastry but he didn’t die from the poison. So they shot him in the head and threw his body in the river. But the autopsy was said to have found water in his lungs, meaning that he actually was not killed by the gunshot, and died by drowning. Quite a testimony to his vitality.

Like so many of the stories about Rasputin, this story is not true. His daughter Maria would write that her father ate only simple food - fruit, vegetables, fish and bread. Any photos you might see of Rasputin surrounded by lavish food represented gifts from admirers that he never touched. He hated sweats and would never have eaten the pastry. The actual autopsy report with became available to scholars after the fall of the Soviet Union showed that he did die of the gunshot, and no poison was found in his system.

I will not take up time to talk about the other sensationalistic things said about Rasputin. There are claims that he returned from the dead, that one of the organs of his body was severed and used in secret rituals, that his children formed a secret society. All of that is nonsense that you can debunk in a few minutes using Google. 

You can also find photos of the mentioned severed organ which is on display in the Museum of Erotica in St. Petersburg, Russia, if you are into such things. However, physicians determined that it actually turns out to have come from a farm animal.

At some point Rasputin spent time training with a heretical branch of the Russian Church who called themselves the Khlysty. They did not honor any sort of clergy and were organized as insular groups of people, with communication between these groups being maintained by traveling messengers called “Flying Angels.” The Orthodox church tried to suppress this form of religious practice, and so the Khystry maintained their faith underground - sometimes literally in caves and basements.

The Khlysty practiced a form of worship they called “rejoicing,” and it involved estatic dancing and speaking in tongues. They also apparently practiced group sex as a form of worship. However, as far as can be determined, scholars can find no evidence that Rasputin was formally a member of the Khystry, although he may have had sympathy for some of their methods. 

The stories that are told about people often take on a life of their own, which pushes away truth. 

That sort of exaggeration happened to Rasputin too. You probably have heard stories that he was a libertine who seduced Alexandra, the Empress of Russia. Serious historians doubt all that. 

Rasputin did hold solons, informal teaching gatherings, in his home. Many aristocratic women attended because they had little else to do in that society, and it was fun to attend because of Rasputin’s “bad boy” reputation. 

But there is no actual evidence of libertine practices or that he ever seduced the Empress, although no one really knows for sure. It was common in that society for aristocrats of both genders to have paramours and mistresses. So maybe; but it wasn’t that big a deal back then.

In reality what we do know is that Rasputin converted to Russian Orthodox Christianity, and stayed in a monastery as a married lay-monk in 1897 when he was 28 years old. In Orthodox Christianity, religious professionals below the rank of bishop can marry, and laity always can.

Rasputin became a Starets. A Starets is not a priest, deacon or bishop. They are not ordained at all. But they are religious workers. 

Probably the closest equivalent we have in our culture would be the Spiritual Director. A Spiritual Director is a person who helps guide people to deepen their spiritual lives, and they can be laity or clergy - it doesn’t matter.

Another parallel would be someone in our own society who was known as a spiritual practitioner, such as some of the more popular teachers of A Course in Miracles, or some of the famous motivational speakers like Tony Robbins. 

Apparently, Rasputin was really good in this role and soon because very popular despite his peasant upbringing and mannerisms - his table manners were awful. For example, he only ate with his fingers and never used a napkin.

His Work

Rasputin was an imposing man of powerful charisma who became known for doing spiritual healing, and that is what brought him to the attention of the Tsar.

The royal prince Alexi, suffered from hemophilia and his blood would not clot properly. At the time this condition was frequently fatal.

Somehow, Rasputin was able to help the boy. We do not know his method of healing, but what is said of it sounds a lot like some form of medical hypnotism to me. It appears he often based his patter in such sessions on nature and nature’s beauty, like a Whippoorwill’s song.

You can probably figure out why I find Rasputin of interest as I am a religious professional who is also a hypnotist. Although I am shorter. And bald. But you can’t have everything.

In fact, hypnotism was a common study among Orthodox clergy at that time, so it is quite likely that is what Rasputin used. There may even have been some sort of connection between Rasputin and the person known as Rexford North who was the founder of the National Guild of Hypnotists, the modern organization of which I am an officer. 

Rexford North, and historians now know that was not his real name, disappeared may years ago under mysterious circumstances. He was Russian. One theory is that the Russian Communist government hunted him down, because they did that to anyone who was connected to the Russian Imperial Court.

What Rasputin Believed

Rasputin used his influence with the royal family to get them to do things powerful people didn’t like.

The common story is the aristocracy thought Rasputin had too much influence on the Tsar of Russia and was causing the war to go badly. But historians suspect he didn’t really have that kind of influence with the Tsar who was making bad decisions all by himself. 

But when the Tsar went to the front lines and left the Empress in control of day-to-day living, Rasputin did have influence over her and she began to advocate for social reforms.

The aristocracy didn’t like that Rasputin, of peasant stock himself, was a regular and popular advocate for the poor, raging that it was sin that there was corn rotting in the Imperial warehouses while the common people were starving because they couldn’t pay the high prices the aristocrats demanded. 

One of the surest ways to get on the bad side of someone who is rich and powerful is to tell them they should be less rich and less powerful. But that is what Rasputin asked the Empress to do. 

Rasputin would also seek to help anyone who was getting a raw deal in that society. He had a pad of notes that he would give out asking people to lend a hand to anyone who presented one of these notes, which he signed adding a small cross under his name. His stature with the common people was such that this help was typically given.

Rasputin knew he could not single-handedly alter the Russian economy or system, but where he could put influence, he did. 

I have often thought that Rasputin would have agreed with the Rev. Edward Everett Hale, a Unitarian minister during the Civil War in America, who said words that I have used as an inspiration myself. 

Hale said, “I am only one, but still I am one. I cannot do everything, but still I can do something; and because I cannot do everything, I will not refuse to do something that I can do.” 

Rasputin always tried to do the something that he could do.

Rasputin also persuaded the Tsar to discontinue the conventional medical treatments the physicians of the time were giving to Prince Alexi. And a good thing too, because we now know that treatments were at best ineffective and probably actually toxic. 

The boy simply may have gotten better because those treatments stopped, and Rasputin was able to get the boy to be calm and let his natural healing response take over.

In short, he was an earthy and compassionate man of faith. Tsar Nicholas II would write that Rasputin was “a good, simple, religious Russian man. In moments of doubt and spiritual torment I love to converse with him and after such conversations my soul is always light and calm.” He would also write, “Better ten Rasputins than one of the empresses’s hysterical fits.” Apparently, the Tsar thought his wife was something of a piece of work.

So there you have the first, second and third thing that Rasputin believed. 

First, that the rich have an obligation to help the poor.

Second, that we should all do what we can to help others, even if we can’t completely see how to fix whatever is systematically wrong.

Third, that natural healing was often best, and soothing away emotional pain often, the finest medicine. 

I give an unqualified yea-saying to all of these beliefs.

When Stuck

All of us will face problems that defy solution. We can’t get the damn computer to work. No matter how hard we try, the relationship fails. We really thought this was the right job but now we find it isn’t fulfilling and we don’t know what do to. We may have a temptation that we find we can’t resist, even though we know nothing good will come of it. We’re stuck and don’t know how to proceed. 

Rasputin believed a way to address these things was to try harder and harder until you became sick of it. Then, he believed you’d get over yourself and see a better way.

It was how he taught people to get over inappropriate romantic and physical attraction - give it to them until you got sick of them. That’s the reason for his sensational reputation. 

Yet the basic idea is when you can’t figure out how to achieve something, you need to reset your thinking somehow so that new ideas can flow. This is the fourth thing that Rasputin believed and I agree - although I suggest a different method.

Rasputin’s core idea was to free oneself from the temptation to sin by engaging in sin until it lost its hold on you. 

To understand that, think about someone who smokes cigarettes. Often such people get started smoking in adolescence because they think smoking is “cool.” It makes them seem adult and sophisticated and they really, really want to do it. However, as the years turn into decades the smoking behavior stops seeming “cool” and may even become embarrassing and something the person wants to stop.

One of the techniques used by therapists today is called Implosion. Now, this is a problematic technique that I do not recommend but some therapists use it. They help you stop smoking by first requiring you to smoke three times as much. After you’ve done that for a while you are so sick from nicotine poisoning that tobacco loses its hold on you.

Got a problem resisting eating ice cream? Try living on nothing else for two months and see how much you like it then. 

This seems to me a little extreme, but it is a fairly common belief in the Christian community that if one commits a sin, but seriously regrets it, God will forgive one for having sinned. I fact there is a priest who said to have written, “I love sinning. God loves forgiving. God and I get along just fine.” 

Rasputin called such experiences “purifications,” and believed that once the intensity of the thing you thought was important fades with repetition, you will see a different way more clearly.

Let me suggest a method that seems to me more reasonable when you feel at your wits end, and are stuck on a problem you can’t solve. It will work better in our society, and I’d like to believe Rasputin would approve of it if he were trying to function in our world, because he clearly was not a stupid person.

The Stoic Point

There is a principle in ancient philosophy called “The Obstacle is the Way.” It was first expressed my Marcus Aurelius, one of the greatest emperors of ancient Rome. 

“The impediment to action advances action. What stands in the way becomes the way.”

What he meant by this is that when you confront something in your life that brings your progress, goals or dreams to a halt, that is not a bad thing. It’s not a bad thing because discovering that something isn’t working is valuable, as it serves to point the way to correction. 

The correction comes in two forms. First, you might figure out another way to achieve your goal. Second, the obstacle might show you that you really don’t want that goal as much as you thought you did.

Clement Stone, one of my guides in life, said in a book, “Got a problem? That’s good.” It’s good because perhaps you can find a way around that problem instead of just doing more of what isn’t working.

I think a far better way is to realize that often our obstacles show us the way instead. Either we need for find a different path forward, or realize the path forward was not really a path we should be on.

This is much less likely to land you in trouble.

So, what Rasputin believed - four things.

If you are well off, you should use some of your resources to help others. Be compassionate;

Do what you can to help others - even if there is a limit to what you can do as a single person;

Natural healing is often best, and soothing away emotional problems is the best therapy; and 

When you don’t know what to do, find some way to reset your thinking rather than doing more of what isn’t working. Find a different way to your goal or decide that you need a different goal. The Obstacle is the way. A reframing of Rasputin’s fourth belief.

Not bad ideas, from the mind of a man who was not himself bad, but who had a really bad reputation. And so I remember him on this Memorial Day. I hope you find his counsel of interest.

And that’s my sermon, in these troubled times.

Happy Memorial Day.

Resurrexit

Resurrexit

An Easter Sermon, Countryside Church, Unitarian Universalist

April 17, 2022

The Rev. Dr. C. Scot Giles

Pleased To Be Here

I am delighted to be in the pulpit on this Easter Morning, and I express my gratitude to Rev. Hilary for giving me this opportunity on her final Easter Sunday at Countryside Church.

My sermon is title Resurrexit, an old Latin form of the word “resurrection.” This is my re-thinking of the classic resurrection mythology that has emerged from the Christian tradition. As many of you know I base my Unitarian Universalism on a radical reading of scripture that horrifies most people of conventional beliefs, but which I find helpful.

Of course, as Unitarian Universalists, we have a different take on such things. While our movement emerged from the Judeo-Christian tradition, we grew beyond it and incorporates insights from many religious, spiritual practices, philosophies (both theological and secular), anthropology and other disciplines. 

Our holiday celebrations generally cleave to the cultural calendar in the United States, but we celebrate the festivals and insights of many traditions here, and the symbolism of Easter as we know it may include the resurrection story about Jesus of Nazareth, but also includes the pagan traditions of antiquity, and we celebrate the insights they offer as well.

In fact, we sometimes mix these things together in a way that is confusing for our young people. When I was in theological school the professor for religious education, the Rev. Jean Starr Williams, told a story about something that happened to her. I believe the story is original to her, although I’ve since heard others recount it too. She told of asking a member of the church school at First Unitarian Church in Chicago (which at the time was across the street from the school) about the meaning of Easter. 

The young person looked at her with a big smile and informed her that Easter was when Jesus came out of his tomb, and if he saw his shadow that means we would have six more weeks of winter. Not good. 

However, it is the resurrection story that troubles me. 

If we were to ask most people about the central claim of the Christian tradition, almost all of them would respond that it is the claim that Jesus of Nazareth rose from the dead, and that therefore death is not the end, and all can look toward an afterlife of some sort.

I disagree that is the true meaning of the story of resurrection.

Even if Christianity were to disappear, I think the story of the empty tomb on Easter morning would still have a place in the deeper psychology of our culture because of the psycho-spiritual way the human mind works when we suffer loss.

The Story Is Not Unique

Despite the fact that many would say that the claim of a resurrection after death is unique to the Jesus story, that is not in fact correct. 

The belief in a resurrection of the dead occurs in Islam as well as Christianity, but that only scratches the surface. 

In ancient Babylon, the agricultural god Tammuz also was said to have risen from the dead.

In ancient Egypt, the god Osiris was resurrected, and the Pharaohs claimed to be descended from his son, and decorated their sarcophagi with images of Osiris in the hope that the Pharaoh would also rise from the dead.

The great religious anthropologist Sir James Frazer in his authoritative book on Comparative Religion, The Golden Bough recounts resurrections of the ancient gods Baal, Melqart, Adonis, Eshmun and Dumuzi as well as Tammuz, Jesus and Osiris. 

Ancient Greek religion recounts no fewer than seven other resurrections. Even in Buddhism - a religion that has no concept of a God or a well-defined afterlife, there are legends of spiritual leaders who returned from the dead. The Bodhidharma was said to have returned from the dead, and the Chinese Chan master Puhua told the story of a man named Fake, who was said to have risen on the third day after his death, when his coffin was found empty.

The folklore of Hinduism contains many resurrection stories. In the epic Ramayana, there is even an account where the god Rama commands the resurrection of a large number of — monkeys.

Shaman, Pagens and Heathens, both ancient and modern are quick to point out that nature resurrects itself every Spring after the decline of Fall and the seeming death of Winter.

And this is not to mention the stories of Zombies, Vampires or the people who have their dead bodies frozen in the hope that science will find a way to resurrect them in the future.

There is actually very little that is unique in the resurrection story of Jesus of Nazareth.

That’s not what I think is important in the idea of a resurrection. Because in my life I have experienced resurrections, and so have you.

Stuff Happens

When I was in training to become a chef I managed to burn a tray of pies. In fact, I didn’t burn them. I incinerated them. I completely forget they were in the oven until the smoke alarm went off. In Biblical tradition it was a burnt offering.

I mentally prepared myself to get fired. But the Executive Chef came over and looked at me and the tray of pastry - really a tray of ashes at that point - and said, “Don’t worry. Stuff happens.”

Stuff happens. You know about stuff, right? Our life is rolling along and then, unexpectedly, everything goes to blazes. We get fired. Someone gets sick. Our kid gets picked up by the cops. The IRS says they have a few questions about our tax return….whatever….

Bad things happen to good people all the time. In ancient days if something bad happened to you, the religious leaders assumed that meant you had sinned or were a bad person.

Psalm 1:3, says:

“(Faithful people) are like trees planted by streams of water,

which yield their fruit in its season,

and their leaves do not wither.

In all that they do, they prosper”

The Book of Proverbs is even more direct in Proverb 13:21:

“Misfortune pursues sinners,

but prosperity rewards the righteous.”

The problem with these verses is that what they say is manifestly untrue. Faithful people do not always win. Prosperous people are not always righteous, and being righteous is no guarantee of prosperity. I can understand why people would want to believe that because it makes life seem fair, but only a naive and superficial person would think that belief is actually true. 

We do not have to look far to find examples of healthy and wealthy reprobates, or examples of poor people who obviously and sincerely do their best to be good to others. 

As time went on, it became obvious to the ancient scribes that the original writers of the Psalms and the Proverbs were full of it. In fact, the Book of Job (a book about the unearned suffering of a good person) had to be written as a corrective. Bad things do happen to good people. And everyone screws up some of the time.

The Dark Night of the Soul

In the 16th century there was a Spanish mystic named St. John of the Cross. He was a Carmelite friar who was a student of St. Teresa of Avila, another great theologian. A poet, he wrote a book-length poem called the Dark Night of the Soul.

According to St. John of the Cross, the Dark Night of the Soul was a phrase that captured all the hardships that people typically experience in their lives. And everyone experiences some, because Stuff Happens.

He believed that there were several steps that one went through as one dealt with whatever Dark Nights of the Soul came into one’s life. However, the proposition St. John of the Cross wanted to advance was his belief that dealing with problems was the way one advanced spiritually. 

He believed every great spiritual figure had become great by working through the hardship when really Bad Stuff happened to them.

Psychotherapists have known for a long time that people are shaped more by the bad things that happen to them than the good. Good stuff is easy. It doesn’t call anything into question - our beliefs, lifestyle, philosophy, personal presentation, etc. go on without interruption because there is no reason to believe they are not effective if everything is going well.

However, as we encounter problems and hardships we have to adapt to change. If things are not working we need to figure out what might work better. 

With feedback from the world calling what we do into question, we alter who we are, and what we do, looking for a better path. 

That is what the Dark Night of the Soul is all about. You encounter a problem. That makes you change. With a bit of intelligence and maybe some luck, the change improves things. You come out the other side of the Dark Night a better person.

Stuff happens. We all undergo Dark Nights of the Soul. But they can make us better.

The Stages of Loss

In 1969 there was a Swiss-American psychiatrist Elisabeth Kubler-Ross, working at the University of Chicago Medical Center (a place where I personally trained as well). On the basis of working with people who knew they were terminally ill Kubler-Ross proposed a model for how human beings deal with the experience of loss or the expectation of loss. 

She believed that there were five stages a person went through when trying to cope with any loss, or any anticipation of loss. The states were:

• Denial - You can’t believe a loss will happen;

• Anger - You get mad that you have to deal with this. Because it’s unfair!

• Bargaining - You attempt to make sense of the loss, or find some way to try to control it;

• Depression - You become sad as you realize that you can’t control the situation as completely as you would like; and finally

• Acceptance - You bow to the inevitable and realize that the loss will be something you have to go through.

Kubler-Ross’s model quickly become popular, and you could even take a pricy training to become certified as a Bereavement Specialist (never underestimate the power of therapists to figure out how to make a buck). 

The initial understanding of these stages were that they were a prescription. At the time she first proposed them the mental health community seized upon the stages as if it were infallible. There was something wrong with you if you didn’t go through the Stages of Loss in the precise order. 

I recall watching one doctoral student object to what a patient had said. The student’s objection was that the patient shouldn’t be depressed, because they had not been angry first.

Kubler-Ross’s model has been challenged in recent years, but it does still have value. We know the stages are not absolute, nor is the order of them. But as a rule of thumb, when a person deals with a loss of any kind - any kind of Dark Night of the Soul - generally speaking those five stages will be involved somehow. So I believe Kuber-Ross was more correct than she was wrong when she did this pioneering work.

Resurrexit

But I think that Saint John of the Cross was also correct. He was correct about the Dark Night of the Soul opening one to personal growth and spiritual wisdom as one moved through it. And this is the hidden meaning in the world-wide mythology of resurrection.

When I student at the University of Chicago Medical Center I noticed that people dealing with loss, or just people dealing with the reality the Stuff Happens, did often go through something like the Kubler-Ross stages. But I think Kubler-Ross stopped her study too soon.

You see, when a person has suffered a loss or a reversal - Bad Stuff - they work their way toward acceptance. But that is not the end of the matter. I noticed that after some time posses, and it can be as much as a couple of years, something else happens. 

The very best qualities of the people we’ve lost, or the important learnings from the job or relationship that ended, begin to show up in our lives.

As an example. I used to care very little about poetry. Heck I was a philosopher and a logian. I didn’t do those word games. But growing up I had a close friend who loved poetry. She was forever quoting it, and I sometimes had difficulty figuring out when she said something if that was her original thought, or if she was quoting a poem.

That relationship ended, as many relationships do. I experienced loss. Then, about a year later I noticed that poetry began to interest me. These days I’m fond of poetry. 

What happened is that one of the best parts of the person who was no longer in my life - her love of poetry - began to assert itself in me. Her love of poetry resurrected into me after the relationship ended.

I’ve seen this now many times. People find that their personalities or habits start to take on the good things about a deceased romantic partner, or a partner who had moved on and was no longer around.

This is a special gift that people bestow upon us as they exit from our lives. They take any bad habits or bad stuff with them, and frequently we’re glad that is gone. But the best things about them don’t disappear. Instead, those things start to find their way into our lives. 

The best qualities of the people we have cared about will resurrect themselves into our lives in time when we have suffered a loss. I think this is the deeper meaning in the resurrection mythology.

The bad that people do dies with them, but the good somehow remains, showing up in the lives of everyone who knew them in some way. This is how we grow as spiritual beings - we benefit as the best parts of others we have lost are resurrected into our lives

I had a church employee who was chronically late for work at a congregation I served when I was a parish minister. The lateness really burned me because I knew his wife always made it a point to be punctual. They divorced. He missed her. Within six months his chronic tardiness vanished. He became as punctual as she had been. 

This works for situations too. 

If one gets fired, or quits a job, you will find that if there was anything good about that job, it will start to show up in your present-day work habits. You may become more focused or organized. Whatever was good about the situation resurrects into your life. 

Stuff happens. We all experience Dark Nights of the Soul, but resurrection is real. No, it’s not about dead bodies walking around. It’s about personal growth and personal change. Resurrection happens in our minds and hearts.

The empty tomb on Easter morning is a symbol of this psycho-spiritual reality.

In the reading today, the disciples of Jesus were said to have walked on the road to the village of Emmaus, and met someone they’d never seen before. But as they talked they found in that new relationship a resurrection of the energy they had only previously enjoyed in the presence of their rabbi Jesus. 

So they said “he is risen.” And I believe he was. He was resurrected into their hearts because that is what the human mind does after a loss. The best - of people or situations - lives on by manifesting in us with a new power. 

Resurrexit. Bad Stuff doesn’t take the good out of the world. Instead, the mind does it’s spiritual alchemy and the good stuff goes inside of us.

There is an empty Easter tomb. It represents all the loss we have experienced ourselves. It’s empty, because whatever good it contained is making it’s way into our hearts and minds.

And that’s my Sermon. Blessed Easter.

Amen.

What Makes You Unique?

What Makes You Unique?

Community Ministry Sunday, Countryside Church, Unitarian Universalist, February 6, 2022

The Rev. Dr. C. Scot Giles

Are You Possessed By A Demon?

Are you possessed by a demon? I hope so. If you are not, my hope is that following this sermon you will want to be.

Being possessed by a demon is not supposed to be fun - I’m sure many of you remember, as do I, the 1973 movie The Exorcist, where actress Linda Blair portrayed the young victim Regan MacNeil who was possessed by the demon Pazuzu (who, in mythology, was actually a minor god in Babylonian society and the King of the Wind). 

It was quite a movie! The critics hated it but audiences flocked to it, and some of the scenes were so remarkable that viewers suffered emotional breakdowns just watching it. There were heart attacks and miscarriages, and a psychiatric journal proposed a new diagnostic label - cinematic neurosis - to describe the emotional effects of the movie. The city government of several cities tried to ban the film from being shown. 

This is the classic trope about demonic possession. One is taken over by an evil, supernatural intelligence and does its bidding. Traditional church doctrine proposes that evil women, in league with dark spiritual powers, had the ability to inflict such possession on others, and that is what the Malleus Maleficarum was all about.

Now, I’m being a little deceptive here. When I say I want you to be possessed by a demon, I do not mean the sort of thing The Exorcist movie was all about. Not that kind of demon.

Demons v Daemons

The word demon is derived from the Latin word daemonium which means a “lesser spirit,” and not necessarily an evil one. 

Technically, that term encompasses all spiritual beings some systems of theology believe exist, and some daemoniums were thought to be holy and pure. They were called Angels, which means Messengers, only if there were specifically charged with some mission from God. Otherwise, the same being was considered a daemonium - think of them as Angels who had the day off.

As Christianity evolved and church leaders felt fear was necessary to ensure compliance with church doctrine, the terminology changed. 

Angels were good spirits and the daemonium, shortened to demons, were evil spirits. 

Priests then began to claim that if you did what the church said, you would be protected by Angels and perhaps go to Heaven when you died (“Pie in the sky, by and by when you die,” to quote an old Labor Movement hymn). However, if you didn’t do what the priests taught, then you would go to Hell where you would be punished eternally. 

Comedian George Carlin has a routine about this. It goes…

“Religion has actually convinced people that there's an invisible man living in the sky who watches everything you do, every minute of every day. And the invisible man has a special list of ten things he does not want you to do. And if you do any of these ten things, he has a special place, full of fire and smoke and burning and torture and anguish, where he will send you to live and suffer and burn and choke and scream and cry forever and ever 'til the end of time!….But He loves you. 

You get the idea. However, worse than even this prediction of a fate of sulfurous brimstone, was that fear that demons might take you over while still alive and make you do bad things. Demonic possession.

Well, I want to go back beyond the Latin understanding of demons because there was actually an original Greek understanding of the word. The Greeks spelled it similarly, but they tossed in an “a” so that the word was spelled “daemon.” To the ancient Greeks a daemon was a spirit who fell somewhere between God and humanity. They could even be the ghost of a fallen hero. 

As the concept evolved it came to mean the inner driving force of a person, sometimes also called a person’s “inner genius” or “Higher Self." It is part of what makes a person unique.

The word still gets kicked around. Novelist Philip Pullman uses the term daemon to describe the human soul in the form of an animal in the His Dark Materials trilogy, and some computer programming languages use it to describe a process which runs in the background. 

Your inner daemon is what I want you to consider today.

Your Inner Daemon

What is it about you that makes you unique? Increasingly, mental health workers are discovering that having a sense of one’s own inner core is vital to being happy, and they have some ideas of how you can go about figuring that out.

The reason this is important is that many believe that we easily lose track of who we really are. We grow up, we take on responsibilities and roles. There are social expectations and we are supposed to conform to them. We are expected to dress within certain parameters, behave within certain parameters, live in a manner dictated by convention - and our personal preferences be damned. 

And then we walk around feeling unfulfilled in our lives. We know something is missing but can’t identify it and if we step outside of the mold we’re criticized or made fun of.

Poet William Wordsworth puts this in his poem “The World Is Too Much With Us.”

“The world is too much with us; late and soon,

Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers;—

Little we see in Nature that is ours;

We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon!”

The Inner Blueprint

Many of you know that my ministry is a healthcare ministry. I work with people who have received a life-changing diagnosis like cancer, AIDS, heart disease, autoimmune or organ failure. 

The method I use for this is hypnotism, but the theory that directs how I use it comes from the work of Dr. Bernie Siegel who did his fundamental research at Yale/New Haven Medical Center and has published any number of best-setting books about his findings.

Dr. Siegel has what he called his “blueprint hypothesis.” His discovery was that people living with cancer, indeed, people living with any chronic, life-changing, diagnosis, did better if they felt fulfillment in their lives.

Consequently, the whole approach became helping people with this sort of issue discover what changes they needed to make to their lives in order to feel more fulfilled as persons. If they made those changes they almost always did better medically.

Dr. Siegel proposed that we all have an “inner blueprint” for the sort of person we are supposed to be. Some claim such a blueprint comes from a spiritual source, while others take the view that it arises from our deeper psychology. But in all cases, figuring out your inner blueprint and then sculpting your life to work with it, will result in greater happiness. 

A whole methodology arose using conversation, testing, dream and drawing interpretation and other techniques to help a person discover their inner core, and then methods (including hypnotism) were used to help people shift to match what that core was about.

Research, including that from my own I CAN program which was based at LaGrange Memorial Hospital for more than thirty years, showed significantly improved medical outcomes with this approach.

Sometimes the changes people made were extreme and obvious - for example relationship or occupational changes. Other times the changes were modest - a patient acquired a hobby or some other focus. But in all cases they changed to better conform to their inner blueprint.

One patient told me that when she figured this out she felt she had found her “superpower.” 

There Will Be Objections

Obviously, the task of figuring out your “inner blueprint” was the same task as deciding what your “inner daemon” or core identity is all about. I want to help you do exactly that right now.

One caution. When you decide that you will make adjustments within your lifestyle, habits or temperament, others are going to object. They like you just the way you are. Even if you are miserable, others have you pigeonholed as one sort of person and will resist any attempt to climb out of that pigeonhole. Family Therapists call these efforts “change back maneuvers” and they are common.

“Gee…I wonder if that therapist is really helping you.” Translation, “I don’t like the way you are behaving and want you to stop.”

“You know - there are other people depending on you.” Translation, “Please stop trying to please yourself and instead try to please me.”

As understandable as “change back maneuvering” may be, it is always wrong. You should be the star of your own life. Your loyalty should be to yourself first, and your responsibilities to others (while real) need to take a reasonable back seat to that. Resist the many social pressures to conform.

I wasn’t kidding about starting this sermon out by taking about the traditional church and its warning about demon possession - facilitated by wicked women or otherwise. The traditional church wants you to do what it says you should do, and become the sort of person it wants you to be. So it warns you about paying attention to the wisdom inside of you. Your inner daemon.

Performer Sammy Davis, Jr., put it nicely in the song he wrote titled “I’ve Gotta Be Me.” 

“Whether I'm right or whether I'm wrong

Whether I find a place in this world or never belong

I gotta be me, I've gotta be me

What else can I be but what I am….

I'll go it alone, that's how it must be

I can't be right for somebody else

If I'm not right for me."

Amen brother. You sang the truth. We all need to know what our inner core, our inner daemon, is and we need to do what we can to be “right for ourselves.” Chips fall where they may, you don’t want to waste time following a false path that isn’t really you.

Finding Your Daemon

So how do you figure out what you inner core, your inner daemon, is if you have not already?

Philosopher Robert Greene gives us a clue in his recent book titled, Mastery. He wrote:

“Some 2,600 years ago the ancient Greek poet Pindar wrote, ‘Become who you are by learning who you are.’ What he meant is the following: You are born with a particular makeup and tendencies that mark you as a piece of fate. It is who you are to the core. Some people never become who they are; they stop trusting in themselves; they conform to the tastes of others, and they end up wearing a mask that hides their true nature.”

The idea is to refine what has been hiding in you all along. One of the first places to discover that, is to think about your childhood likes, desires and preferences. What did you enjoy? What fascinated you? What made you different from your peers? Who were your childhood heroes? What did you do well?

The answers to these questions come from a deep place. Greene suggests that if answers do not suggest themselves to you because you’ve buried those answers too deep. So ask someone who knew you as a child. What about you stood out? 

There is a kind of reinforcement that psychologists call “shaping.” It is what happens when there isn’t a big event that changes one. Instead, there are a thousand and one little, tiny reinforcements and disconfirmations from others intended to push you to be who they want you to be. 

Parents has always done this to their children. Teachers do it to their students. Lovers do it to their paramours. Therapists do it to their clients, and ministers do it almost nonstop to everyone.

But who were you originally, before society and family got to you and tried to shape you into what they thought you should be like?

They may have meant well. Friends and roommates did their best to convince me not to follow my harebrained idea to become a clergy person, and worse yet, a hypnotist. They thought they had my best interest at heart. But they were wrong.

It’s okay to feel dismay at people who tried to get you to follow a false path. Feel anger toward any who tried to force you.

Your early inclinations can provide a clue as to what your inner daemon is like.

One wag put this by saying “Embrace Your Weirdness.” Embrace what distinguishes you from others.

I mentioned this do my wife of almost forty years as I was composing this sermon and her response was “I can see that would be comforting for you, because you’re one of the oddest people around,” 

She meant that as a joke (I think), but I get the point. From my earliest days I have never given a damn about social convention. From my days as a motorcyclist to my profession as a ministerial hypnotist, I am, frankly, odd. But I am happy.

And I think that is great. I think that is one of the reasons I’ve lived as long as I have, when I wasn’t supposed to. My inner daemon and I are friends.

You are a one-time creation. Even if you have an identical twin somewhere your DNA is unique to you because it has been shaped by your experiences (that’s called epigenetics). When you were conceived, the cells that successfully fertilized the egg that became you were in a competition, and exactly one was victorious over all the others. You began as a winner because you were different from everyone else. 

If your early experiences do not help you, ask about what you take delight in now. Ask yourself what you are good at now - no matter how small. Indulge that. Assert yourself against any who would stop you.

It’s Never Too Late

Think about the times when you did what you really enjoyed and how you felt. Think about the times when you did what others wanted, and how you felt then. Trust your own insights more, and the insights of others less.

No matter where you are on life’s journey, there is always a way to be more like the person you were created to be. You may already have made decisions that will prevent you from making a radical change in your circumstances, but I am here to tell you that you will nonetheless benefit by making some small change. Even if you are late in life, it’s never too late to make yourself more happy than you were.

I’ve seen, many times, how even people close to the end of their lives can make their remaining time better by caring less about how others want them to behave, and caring more about what actually brings happiness. 

Even if what makes you happy is binge watching movies on the Hallmark Channel, your own mind is telling you by the realization that there is something there that is important for you.

I had a client for whom precisely that was the case. After watching the Hallmark Channel from her hospital bed she realized that her inner hunger was for stories that ended happily and well, and this allowed her to reflect on the stories she remembered about herself. 

Like most people she remembered the bad stories better. When she realized her inner core longed for a different sort of story she wrote down her memories about the things that had gone well for her. She realized there were more than she’d noticed. Everything improved, and she made sure that from that time forward she put her energy into things that might plausibly go well, because she was, at core, an optimist for the rest of her days.

Are You Possessed?

So, are you possessed by your inner daemon? Do you have a sense of who you were created to be and can you find a way to make even a piece of that real now? I hope so.

Happiness doesn’t happen to us. We have to resolve to seek it because it will not occur on its own. We need to do the inner work and not let ourselves be pushed around by the expectations of others.

And that’s my sermon.

Regret Free Living

Regret Free Living

A Sermon to Countryside Church, Unitarian Universalist

The Rev. C. Scot Giles, D.Min.

September 5, 2021

The Black List

In 2016 when I was the President of the Unitarian Universalist Society for Community Ministries, the professional association for UU community clergy like myself, the officers of the Board got together to ask me if I ever watched the TV show The Black List on NBC. 

I had not actually seen the show because I don’t really watch a lot of television. That’s an occupational hazard when you work in a helping profession. You work when other people don’t - evenings and weekends are your busiest times. 

“Well, you really should,” they said. “Because you are just like Raymond Reddington,” who was the character played by actor James Spader on the show. 

I really didn’t know how to take that. When I checked I discovered that the character of Raymond Reddington was a murderer and criminal mastermind on the show. So saying I was just like him was not exactly high praise from a group of ministers. 

But I started to watch the show, and I did sort of get it. Reddington is drawn as the classic “bad boy” character, who lives by his own code and is willing to ignore the rules of society if they don’t match. It’s what we used to call the “outlaw” type when I was a motorcyclist, and I while I am not have have never been a criminal mastermind, I do sort of fit the mold of living by my own code.

On a recent episode of The Black List (season 8, episode 21 for those who want to see it) the actor, speaking in the character Raymond Reddington, said something that inspired my sermon today. He said, “As a rule I don’t live with regret…”

That got me thinking, because I don’t live with regret either. So that is what I want to talk about today.

To Err Is Human….

In 1711 English poet Alexander Pope wrote in his An Essay on Criticism, that “to err is human.”

“Ah ne’er do dire a Thirst of Glory boast, 

Nor in the Critick let the Man be lost!

Good-Nature and Good-Sense must ever join;

To err is Humane; to Forgive Divine.”

Most often this quote is cited to encourage forgiveness, as it’s plain meaning is that everyone makes mistakes so we really should cut each other some slack. 

While that is certainly true, the phrase “to err is human” is true just on it’s own. In fact, I would champion a stronger formulation - “all living things make mistakes.”

Human learning is not like machine learning. When you program a computer to do something you already know how it should be done, and you set up the machine to do exactly that and nothing else. Provided it is functioning properly, the machine never makes a mistake. It can’t.

Computerized Artificial Intelligence works differently. With it, a computer program learns that same way that a living organism learns. 

Among living creatures learning starts at birth, and functions by trial and error. 

Some lessons, for example, touching a hot stove, are learned immediately. Some require multiple experiments until we figure things out. All learning requires experimentation.

Later, we may experience education, where lessons learned by others through their experimentation are passed to us, so we don’t have to repeat their mistakes and can benefit from their experience.

The thing to get is that learning is rooted in trial and error, either personal trail and error or by absorbing accounts of the trial and error of other people. We don’t come set up to do things exactly right. We have to make mistakes or we learn nothing. 

A professor of mine years ago compared the process of human learning to the flight of a missile toward a target. The missile has a guidance system. If the missile is on target toward its goal, the guidance system is off. If the missile gets off target, the guidance system activates and adjusts something so that target acquisition is recovered. A missile does not travel toward its target in a straight line. Instead, it zigs and zags as the guidance system turns on and off. 

That is to say the missile makes mistakes as it heads toward its target, and its guidance system functions by correcting those mistakes. That is how Artificial Intelligence learns, and it’s how all living creatures learn.

Hence my formulation, focusing here on living creatures instead of advanced computers, that “all living things make mistakes.”

The result is that every one of us has a long list of memories about where we messed something up. We have this list because that’s part of being alive. All learning comes to us by some form of trial and error. All learning comes to us by trying something out, messing it up, and hopefully learning from those mistakes.

The problem is we feel regret.

Regret

Regret is the feeling of sadness we get when we think of something that either didn’t go as we hoped, or we think of an outcome that didn’t manifest because of choices we made.

Regret is a physical process. It arises from activity in the orbitofrontal cortex of the brain (the front lobes, right behind the eyes). Brain scans of sociopaths show they have little activity in that area of their brains. Most of us have a lot.

Sigmund Freud thought regretful feelings were healthy. He believed such feelings were the mind’s goad to correction. Given that sociopaths and psychopaths apparently feel no such impulse, he was probably right about that. 

But too much of anything is a bad thing. I recall a popular Science Fiction television show called Babylon Five, were there were a race of invisible aliens who could control a person’s behavior. They clung, invisibly to one’s back and stretched invisible tentacles into the mind. 

Having a lot of regrets about your life is sort of like that. You carry them around. Others can’t see them but they are there, and they do control you by forcing you to hide who you really are, what you really think, and what you really hope. It destroys your self-confidence. What is self-confidence if not the willingness to put yourself forward in the expectation that you will be sufficient to meet the challenges and do okay.

Psychologists tell us that regret is one of the most common emotions. In a recent study published by the American Psychological Association, titled “Commonly Named Emotions in Everyday Conversations,” by Susan Shimanoff (https://psycnet.apa.org/record/1985-00832-001) it was found that regret is the second most frequently mentioned emotion in everyday talk, love being the most frequent.

The most common regret people mentioned was romantic regret, either about the “one who got away,” or “the one who didn’t get away but in retrospect we wish had.”

Another theme was education, either not have gotten an education, or regret at not having studied something that one realized would have been fulfilling - majoring in business administration instead of art, as an example.

Self-Blame

Another common theme is regret for roads not taken in life. We all make choices about what to do and what not to do. It’s natural to wonder if perhaps things might have gone better if we chose what was behind Curtain B instead of the one we did choose. That’s the meaning of the poem, Maud Muller by John Greenleaf Whittier. What might have happened if the Judge had gotten off his horse and let himself spend time with Maud. What might have happened if she had walked over to him and smiled instead of politely brushing him off.

There are some things we cannot know. One of those things is what might have happened. It’s always possible for us to have done something other than what we did do. But it’s an open question if the result would have been better or worse. 

“What might have happened” will always be locked away behind a mystery we cannot solve. We can only deal with what we did do and giving energy to thinking about what might have happened is a really effective way to make yourself miserable. 

As psychologist Tara Brach recounts in her book Radical Acceptance, self-blame shuts down the learning centers of the brain which results in our becoming less than we might otherwise have become. 

In 2019 hospice nurse Bronnie Ware published a book that everyone should read, titled The Top Five regrets of the Dying: A Life Transformed by the Dearly Departing. She recounts that having listened to people list what they regretted about their lives as the end neared, she was motivated to change her own course.

The five regrets:

“I wish I had the courage to live a life true to myself, not the life others expected of me.”

This one really resonates with me because I’ve heard it so often among the more gravely ill of my clientele. 

There is an old saying that comes out of the human potential movement - “You can never get enough of what you don’t really need.” That is, you don’t need the approval of other people. You can actually do what you want. But if you mistakenly believe you need the approval of others, you will never get enough, because there will always be people who will withhold approval in order to manipulate you.

If I had wanted the approval of my family of origin, I would have fulfilled their, clearly articulated, script for my life. They wanted me to become a janitor at a bakery. The shop was called Oronoque Orchards Bakery, and they make great pies and brownies to this day. Practically the whole family worked for owners. I was supposed to as well. Sweeping up. Other, more important future roles at the bakery were assigned in the family imagination to other people they valued more. I’m glad I decided as a boy that they were full of it and not worth taking seriously. 

“I wish I had the courage to live a life true to myself, not the life others expected of me. I get that. I’m glad I didn’t do that.

A second regret nurse Ware reported was “I wish I hadn’t worked so hard.” For a workaholic like me, this one is difficult to hear. But I’ve heard it said again and again. Work isn’t everything. Career isn’t everything. Don’t neglect the people and things you love.

“I wish I had the courage to express my feelings,” was a third common regret. When the end is near, many feel remorse for the things they left unsaid. 

“I wish I’d stayed in touch with my friends,” came in fourth. The fifth was a profound regret. “I wish that I had let myself be happier.”

That last was one of the insights of the Buddha. The cause of suffering is craving things you don’t have, and perhaps will never be able to have. It is a better path to want what you have been able to give yourself, and be content with that - to celebrate that. I often read in the book Walden by Henry David Thoreau. 

“However mean your life is, meet it and live it; do not shun it and call it hard names. It is not so bad as you are. It looks poorest when you are richest. The fault-finder will find faults even in paradise. Love your life, poor as it is. You may perhaps have some pleasant, thrilling, glorious hours,….I do not see but a quiet mind may live as contentedly there, and have as cheering thoughts, as in a palace.”

To live without regrets is to free yourself from all of these things. It probably isn’t possible to be completely without regrets. Freud was right, regret does help goad us toward self-improvement. However, it is certainly possible not to live with unnecessary regrets, and I have two magical spells to share with you that can help you do exactly that.

Harry Potter

Unless you’ve been living inside a deep cave for the past twenty years, you know the tales of Harry Potter by author J.K. Rowling.

A young boy who was secretly a wizard, discovers his magical abilities and goes on to avenge his parents and save the world from domination by an evil power.

There actually is a real Harry Potter, in that J.K. Rowling has since said that she based the character on a young boy she knew named Ian Potter who lived four doors down from her own childhood home, and who had a real gift for getting into mischief. 

While the characters in the books by Rowling and the movies based on them are delightful, and recalled many of us to our own childhoods, the real fun of the stories is the magic spells.

Everyone who is magical in that fictional world carries a magic wand of some sort and by flicking it with just the right touch while reciting an incantation in dog Latin, can make special things happen. Like the levitation spell the character Hermione loved, “Wingardium Leviosa,” which actually comes from the Latin root words, “wing” and “levi,”  meaning “flight” and “lift.” respectfully.

Well, there are psychological and spiritual magical spells, and I’ve seen more than one magic wand on display in a counselor’s office as a way of illustrating exactly that.

Language controls conscious thought. If you do not have language for something it is almost impossible to think about it. This is why theoretical physicists have to invent whole lexicons to describe subatomic particles that cannot be directly observed. If they don’t have words for them they can’t think about them.

This is true of a lot of things. The German language has more words for describing objects moving in space than almost any other language. Perhaps that is why German culture has produced magnificent engineers. The French language has more words for describing nuances of emotion than other languages, and so French culture is sensual, emotional and psychologically rich. 

Words are important. In our culture, patriarchy stunted the linguistic development of most males. We’re told from the time we are young boys not to talk about our feelings - “don’t be a sissy,” or “man up.” The result is most males get to adulthood and do not have a rich emotional vocabulary and have trouble explaining how they are feeling, and too often, stop trying - typically to the dismay of their Significant Others.

But then there are spells. I want to share two spells with you today that can help deliver you from unnecessary regret. They are not mine. They come from the work of Ormond McGill, who was called during his lifetime the “Dean of American Hypnotists.” 

Because he did not possess academic accomplishments and made his living as a stage performer, few outside of the hypnotic community know of him. He died in 2005 at the age of 92, and he was the person who inspired me to study hypnosis when I saw him perform when I was ten years old.

I would come to know Mr. McGill. He taught me what I am about to teach you, and the lesson transformed my life.

The First Spell

The very first spell has three words. Up To Now.

Whenever you find yourself ruminating on a regret about something that you attempted that didn’t turn out as well as you hoped, instead of thinking “I failed,” or “I messed up,” use this spell. Say “Up to now, I’ve failed at that,” or “up to now, I’ve messed that up.”

By adding the all-important qualifier, “up to now” you remind your own deeper mind that the future is actually open and that the past has no power to control your future except the power you give it by allowing it to influence what you do in the present.

That fact that you messed the recipe up ten thousand times when you tried to make a dish, doesn’t mean that the next time you try will also fail. It could be spectacular. That’s happened in my kitchen more than once.

The fact that you have not been able to have a great long-term romantic relationship with someone in the past, doesn’t mean that the next one will also fail. It could be good. It could be great.

The spell, “Up To Now,” if you will use it consistently will resolve a lot of the regrets you may have about things that have gone wrong in the past.

I Learned A Lot From That

The second spell is longer. It has six words. Those words are to say to yourself “I learned a lot from that.”

This is the spell I use to deliver myself from shame and embarrassment about things I’ve done that didn’t go the way I’d hoped. 

I tried something and it flopped. I had an inspiration that actually turned out to be dumb. I fell for a trap set for me by someone who wanted my humiliation. It’s possible to over-focus on such things to the point where the regret about them paralyzes one.

Instead, when such recollections come to mind, I add “I learned a lot from that.” 

And I did. I learned what I should not do again. I learned to be more aware of my surrounding and the motivations of the people I am with. I learned how to be a better friend, or lover, teacher or student. I learned a lot by zig zagging my way to the target.

The Spells Work

I’ve done things I wish had gone differently, but I’ve learned from every one of them, and therefore they have made me better than I was. 

I’ve had my share of failures, things I’ve tried and up to now have not figured out. But eventually I may get them right and when I do I’ll be ahead of the game.

Up To Now. I Learned A Lot From That. Not quite as fancy as Herminone’s Wingardium Leviosa, but they’ll do because these spells work to banish regret.

And that’s my sermon.

The Calm Light of Mild Philosophy

The Calm Light of Mild Philosophy

A Sermon by the Rev. Dr. C. Scot Giles

Countryside Church, Unitarian Universalist

February 7, 2021

The Value of Philosophy

Do you have a favorite play? For me, it’s The Tempest by William Shakespeare. Growing up where the Shakespeare Festival Theater was located, I’ve seen almost all of the Shakespearian plays on stage.

Did you know that George Washington had a favorite play? It was called Cato by Joseph Addison. Written in 1712, it recounts the last days of Marcus Porcius Cato Uticensis, the Stoic Philosopher who resisted Julius Caesar’s tyranny, and died for it. Here is the relevant quote:

The speaker is Marcus, one of the sons of Cato, speaking about the dictator Caesar:

— Thy steady temper, Portius,

Can look on guilt, rebellion, fraud and Caesar,

In the calm lights of mild philosophy; 

I'm tortur'd, even to madness, when I think  

On the proud victor: every time he's nam’d

(Act 1, Scene 1)

In its time, this play was famous. It was so famous in the 18th century that most educated people could quote it by heart, and if you recited a passage, everyone would recognize it without you having to say where you first heard it. 

Some historians consider the play the literary inspiration for the American Revolution. Patrick Henry got his famous phrase “give me liberty or give me death,” from the play, and Nathan Hale coped his famous “I only regret that I have but one life to give for my country,” from it too.

George Washington loved the play and had it staged for his troops before the Battle at Valley Forge. He was fond of quoting one particular line, and said it when speaking about his return to private life after the Revolutionary War was over. He said he was now “Free from the bustle of a camp and the intrigues of court, I shall view the busy world ‘in the calm light of mild philosophy,’ and with that serenity of mind, which the Soldier in his pursuit of glory, and the Statesman of fame have not time to enjoy.”

“In the calm light of mild philosophy.” That speaks to what I call the Golden Way - the essence of ancient Greek and Roman teachings about the best way to live, that has also become my personal philosophy of life. It goes by the name Stoicism, and it means learning to use our gift of reason to temper emotions and thereby make better decisions.

It’s actually a bit similar to Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, and that’s no accident. The person who created that system of therapy, Albert Ellis, was a student of Stoic Philosophy.

It’s also similar to the 1932 Serenity Prayer of the Protestant theologian Reinhold Niebuhr:

God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change,

courage to change the things I can,

and wisdom to know the difference.

The similarity is no accident. Niebuhr was steeped in Stoic Philosophy and apparently copped the idea for the prayer from Epictetus, who taught around the year 100 CE. 

In this sermon, I want to speak about Stoicism - both because it is my personal philosophy and one that I am finding especially relevant in our troubled times, and to encourage those of you who find it interesting to look at it some more.

In our time we use the word “stoic” incorrectly to mean someone who is without emotion. But in ancient times it described a rich philosophy that dated to the third century BCE. 

Supposedly founded by Zeno of Citium in Athens, it took its name from the Stoa, or the porch of the Acropolis where Zeno used to hold classes. The most famous of the Stoic Philosophers are Marcus Aurelius, once Emperor of Rome, Cato, Senica, Zeno, Epictetus, and many others. 

Most of these philosophers lived and thrived during the most politically difficult times of the Roman Empire, including the reigns of Nero and Caligula, emperors who were “malignant narcissists.” If you’ve never heard that diagnosis before, you might want to learn it because it seems to be becoming more common. It’s a combination of narcissism in someone who is also a sociopath. Yet the Stoics found a way to be happy and productive, even when Rome was ruled by malignant narcissist with an iron grip on the government.

It’s Dull

I once shared my view of life with a young lady I was dating back in college with disastrous results. I told her that I wanted to live “in the calm light of mild philosophy,” and she looked at me as if I had grown antenna and become a cockroach.

“How incredibly dull!” she said. 

Trust me, that is not what a young man wants to hear from a young lady he is dating. Things didn’t go well. 

But I do understand why she said it, and I completely forgive her for promptly dumping me. Living “in the calm light of a mild philosophy” does sound dull. It’s not at all the sort of thing that gets people inspired.

Promethean Mythology

What gets people inspired are heroic, Promethean themes.

Prometheus was the ancient Greek god said to create humans from base clay, and then stole fire from the gods and gave it to humanity along with the gifts of civilization and learning. He was punished for this transgression by the King of the Gods, Zeus, but expresses no regret for his act.

We get off on that sort of flashy heroism! We’re supposed to “Climb every mountain,” and to “fight the unbeatable foe,” to get into our spaceships and “boldly go where no one has gone before!” 

We love the superheroes we read about in graphic novels or watch in the movies. We cheer Bruce Willis in Die Hard and its four sequels (or is it five now?). We groove on Jack Ryan and John Wick. Heck, we even like it when David slays Goliath with nothing but his slingshot.

But I don’t suggest you emulate them too closely. Generally, speaking, acting in a Promethean way is a bad idea.

Let me be clear, there are people who do individual acts of heroism and they are admirable. They are the medical personnel, firefighters, law enforcement officers, the astronauts and test pilots. They are the courageous statesmen and stateswomen who vote their conscience even though it may being a reprisal. The world is better for such people. 

That said, such brave urges are best tempered with common sense and good training, and in the case of actual heroes, nearly always are. 

Don’t mistake fantasy for reality. Real life is not a movie. Fighting “the unbeatable foe” is a really great way to get your behind kicked, because that’s what “unbeatable” means.

I don’t know about you. But I’d rather win, and that almost never happens if you don’t think before you act. Even people who do heroic things usually have made decisions about their values, and those considered values determined their behavior. 

Heck, in the story of David slaying the giant Goliath we read that David carefully picked up five smooth stones, evaluating them to be sure they would be good ammo and fly true. He had practiced with his slingshot and presumably was a marksman. He didn’t just wing it on the spur of the moment using an unfamiliar weapon.

The Inner Meaning

I regard most mythology, ancient scripture or otherwise, as actually containing a hidden thread beneath the surface structure of the story. The mythology of our species is full of stories of people who lived, and sometimes died, heroically. This is true of even anti-heroes like the protagonist of the movie John Wick. The stories have staying power. Why?

Surely they are not advising us to go get our behind kicked by fighting for a lost cause, or doing something flashy that actually leaves us worse off. 

Instead, I think these stories exist to transmit something really wise. That wisdom is the warning that if you set your goals too low, you will never become all you are capable of being. While you don’t want to stretch yourself so far that you break, some stretching is a good thing. 

Stories about heroism encourage us to consider that kind of stretching. They remind us to not settle, at least not to settle for too little, and to keep trying to be a better version of ourselves. Even if the risk doesn’t pan out in the end, still there is something that comes to us by having made the attempt, provided the attempt was reasonable. 

But if you do something that isn’t reasonable and thereby fail, no one considers you a hero. They consider you foolish.

Thinking things through rationally will almost always lead to better actions, bringing better consequences. 

That’s what I neglected to mention when I told my date that evening when I said I wanted to live my life “in the calm light of a mild philosophy.” 

How To Win

The play about Cato is a tragic play. Cato dies having gotten on the wrong side of Roman politics. His comrades decry the “guilty world” where good people like Cato perish and bad people like Caesar prosper. 

But those comrades do go on to a better day. They take with them the example of Cato, and held him up as a model of the best way to live. Cato made decisions rationally and in pursuit of what he regarded as noble. Making rational decisions is the basis of the Stoic Philosophy. While there are never any guarantees, I’ve come to believe the Stoic way is smart.

Stoicism

The goal of Stoic Philosophy is to be happy and at peace. It isn’t based on the elimination of emotion. Rather, it is based on the regulation of emotion. One thinks about everything in terms of three bright categories.

First, consider what you can control. Pretty much this will be your own thoughts and behavior. Decide your values and act accordingly.

I can’t control that, for example, my supervisor at work is an idiot, or that the leadership of the company I work for is bad. I can control how I respond to that. 

I can sit at my desk and fume, to no purpose, or I can use use the energy as motivation to polish up my resume and networking. 

Alternatively, I can decline to become part of the problem in the company by keeping my head down and doing my best to shine. 

Other people cannot make you angry or sad. They do not have that power. We are the one who chooses to respond with anger or sadness, or chooses to respond otherwise, after the initial rush of feelings has past.

I sometimes tell my clients that the difference between reacting emotionally to something, and responding rationally, is about ten seconds of silence and a couple of deep breaths. That’s it.

I control my behavior, and endeavor to do those things that will actually serve me well in the longer term.

I had a client who failed to do this. His family shafted him out of an inheritance. He became rageful and took it out on his spouse and kids. It was all he could talk about for a long time until his wife threatened to take the kids and leave.

That was when he realized that what happened showed him how manipulative his family was. He realized that manipulative people are usually worthless to those in relationship with them. He put a boundary in place so they couldn’t hurt him again, and reconciled with those who actually loved and cared for him - his spouse and offspring. His siblings squabbled among themselves and were miserable. My client went on to be okay. He never got the inheritance - that was beyond his control. But he stopped hurting himself and his family because of that.

First, consider what you can control, and make good choices about that.

Second, consider what you can influence, although not control. Pretty much this will be your behavior with other people in families, groups or nations. 

Voting in an election would be in this category, as are making charitable donations, or apportioning volunteer time. Also in this category is setting a personal example in work, home, in relationships and family about the way people should behave. 

Your influence may or may not carry the day, but we’d surely have a better world if we all were intentional about the impact we have.

Finally, consider what you can neither control nor influence, and stop trying to control or influence those things. 

Trying to do that is the equivalent of trying to beat the unbeatable foe. It’s not going to work. Instead, see if you can use the struggle to make yourself into a better version of you.

A whole world of hurt comes to people because they get this wrong - and a lot of people do.

Life isn’t fair. You can be a wonderful person and still die in a car wreck because of a drunk driver. The highway doesn’t care about your personal worth. Bad stuff will happen, and usually there isn’t much we can do beyond controlling ourselves and influencing what we can. 

In Stoic Philosophy this is call Premeditato Malurum - Remember that bad stuff will always happen. Try to make the best of it when that takes place.

Like any helping professional I hear people whine. It always sets my teeth on edge. One of my parish colleagues put a little sign in her office that said “We do not serve cheese in the minister’s study. Please take your whine elsewhere.”

I don’t think her parish ministry lasted too long, but I think she was on the right track. My wife, Lindsay, Minister Emerita after a forty year ministry to our sister congregation in Geneva, Illinois, used to have a “hour glass” in her study that she’d picked up at the Bristol Renaissance Faire. The sand in the glass would run out after ten minutes. She used to turn it over and tell troubled parishioners that she would listen to them whine for ten minutes exactly. Then, they had to talk about what they were going to do about their upset - change something or to use it to develop a positive part of their character. That’s a Stoic idea.

Whining is when someone complains powerlessly. They can not do anything about what they are upset about, but they complain about it anyway. It is the destruction of mood, relationship and health.

Complaining about what you cannot change is a formula for making you miserable. 

Considerations

It’s awful that you and I are living though a global pandemic that has disrupted everything. 

There are things we can control, like mask wearing and social distancing. We can get vaccinated when that’s possible. 

There are things we can influence. We can support our legislators and health professionals so they can do their jobs. We can push for much better treatment of first responders and essential workers.

But we can’t do anything about the fact that we are living through the disruption of a global pandemic. 

Short of the American Civil War (I almost said the “First American Civil War,” whoops), it’s really tough to live through such a dark political time in our nation. 

We can act responsibility, seek to de-escalate conflict, push to elect better legislators - things we can control or influence. But we can do little about the macro events of the pandemic or the national political turmoil.

Instead, we can take these and use them to do some work on ourselves. 

Can we learn to get by with less if our income has been impacted? Can we discover how to help others who need a hand up because they’ve become ill? How can we enrich our home lives so the food on the table is better (even if not restaurant quality). Can we make our home entertainment or workouts more engaging?

How can we deepen philosophically as people living through a dark time? 

Those are the Stoic questions. Don’t complain about what you cannot change or influence. Instead, use the circumstance to hone yourself to a sharper edge.

I tell my clients that it may be really tragic that you may have come down with cancer or some other life-changing diagnosis. But given that you have, and you cannot change that, how can you make this time of treatment a time where there are some good things for you?

One of the most important books in cancer care is Cancer as a Turning Point, by Dr. Lawrence LeShan (now in its fourth edition). It was one of the most influential books on my professional and personal development as I live with a life-changing diagnosis myself. His discovery was that if someone used their time of diagnosis as the motivation to make long-desired life changes, they almost always did better medically. They didn’t just rage or collapse into sorrow about the diagnosis. They realized they couldn’t do anything about it. Instead, they used it as the opportunity to work on themselves. 

When I was a parish minister I used to say to hurting parishioners that it’s awful that your beloved wife, husband, partner or child may have died and you are now alone. But as that has happened, how can you experience yourself as a survivor who honors the memory of the one you lost by becoming a better person? 

Consider what you can neither control nor influence, and stop trying to control or influence those things. Do not fight, or rage against, the unbeatable foe. Instead use that issue to make yourself or your circumstances better. You will spare yourself a lot of pointless pain, by living in the calm light of a mild philosophy.

And that’s my sermon.

——

You can learn more about Stoicism, and it’s related themes of Skepticism and Epicureanism from my four “Golden Way” videos. They are available for free on my YouTube Channel, which you can access through my website at www.csgiles.org.

Also, see https://dailystoic.com

Be Ye Perfect

“Be Ye Perfect”

A Sermon to Countryside Church, Unitarian Universalist

September 6, 2020, Labor Day Sunday

The Rev. Dr. C. Scot Giles

It is debatable if Unitarian Universalism is still what it once was - a Christian heresy, or if it has come to be something of its own, detached from its historical origins. What is not debatable, is that Unitarian Universalism inherited from Christianity a lot of its world view.

In generations past, members of Unitarian and Universalist congregations gathered and recited on every Sunday an affirmation taken from a sermon given by the Unitarian minister James Freeman Clarke in 1886 (please overlook the dated sexist language). 

They would stand and say:

"We believe in The Fatherhood of God, The Brotherhood of Man, The Leadership of Jesus, Salvation by Character, and The Progress of Mankind, onward and upward forever.”

Some congregations deleted the word ‘and” then added:

“…to progressively establish the Kingdom of God, onward and upward forever.”

I was told by the first UU minister I knew, who was alive when that affirmation was used every Sunday, that it was customary for the members of the congregation to point upward with their forefingers when they said the words, “onward and upward forever.” It must have been a great deal of fun.

However, over time that affirmation fell out of favor. 

At the time when our people used this ceremonial verse, they believed that humanity had turned a corner and things would just keep getting better - “onward and upward forever.” 

They thought that there was a hierarchy of progress through time, so that as time passed, things would improve. Just like a chef creates a broth and then lets it simmer, blending the flavors and creating a better and better broth, the world would get better the longer things went on. 

Slavery was thought to be a thing of the past. The scriptures of the world religions had been translated into English, and so new spiritual insights were appearing. 

Technology was advancing and there were passenger aircraft, fast trains and better communication. Consumer goods rolled off production lines in factories so items that had been luxuries were commonly available. 

Mass farming was producing a bounty of food so that many believed hunger would be a thing of the past.

And the wars! The world had fought the “war to end all wars” and surely lasting peace was at hand. 

Historians began to advance something called the Whig Theory of History in the 1930s and 40s. The historians saw an inevitable progressive movement in history. The world went from barbaric tribalism, to warlord leadership (such as is described in the Book of Judges in the Old Testament) to authoritarian monarchy leading to a rise in reason, the development of science, ever greater liberty culminating in constitutionally determined governance. 

To their minds it was only a slightly optimistic exaggeration to believe that the “Kingdom of God (whatever that was) was arriving. 

As Freeman Clarke put it, “"the one fact which is written on nature and human life is the fact of progress, and this must be accepted as the purpose of the Creator.”

God was on the side of progress, and evolution had a divinely directed purpose!

Our spiritual ancestors thought the dinosaur fossils being discovered were evidence that evolution wasn’t a blind process. Instead, evolution was evidence that living creatures were constantly being improved by nature and nature’s God. 

Clarke called this the “coming theology.” A world filled with perfected people was on the way!

In churches of all denominations a hymn by John Addington Symonds titled “These Things Shall Be was sung (it was in the Unitarian Universalist hymnals of the time too).”

These things shall be: a loftier race

Than e'er the world hath known shall rise

With flame of freedom in their souls

And light of knowledge in their eyes.

They shall be gentle, brave, and strong,

To spill no drop of blood, but dare

All that may plant man's lordship firm

On earth, and fire, and sea, and air.

Nation with nation, land with land,

Unarmed shall live as comrades free;

In every heart and brain shall throb

The pulse of one fraternity….

Then another world war. The Holocaust. The development of weapons of mass destruction, the rise of authoritarian regimes, the waves of immigration from Italy and Ireland, the Red and Yellow Perils. The warnings of a “Silent Spring” as an out-of-control technology poisoned the world. Global Warming. People began to realize that our optimism about an inevitable, God-directed upward progress was probably mistaken.

Perfectionism

What inspired this mistaken belief in an inevitable and relentless progress was a belief system that goes all the way back to the very beginnings of the Christian tradition. It was the belief that not only could things keep getting better, but so would people. The claim was that with sufficient effort, one could become perfect in all important ways. Just as society could do it, so could people.

The belief that perfection can be achieved is an old religious doctrine. It is actually stated in the New Testament. “Be ye therefore perfect, even as your Father which is in heaven is perfect. (Matt 5:48).”

People came to call this the “infinite perfectibility of humankind.” 

A number of religious communities embraced this idea. The largest was the Roman Catholic Church, and those of you who were raised in that tradition no doubt remember the heavy emphasis on guilt and sin. 

That emphasis was there because perfection was held up as the ideal. Had a more humane ideal been selected, like “always try to be the best version of yourself” there wouldn’t have been a lot that would make people try to control their behavior. 

But if the goal was perfection, and you were less than perfect, why then there were lots of opportunities to get you to change your behavior. The church would tell you how. 

On the Protestant side it was the founder of Methodism, John Wesley, who proclaimed the idea of human perfectibility. However, his church would eventually move away from it, because so many people found it demoralizing. 

But many still clung to the belief they could aspire to perfection. When you see fundamentalist congregations that call themeselves “Wesleyian” or include “Methodist” in their title, like the African Methodist Episcopal Church, what they are indicating with that is they still think people can be made perfect as Wesley taught. 

But there is a problem here.

A Bad Translation

It turns out that Matthew 5 is a bad translation.

In the original language Matthew 5:48 doesn’t actually say, “Be ye therefore perfect, even as your Father which is in heaven is perfect.” That is how it was understood, and people acted upon it, but that was simply religious people taking a bad idea and running with it.

What Is Should Have Said

The New Testament was written in Greek, which, by the way, was not the language that Jesus of Nazareth spoke. When we open an English Bible what we are reading is a translation of the Greek into English. The word translated as “perfect” in the phrase, “Be ye therefore perfect,” is the Greek word “teleios.”

In the modern understanding of ancient koine Greek, the word “teleios” means “end,” “whole” or “purposeful.” We talk about things being “telelogical” when we want to imply they have a purpose or goal.

Therefore a better transition of Matthew 5:48 would go something like, “Be purposeful and whole, even as your Father which is in heaven is purposeful and whole.”

That’s quite different isn’t it? Instead of being told we should be perfect in all things, we are instead counseled to have a purpose for our lives - and to strive for a holism in integrating the various parts of ourselves. 

I can dig that!

Unfortunately, Western Christianity and therefore much of Western Civilization went a different way. Indeed, they went crazy.

Scripture as Psychology

As some of you know I based much of my theology on a radical reading of world scripture, the Bible included. I understand these books not as making empirical claims about what the universe is like. Instead, I consider them books of psychology that describe how the human mind works and understands its world.

Of all the psychological counsel given in scripture, the notion that people can make themselves perfect, or that striving for perfection is reasonable, has got to be one of the dumbest things any book could contain. 

Consider the harm that it did.

Families - Parents raised their children in an intolerant way, demanding an inhuman degree of emotional and behavioral control, because the parents thought if they pushed hard enough their children could be perfect children.

It is written in the Book of Proverbs:

“Whoever spares the rod hates their children, but the one who loves their children is careful to discipline them (Prov. 13:24).”

Society - Punitive laws intended to punish people were devised, instead of lifting people from the circumstances that caused them to be law breakers. The belief that if you hurt someone enough they would change, is at the core of our entire prison, legal and even our drug rehabilitation system. 

After all, they could be perfect people if they tried hard enough…or so it is assumed. 

And if they failed to be perfect; if they had a moment of weakness and slipped, stopping short of 100% performance, then back to jail, pay the fine or get out of the therapeutic program.

Occupation - How many of you have had to submit to a performance review where you were rated on a scale of one to ten, or one to one hundred, with ten or one hundred described as “perfect?” If so, you are probably aware the Human Resources Department will usually have set a policy that no one can be rated “perfect” or in the most generous case, “perfect” in a maximum of one category - no matter how good a job you actually did.

The “perfect” score option is there, not so you could be rewarded, but as a way to pressure you to sacrificing even more for your employer - to push you harder to give more work for the same pay.

What an incredible darkness the idea of human perfectibility introduced into our lives. 

Worse, many people internalize this oppression. They buy into it and start to beat themselves up for being imperfect. Every time they make a mistake or flub something due to a misunderstanding or other normal human reaction, they subject themselves to an unrelenting flow of criticism. 

I am often amazed at the way people talk to themselves - with zero empathy, zero forgiveness. If they ever spoke to anyone else that way no one would have anything to do with them.

If this describes you, you’ve bought the con. You have internalized the idea that is used by others to manipulate you, and they no longer have to manipulate you, because you are doing it to yourself.

Every single time you feel bad because you fell short of the goal of being perfect or doing something perfectly, you bruise your own spirit. Over time, those bruises become festering sores on you spirit. The price of them will be your mental, spiritual and physical health.

“Be ye perfect…” Bullshit.

A Scam

The idea of human perfectibility may have begun as a bad translation of a historical text, but it was embraced by the elites in society and the heads of families because was a scam from the start, and they found the scam useful. “Be Ye Perfect…” is just another one of those religious memes that arose, and was perpetuated, because people in power found it useful to manipulate other people. There is a lot of that sort of thing in religious history.

A Fool’s Errand

You see, perfection is a fallacy. The only things that can be perfect are those things that exist in the realm of definition. I can give you the definition of a perfect circle. But outside of that definition, perfection does not exist. We can define a perfect circle, but no human alive can actually draw one nor can any machine.

Even if you designed a circle-drawing machine with parts made from the hardest materials and set a computer to craft a drawing of a circle, the drawing would still be imperfect. 

The nib of the pen used would be wearing down at the atomic level every time it moved, and the line it made would not be exactly the line it made before. The bearings in the mechanism would also wear at the atomic level with each motion made, and no matter how well-calibrated at first, the finished circle would be flawed. You wouldn’t be able to see it with your eyes. But it would be flawed.

Nothing that exists can be perfect.

In 1889 by international agreement a definition object of the standard kilogram was made. It was a solid cylinder, height equal to its diameter, made of platinum-iridium alloy, the hardest material known. The standard kilogram object was kept at the International Bureau of Weights and Measures laboratory at Sèvres, France. An exact copy was also made at the same time and stored at a separate location for safekeeping. It was said to be a perfect copy in case something happened to the original. Perfection had been achieved with a perfect object and a perfect copy.

However, in 1989, a century later, it was discovered that the prototype kept at Sèvres was 50 micrograms lighter then other copy of the standard kilogram. The perfect pair of cylinders were no longer perfect. The differences were caused by changes in humidity, the friction of air particles over the surface, irregularities in the gravitational field of the two locations, loss of atomic nuclei due to age in some of the alloy, and other tiny disparities.The two objects became imperceptibly different the instant they were created. It just took one hundred years for the changes to be noticeable. No object in this universe can be unchanging. In the realm of reality, nothing can be perfect. 

In response, and to avoid the problem of having the kilogram defined by an object with a changing mass, the General Conference on Weights and Measures agreed in 2011 to redefine the kilogram not by a physical artifact but by a fundamental physical constant - Planck’s constant - when expressed as a unit of mass. 

That’s far more complicated than a cylinder in France, but it is perfect, because it is a definition, not an existing object. Nothing that actually exists can ever be perfect. 

Beating oneself up for being less than perfect it foolish, because everything that actually exists is less than perfect. It isn’t theoretically possible for perfection to be achieved in any existing domain of discourse. Trying to be perfect. Holding yourself accountable to do things perfectly, is a fool’s errand. That means if you attempt it you are a fool.

The Price One Pays

But the price we pay for not understanding that the ancient command to “be ye perfect” was a mistake from the moment it was written, is vast. 

How much unhappiness has come from people feeling they have failed because they were not a perfect employee, professional, son, daughter, parent, partner or spouse? How many people feel shame and guilt because their best efforts fall short of perfection? 

Yet it’s impossible for anything or anyone to be perfect. When people try anyway, they either beat themselves up for failing at an impossible task, or worse, they pretend to be perfect by concealing their imperfections and appearing to be other than as they are.

You’ve met them and so have I. Nothing is ever their fault. The responsibility always was elsewhere. They may even claim that the things they say or write, even their telephone calls, are “perfect.”  This results in personal, mental and spiritual fraud and hypocrisy as it’s not even theoretically possible to be perfect.

I used to fall for this. I come from a family where I was disliked and scorned. Because everything I did, good grades, success at my after-school jobs, even getting an award in history given my by High School, was dissected, critiqued and dismissed. Because all of these thing were necessarily less than perfect, as everything is, there was always something that could be used to throw some shade my way.

I struggled with this throughout my young adulthood and it did a heck of a number on my self-esteem. Then a girlfriend read a passage to me from the work of the French writer Voltaire, “the perfect is the enemy of the good.”

If you try to be perfect, or do things perfectly, you will fail because that is not possible. Perfection cannot exist in the physical realm.

In that failure you will loose the freedom to enjoy doing things well, or the satisfaction of being “good enough.” Good enough isn’t bad.

In fact, in my early years as a Unitarian Universalist minister I had a card under the glass top of my desk. It said, “Done is Good.” Even done imperfectly, it was far, far better to have something moving forward that to have it stagnate because I couldn’t figure out how to get every aspect right. That was an important understanding because, believe me, parish clergy are routinely criticized no matter what they do because everything they do is necessarily imperfect. 

I will close with the words of a favorite pop philosopher of mine, Ashleigh Brilliant. He said, “I may not be totally perfect, but parts of me are excellent.” And that’s fine. I am not perfect and neither are you. I do not do things perfectly, and neither do you. But we can be excellent, if only in part. That’s good enough.

May we all take that to heart this Labor Day.

And that’s my sermon.  

Radiance

Radiance

A Sermon to Countryside Church, Unitarian Universalist

The Rev. Dr. C. Scot Giles

May 24, 2020

Back when our congregation routinely met in person, we’d end our worship with something Rev. Hilary calls “Sharing the Light.” When we do this I typically grumble and say something along the lines of “what she said.” For a while I would instead look at the people around me and say “the weirdness in me honors the weirdness in you.” But on the whole that didn’t go well as people began to look at me with alarm.

My grumbling about this is because I am a highly introverted person, something of a curmudgeon and I don’t like being told what to do. However, I don’t dispute Rev. Hilary’s idea that people do have an inner light and that it is good to be reminded about this. My sermon today is about that inner light, although I reserve the right to continue in my curmudgeonly grumbling.

The Ripple Effect

Those of you who know my ministry know that I am a Board Certified Consulting Hypnotist specializing in medical work. In the system of hypnotism I practice there is something we call the “Ripple Effect.” That is, when you start working with a client on some issue you open a door to the unconscious mind. Our unconscious minds are vast and deep, and also basically benevolent. It wants to help one. So when the hypnotist opens that door, the mind will use it for other things.

For example, I may be working with a client to bring excessive weight down. That gets accomplished, but other things start to happen too, as the positive change about weight loss ripples out and causes other positive changes. Relationship or occupational issues may get resolved, mood may elevate, energy levels soar - despite the fact that none of these things were ever addressed by the hypnotism. 

That why being a medical hypnotist also makes me into a life coach. Change started in one area of a client’s life quickly generalizes.

Where the human mind is concerned, you can never do just one thing. Everything is connected to everything else. Every action creates multiple reactions.

This is true about our interactions with other people as well.

Radiance

If you behave toward other people in a kind and generous way, you set an example that encourages others to do the same. That’s your radiance. A positive energy you project into the world by the example you set. 

However, it works in reverse too. If you decide to act like a creep, you legitimate that kind of behavior for others. That’s why current Presidential example has had the effect of coarsening our civil life together as citizens of a Republic, and I fear his negative radiance will be affecting our nation for many years.

In the 1920s there was a pidgin saying that came from the folklore of Mali in West Africa. It was “Monkey see, monkey do.” What that describes is the tendency among monkeys and those who share a common evolutionary ancestor with them like us, to mimmic the behavior of others. It refers to a process where a creature repeats the behavior it has observed, without really understanding why, or understanding the consequences of that behavior. 

So if you are raised by racist parents, you will probably have a tendency to become racist yourself, as your parent’s dark radiance contaminates you. Ditto for gender, political or any other form of intolerance. It’s why people who grow up in a home where lawlessness is accepted (for example, the members of the family routinely shoplift or deceive), typically are prone to that behavior themselves. 

We are mammals. We are born in a relationship and are pre-disposed to have relationships all our lives. That’s part of the reason why so many resist social distancing even during the time of a global pandemic. It’s also the reason why when someone is in jail, the threat of solitary confinement is the worst punishment you can threaten someone with. People would rather risk bodily harm that have no contact with anyone for a long period of time.

To me, the ethical implication of this is that we all have a moral imperative to improve our weaknesses and to enhance our strengths, because none of us is ever alone. What we do affects others and so there is a responsibility to consider how our behavior affects the larger whole. Bettering yourself, betters others. 

While it is absolutely clear that none of us can successfully control others, we certainly do influence them, and they in turn carry on our influence by those that they influence. Your radiance, for good or ill, shines on.

If you are unenthusiastic about a project, your negative radiance drains your team of energy. If you’re in a bad mood, you radiate that and then reap the result when your partner sits across form you at dinner in silence.

It seems to me that we have two choices about our radiance. First, we can just ignore it and let things fall where they may, reacting as things happen. However, I think such an unreflective life misses the mark. 

Second, we can become at least somewhat intentional about how we respond, and try to shape our radiance in a way that serves us and others well.

I have kept a journal since I was fifteen years old. While I recognize that this method is not for everyone, I have found it enormously helpful in my own evolution. I find that getting things out of my head and onto paper helps me avoid thinking about things one way and acting in another. Its a form of self-accountability.

Perhaps you can think of a way to do this for yourself. I’m told that meditation often works, especially if done as part of a group or under the guidance of a Spiritual Director. I imagine that simple, reflective, deep conversation could be another.

Awareness

As I pondered all of this I realized that just as it’s important to be aware of what we are radiating out into the world that might influence others, it is equally important to be aware of what others around us are radiating. Just as we affect others in ways we might not be aware of, we are also affected by them.

There is a saying by minimalism advocate Joshua Millburn that “you can’t change the people around you, but you can change the people around you.”

What he means by that somewhat confusing sentence is that while it’s foolish to think you can cause other people to change at your request, you can choose to change the sort of people you surround yourself with. That’s a wise strategy because we are influenced by others just as we influence them. It’s wise to be intentional about that.

One of the truism of addictions counseling is that no one has ever successfully changed seriously dysfunctional behavior if they don’t also change who their friends are. Even if what you are doing is actively harmful to yourself, the people around you will continue to expect you to behave as you always have, and will subtly sabotage your efforts at change - doing what Murray Bowen, the founder of family therapy in America, called “change back maneuvering.” 

That’s why we should pay attention to the people we surround ourselves with. This is not to say we should seek out only people who agree with us - in fact the most prized friendship of every successful person I’ve ever met has been the one with someone who will tell you something you do not want to hear. But you want to be around people who are good for you, in the sense they are aligned with your values and goals. 

The best way to improve your own radiance is to be in the radiance of compatible others. It’s wise to build an awareness of that so you do not miss cues. Ask yourself “does this person make me a better person?” Run with the people who want you to succeed. Do you have an emotional vampire in your friendship circle. If so, why do you allow that? No one is going to be on your side if you are not.

Every year Lindsay and I make it a point to review our friendships and make intentional decisions about how they are going, whether adjustments are needed or if the relationship is complete and we need to move on. It’s not smart to let that sort of thing happen by accident.

Families

The problem with this is that we are born into families. Now, sometimes that is a great thing. I watch my wife’s emotional and psychological development and see that the seeds of it were rooted in a basically happy and supportive childhood family system. I recall my own very different upbringing and realize how easy it is for a young person to became a victim of a family system that never should have involved children in the first place. 

I mentioned Dr. Murray Bowen earlier in connection with family  therapy. He had a light-hearted definition of the family that strikes a cord with me. He said “the family is a seething cauldron of pathology, from which with a lifetime of effort, one might partially extricate oneself.” 

That’s certainly not true of all families. It was most definitely true of my own. 

In the art of family therapy there is something called a “genogram.” It’s a chart of the family, but it goes deeper than a simple genealogy. A genogram lists relationships, their outcomes. A well-drawn genogram includes education, major life events, occupations, social relationships, disorders, alliances and living situations.

Whenever anyone creates their family’s genogram it is always a startling experience, which is why if you want to do this you should obtain expert help.

What quickly becomes obvious from a genogram is that families tend to repeat themselves. Time and again, patterns that family members thought were unique to their lives turn out to be patterns and rituals that have been repeated many times down through the generations.

As some of you know I broke with my family-of-origin at a young age, basically I ran away. While I would eventually recontact the family I did so only from a distance and only as little as possible. I thought that was my unique story.

Heck no.

The only time I spent more than a few minutes with members of my extended family was when I returned to Connecticut to officiate at my mother’s memorial service. I didn’t think I owed her that, but it was her request and I try to be a generous person. 

At the lunch afterward - remember this was the first time I had spoken to any of these people in five decades  - I heard story after story of other family members who had also attempted to detach from the family and run away. It was a pattern repeated in every generation by dozens of family members.

The difference. Most of the family members who ran away gave up and went back. I never went back. I broke the generational pattern and that is why I am here today with my education, profession, happy marriage and health. When I did my genogram I saw this pattern as clear as day and I also saw the mistake so many in my family made. They went back into the dysfunctional radiance of an abusive family system and became themselves corrupted by it. 

You can’t choose your family. The luck of the draw determines if your family is an asset or a liability, but you get to choose how much you let that family system affect you by staying in their radiance, or choosing to exit by cutting ties or holding distance. You don’t need their permission and you don’t have to explain yourself.

When I say this to clients they often hear it as advice to hurt the feelings of others. It’s not. It is healthy behavior, not unhealthy, to avoid people who are bad for you.

Show me your friends and I will tell you your future. Show me your family and I probably can do the same, unless you make an intentional decision to decide the radiance you surround yourself with. 

If you are one of the fortunate to come from a family that was a blessing, good for you. You have the best of all possible worlds. But it you do not, there is still something you can do.

I’ve come to call the circle of people who I relate to as if they were family my “forged family” - created with intent and effort. The way a swordsmith forges a blade.

You  can act with intentionality to create the community you want around you rather than just accepting the one given to you by genetics.

You should be the one who chooses the direction of your life. my colleague Richard Nongard says, “There is a reason why when you get into your car you notice that the windshield looking forward is much bigger than the rear view mirror looking behind.” I agree. What is ahead of you is always more important that what is behind.

Compassion

The things I preach this morning are not easy. There is a way to soften them. Just as I have previously advocated gratitude as a lifestyle I also advocate compassion. That is how I feel toward the people who were bad for me and who I choose to avoid. 

Compassion is a sustainable emotion. It is not the same as forgiveness. We can be compassionate toward someone without agreeing with them in the slightest. Compassion simply means we are neither going to be nasty nor run them down. We may feel sad for them without feeling we need to rescue. Typically this will mean a decision not to argue but decline to be influenced. Negativity cannot be countered by more negativity. 

The other day I was grocery shopping and I saw a person who was obviously an idiot. No mask, no gloves, aggressively refusing to social distance to the point of deliberately crowding others, purposefully walking down the one-way aisles in the wrong direction. The initial response to someone like this is to confront them because they endanger others. 

But the compassionate thing is for everyone to distance, even though that is inconvenient. Ask yourself what the inner life of such a person must be like for them to behave that way. There is nothing I can do to such a person that is worse than what they are doing to themselves.

A seeker once asked a guru, “What is the secret of happiness?” The guru replied, “never argue with fools.” “Well,” said the seeker. I absolutely do not agree with that” “You are right,” said the guru.

Focus is Fuel

The most natural way to develop the sort of radiance you want to have is to pay attention, not only to the people you surround yourself with, but also what you choose to focus on. Like it or not your focus is fuel for your unconscious life. What you focus on tends to happen.

Therefore, it is smart to support the person you want to be by not entertaining things in your mind that drag you down. As it says in scripture, “whatever is true, whatever is honorable, whatever is just, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is commendable, if there is any excellence, if there is anything worthy of praise, think about these things” (Philippians 4:8, ESV). 

We are all living through a very difficult time. I’ve actually counseled clients to “fast” from the news. Don’t get sucked into the endless negativity of the twenty-four hour news cycle. In social networking many of us have had the experience of “unfollowing” someone who subjected us to comments or attacks that were not enhancing. So we unfollowed them. Unfollow negativity everywhere you find it.

It can be subtile. As I’ve said from our pulpit before, your unconscious mind hears everything you say. Therefore, don’t spend time putting yourself down.

In a major study published in the journal Current Psychiatry, researchers compared people who were self-critical to those who were self-compassionate. The results weren’t even close. Self-criticism was a trans-diagnostic factor in a host of emotional problems, while people who were self-compassionate - who treated themselves as they would like to be treated, with a bit of forgiveness and appreciation - were everywhere more successful (Current Psychiatry, Vol. 15, No 12, December 2016)

The critical factor was two-fold. First, the people who were self-critical were raised in families who were controlling and restrictive. Second, they didn’t do anything about that.

We don’t control our family-of-origin, but we can do something about it by seeking out the experiences and people who will enhance our radiance and letting that energy overwrite whatever darkness may have been in our past. Look out the windshield instead of staring at the rear view mirror.

Or, as it says in scripture, “Ask and it will be given to you; seek and you will find; knock and the door will be opened to you. (Matthew 7:7, ESV). Note the number of action verbs in that quotation. I you don’t like your circumstances, take action to change them. Change the people, change the focus. Have a positive radiance.

And that’s my sermon.

Reopening for In-Person Sessions

Our Reopening Plans for In-Person Sessions

As things stand now, according to medical advice we have received, we plan to open our office for in-person sessions in the first week of June 2020. We will reopen with enhanced infection control procedures in place and are accepting appointments now.

We assume that some clients who are presently being seen online will choose to remain there. This is fine. We have a long and successful history of online work and it is completely effective. 

We have invested in new online technology and are enhancing our online offerings. It is now possible to experience your hypnotic induction in real time over Zoom, FaceTime or phone, as well has continuing to receive a recorded copy for later use.

As we have always worked with medical cases, we have always had infection-control procedures in place (generous use of hand sanitizer, frequent hand-washing and use of sanitizing wipes for all equipment, doorknobs and fixtures). These are enhanced in the following ways:

• Sessions are scheduled with a fifteen minute buffer so clients will not meet each other in the waiting area.

• All in-person clients are asked to sanitize their hands upon arrival, are screened with a forehead thermoscan device, and have blood oxygen levels checked with a clip-on oximeter. 

• Drs. Bates and Giles wear face masks during client hours. 

• Clients are required to wear face masks during sessions. If you do not have a mask we provide a disposable mask of high quality.

• The trance chair and reiki table are sanitized between every client using environmentally friendly, hypoallergenic products.

• The client restroom is sanitized using an EPA-approved virucide and disinfectant.

• Handshaking is not be permitted.

Obviously, we will adjust the above as needed to respond to any changes from the Centers for Disease Control or the Governor.

Conquering Clutter

Conquer Clutter

Countryside Church, Unitarian Universalist 

Sunday, April 12, 2020

The Rev. Dr. C. Scot Giles

Some 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, and suspect that I may actually had Attention Deficit Disorder that I either grew out of or learned to compensate for. 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 named Saviastano, 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 Savistano. And God help you if you used something and didn’t put it back where it belonged. Savistano 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.

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 others 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 or 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 34 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...

...She’s really, really bad. The Geneva UU Society where she is the Minister Emerita actually had a written policy before she retired that she is not permitted to cook for church events. I’ll tell you the story someday...

What this meant is that I was marrying a partner who could not do any housework other than laundry. 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.net 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. 

Another anti-clutter guru who has become well-known these days is Marie Kondo author of four books including The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up and Spark Joy that have sold millions of copies. She even has a show on Netflix.  

Kondo is an animist, that is she believes that even inanimate objects, like clothing or furniture, possesses some sort of awareness. She urges people to come into relationship with their possessions and to curate them.

Take everything you have in a room, she commands. Put everything in a pile in the center of that room. Then touch each thing and ask yourself if it makes you feel joy. If it does, you keep it and find a place to put it. If it does not, you thank it for its service and remove it from your life in some way. 

Having actually done this with my possessions I can assure you that you do end up with much less stuff and it does bring a feeling of liberation.

That said, in my opinion she does go a bit far. For example she does not own a hammer because it didn’t “spark joy” so when she needs to drive a nail she uses a frying pan. She doesn’t have a dish rack and instead air dries her dishes in her back yard. Not going to do either of those.

The hardest part of either Marie Kondo’s approach or that of the Flylady is the rule 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, or 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.

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. 

I recently transitioned to something called The Bullet Journal created by author Ryder Carroll, who calls it an analogue system for a digital world. It uses a physical notebook and a system of symbols to organize tasks and events, merged with a journal to capture one’s thoughts and feelings. It combines productivity with mindfulness. 

It was helpful because the rules behind a Bullet Journal encourage you to drop tasks and meetings that are not essential. You can’t fill it up with notes to do things that you will actually never get around too. It banishes clutter in the mind.

If you are interested you can easily look either of these up on Google or YouTube. 

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 or 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 or value 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 world 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.

As the Bible says, “there is a time to throw things away.”

And I agree.  And that’s my sermon.

Become a Patron of my Practice

I’ve been making regular videos on topics connected to life coaching or hypnotism for more than a year now. They are first created in Facebook Live, then downloaded, edited and put up on my YouTube Channel with titles, a custom thumbnail and so on.

The videos have become very popular and they are fun to do. People have said they appreciate the “in person” aspect of them as opposed to reading my blog. That’s cool.

Recently, people who have been clients, plus past students and participants at my free clinics for cancer patients have asked to have a deeper and more personal experience of my practice and thoughts. So I decided to create a Patreon Channel. I’ll do it for a year and then evaluate.

Patreon works just like YouTube, except it isn’t free. You have to subscribe to access those videos. The cost is small, $5/month. Once you subscribe you get an email notice whenever a new video is posted for my patrons to see, with a link that will take you right to it. You can also access all the videos I have made for my patrons at any time.

The videos on Patreon are more personal and edgy. I cover spiritual and theological material that I would not put in a public forum because they would attract internet trolls. Patreon requires that someone opt in to see the content. While the fee is small, troublemakers are unlikely to pay it. I want the content to go only to people who welcome it.

Another aspect of Patreon is that it gives people a way to support my work simply because they like what I do and the services I provide to others. Sometimes participants in my free programs tell me they feel bad about attending my programs when they know I am not getting paid to do them. This provides a way for a person to become my patron and support my work even if they don’t need to become a private client (which is the only service I charge for).

So if you’d like to become one of my patrons, come aboard! My blog, YouTube Channel and Patreon Channel can be accessed from the “Blogs, Social and Videos” menu on my website at https://csgiles.org. Or you can sign up with Patreon at https://www.patreon.com/csgiles directly. Thanks!