Preparing For The Worst

Expecting the Worst

A Sermon to Countryside Church, Unitarian Universalist

February 2, 2020

The Rev. Dr. C. Scot Giles

Are you a Prepier?

According to the Washington Post, in the aptly named community called Lost City, West Virginia, there is a place called Fortitude Ranch. It’s set on fifty acres far into the country, and people become “members” of the ranch in return for a payment of $1000/year. 

Apparently, it is a pleasant place with sturdy log cabins, tree houses where children play, there is a zip line and something called disc golf (which I had never heard of) and is apparently golf played with a Frisbee instead of golf balls. 

Have you ever heard of people who are “prepers” or “survivalists”? That’s what Fortitude Ranch is all about. In the event of a war, climate calamity, pandemic or other form of societal collapse, those tree houses become guard towers. That golf course becomes a “killing field” where marksmen can be stationed with overlapping fields of fire. There are walls and fences and underground bunkers stocked with food, water and equipment. 

“Prepers” are people who spend money and effort because they believe that really bad things can happen, be that a natural disaster, a civil war or the collapse of civilization. They take steps be protect themselves at such a time. The members of Fortitude Ranch will be able to travel to it and take shelter there.

There are places like Fortitude Ranch all over our nation. In fact, Fortitude Ranch itself has just opened up a sister campus in Wisconsin. Their motto is “Prepare for the Worst - Enjoy the Present.”

If all this sounds like too much work and you want something more upscale, there is a company that has purchased from the government a group of missile silos (missiles removed) and is turning them into luxury condos for full or part time residence (go to www.survivalcondo.com if you want to know more.) They have air and water filtration for any sort of chemical, biological or radiological incident, hydrophobic and aquaculture food production, an indoor pool, gym and a luxury spa. Oh, and high speed internet. They come fully furnished with 50” flatscreens, high-end Kohler fixtures and stainless steel kitchen appliances that I frankly envy.

The survival condos really sound nice. The company will not give out the locations for security reasons, but apparently they are all over the nation and are selling well. Cash only.

The Idea of Preparation

If all of this sounds a little paranoid, I tend to agree with you. I think preparing for downside risk is reasonable, but for myself, this is going a little too far. However, the survivalists have a saying, “It’s only 72 hours to animal.” Meaning, that if a social crisis goes on longer than three days, gas stations will be dry, the store shelves will be empty and people will start to turn on each other in the fight for resources. 

Personally, I prize the concept of self-reliance. The essay of the same name by Ralph Waldo Emerson is like a second scripture to me. As both a Unitarian Universalist clergy person, a medical hypnotist, and a martial arts swordsman, no one could ever accuse me of conforming to social norms. Or, as my wife puts it, “Scot, you’re weird.” I am. Proudly so.

While I am not going to go live in a missile silo, I do take what I consider reasonable steps. 

When I was the parish minister to a church on the North Fork of Long Island I learned to make preparations for hurricanes. The North Fork is only fourteen miles wide and you had to be able to evacuate quickly. 

So at the Bates/Giles home we do have what is called a “Go Bag” or a “Bug Out Bag.” This is a backpack with essential supplies and important personal effects like our birth certificates and passports, as well as a shock proof hard drive with all of our photos and scans of important documents. The bag sits on top of a cat carrier large enough to fit all three of our cats. There is even a hand cranked portable radio that can recharge an iPhone.

If we got an evacuation order we could be out with everything important in ten minutes or less (and most of that would be rounding up the cats). As we live close to several nuclear power plants and not far from a flood zone, this seems wise to us.

Anyone who watches the news these days know that terror attacks are a real thing. 

So I also have a small backpack that travels in the back seat of my car whenever I leave my property. Bags like this are called EDC, or Every Day Carry Bags. It’s basically my briefcase holding a laptop, a power supply for my phone and so on. But there is also a first-aid kit with trauma supplies like a rapid application tourniquet, wound closure strips and Narcan. Everything I would need if I had to help someone who was in serious trouble, and I am trained to be able to do that.

To many of you I probably sound a little paranoid myself, and I probably am. However, I’d rather make the mistake in that direction than the other. I believe in being prepaid for the worse, if only a little bit. 

There Are Many Forms of Preparation

However, this sermon isn’t really about preparing for social calamity. It’s really about a different form of preparation altogether. Prepers worry about all sorts of things that could go wrong, from climate change to a pandemic. I’m with them on the last one because I believe we really do live amid a pandemic, but I believe it is an emotional and spiritual one. 

Ever since the 1970s, Dr. Herbert Benson of Harvard Medical School has argued that stress is the “hidden plague” in our society. As a treatment, he wrote a book called The Relaxation Response recommending meditation and the power of expectation and belief to overcome stress. 

More recently along with his colleague William Proctor he wrote The Relaxation Revolution: The Science and Genetics of Mind Body Healing, which connected the out-of-control stress of modern living to a host of medical issues.

What Benson and Proctor argue is that the human body never evolved to be able to hold up to stress that never lets up. The stressors of our time are email, the 24 hour news cycle, sensationalism and exaggeration in most of what we read and see, threat to employment due to automation, and completely unreasonable job expectations for most of us. These things are worse in America than in almost any other First World country. 

What they are referring to is something called Epigenetics. Epigenetics means “on top of genetics” and explores the factors that control how your DNA expresses itself. 

For example the cells in your hand have exactly the same DNA as the cells in your tongue. But something acts on that DNA so that the cells in your tongue become tongue cells, not hand cells. There is an external regulatory power that controls what your DNA does. 

Benson and Proctor argue that modern stress is making that power go haywire. The transformation of a healthy cell into a cancer cell is only one example of what happens when that regulatory power goes wrong.

This is why the incidence rate of every illness that has a stress-related component (cancer, heart disease and every form of inflammatory condition) is increasing alarmingly. It is also why the is a huge flare of nonspecific autoimmune conditions taking place. So much so we do not even have good diagnostic language for talking about them. 

For example, these days physicians are more likely to talk about Parkinsonism rather than Parkinson’s Disease, because we are seeing so many odd variations of that condition that we don’t know how to define or name. 

This is the circumstance that we need to address, because as a species we are literally worrying ourselves to death. While there was a slight improvement this year, according to research published in the Journal of the American Medical Association, the workforce in the United States is dying faster than an other wealthy country (https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2019/11/26/us-life-expectancy-downward-spiral-study/4303700002/).

If we have an extinction event I don’t think it will come at the tip of a missile. It will come from the physical breakdown we are imposing on ourselves with our minds.

Resentment

As someone who has practiced medical hypnotism for more than 30 years, I’ve long studied the emotional basis for physical and medical problems. I’ve got a theory about what is at the root of it, and that is the emotion of Resentment. 

Resentment is defined as an emotional reaction where one feels unfairly treated. Merriam-Webster defines it as “a feeling of indignant displeasure or persistent ill will at something regarded as a wrong, insult, or injury.”

I do a lot of work with people who live with cancer, and I long ago noticed that those with the worst outcomes also walked around with a lot of resentment, I thought there was likely a connection. Then I realized that cancer patients are hardly unique in this.

Every morning I read two newspapers - the New York Times and the Washington Post. Once you start looking for it you see in just about every opinion piece the writers indignantly point to something they regard as self-evidently wrong. Indeed the editorial and op-ed pages fairly drip with resentment after resentment. 

I have no way to prove this, but my sense is that in our badly divided society today the level of perceived resentment is escalating. I believe this is the emotion that drives people to perform hate crimes. It is a powerful emotion that can lead some people to regard acts of self-destruction as reasonable, provided those acts inflict some sort of perceived “justice” on the people resented.

What the mind does when it experiences excessive stress is find something to blame it on, and then simmer in resentment toward that something or someone.

I used to tell my clients that in order to have some distance from a bad feeling, one should remember that feelings change. “Neither you nor I have ever had an emotional state that lasted,” I used to say.

As I pondered the feeling of resentment I realized that I had been wrong. What makes resentment so powerful is that it is sustainable.

Most direct bad emotional experiences take a lot of energy. They boil up and pass. But resentment doesn’t. It’s a gradual slow burn. 

You can’t be angry forever, but you can be resentful 24/7, 365. What makes resentment so dangerous is that it is possible to sustain a low level of this emotion  in the long term, where it wears down the body defenses and things start to go wrong. If Drs. Benson and Proctor are right, it corrupts a person at the cellular level.

Resentment is what William Blake referred to in his poem “The Poison Tree.” He got angry with his friend and told his friend why. That ended his anger. But when he got angry with his enemy he did not settle the matter. Instead he transformed his anger into resentment which he “watered” with fears, tears and deceit. 

Unlike his anger at his friend which passed, his Resentment toward his enemy was sustainable. Finally, it became an all-consuming desire for vengeance that allowed him to become a person of active ill-will.

The person or thing you resent is not affected by your resentment. They are fine, and may not even be aware of your feelings. The only person Resentment harms the person who holds it. Resentment always turns inward psychologically. I believe it also turns inward physically, as Benson and Proctor propose. 

Much as I’d like to claim this observation as an original thought, it occurs to me that actually the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche had it first. In in book On the Genealogy of Morals he observed that entertaining this emotion allowed one to feel powerful enough to judge others, and was therefore attractive to the subconscious mind. He predicted that it would become epidemic in Western Society as it allowed people to avoid taking responsibility for events and just scapegoat others.

I think he was right. I think the sustainable emotion of resentment is where things have gone off the rails.

Gratitude

All this said, I would be a poor preacher if I stopped here. Because I do think there is an emotional antibiotic that can be used to treat the hidden plague of modern society - the toxic level of stress our society presents us with. That emotional antibiotic to the hidden plague is the emotion of Gratitude.

The problem with Gratitude is that it does not happen by default. As I’ve said from this pulpit before, your brain evolved to keep you safe, not to make you happy. It keeps you safe by exaggerating every negative emotion, because those emotions make you cautious. In order to counteract this default negative setting in your psychological makeup, there has to be something special that you are doing. Resetting your emotional outlook takes effort. The default setting is fear, resentment, hostility and anger.

Therefore, just like the people at Fortitude Ranch who prepare themselves for the worse, we all need to set up a discipline to prepare ourselves spiritually to overcome the effects of the hidden plague. 

Gratitude, derived from the Latin word for graciousness, means a feeling of thankfulness for what one has, in some way, received. It is the opposite of craving something you don’t have or striving to attain. 

You can be grateful about things in your past by reliving good things you have experienced. You can be grateful for the present, reflecting on such good fortune as has come your way. You can be grateful for the future in the sense of having a hopeful or optimistic outlook. 

The really important thing is that, like Resentment, Gratitude is sustainable. You can’t be happy, joyful or exuberant all the time - those emotions take too much energy to last. But you can be Grateful 24/7, 365. Just as Resentment is a long, slow burn, Gratitude is a long, gentle uplift. 

Dr. Martin Seligman, a psychologist at the University of Pennsylvania, whose work I have long followed did an experiment. He took a group of 411 people and had them take a psychological test to assess their level of happiness. 

Then, for a week they were tasked to write and individually deliver a letter expressing gratitude to someone who they believed had never been properly thanked for some act of kindness. The test subjects overwhelmingly displayed a huge increase in happiness scores, with the benefit lasting more than a month. 

Other experiments have returned similar results. One study by Dr. Robert Emmons and Dr. Michael McCullough took three groups of people. One group was tasked to write a few sentences every day about things that displeased them. The other group wrote about things they were grateful for. The the third group, the control group, wrote about anything that affected them for good or ill. 

At the end of 10 weeks the group that wrote about gratitude were more optimistic and less depressed that either of the other groups, and they had fewer visits to physicians. Their health was better. 

Resentment corrupts. Gratitude strengthens.

The trick is that Gratitude is an appreciation of what you have, instead of striving for something you think might make you happier. Not that there is anything wrong with having wholesome goals, but Gratitude allows you to focus on what you have instead of what you lack. That’s always going to be a better place to be. 

As someone who struggles with a metabolic syndrome that creates a cardiac risk, Resentment is more dangerous for me than for most, not that it is safe for anyone. I use two tools to keep my mind pointed in the right direction.

First, I use a Gratitude Journal. I’ve kept a journal since I was 15 years old. Mine contains a special section where, each morning, I write a few sentences about what I was grateful for the previous day and what thing I expect in my upcoming day that I will be happy to receive. It’s amazing how this simple exercise that takes only a few minutes, changes the channel in my mind.

My wife of 32 years is the Rev. Dr. Lindsay Bates, the Minister Emerita to the Geneva Unitarian Universalist Society. When she retired after a 40 year ministry to that congregation she came onboard in my practice as our resident Reiki Master Teacher. 

Reiki is a form of energy healing. No one has any idea how it works, but experiments have shown that it does. For example, it’s been shown that, much like hypnotism, cancer patients who get Reiki in addition to conventional medical care do better than those that do not. This is why most hospital cancer centers have a Reiki program.

Every morning, Lindsay recites the Reiki Principles - one of which is to be grateful for those good things she will receive today.

Over the years I have had several spiritual directors, both Christian and non-Christian. They have all recommended a similar Gratitude practice, and that was why I created a Gratitude section in my journal.

The second tool I use is something that Rhonda Byrne, the author of The Secret, suggests. I’m not a fan of her work, although I’ve read all her books and find some things there that are personally useful. One of her recommendations is to have a Gratitude Rock.

A Gratitude Rock is a stone that you find which has some positive meaning for you. I use a piece of rainbow obsidian. I happen to love this mineral and collect examples of it. A friend of mine took a palm-sized piece and carved it so that as light passed through the layers of minerals trapped in the natural volcanic glass, an optical illusion of a heart appears. It can always be found on my desk or nightstand.

Every night as I go to bed I touch it and ask myself what I have been grateful for that day. In the morning I do the same and recall the gratitude of last night. This points my mind in the right direction to keep me inoculated from the hidden plague and sets up the tone for my entry into the Gratitude Journal.

Lindsay has since adopted a similar practice.

This sermon has been how to prepare oneself for the worse. My point has been that preparation is wise. We live in a time of maximum stress and our bodies cannot cope unless we make preparations. I bid you do so. Find a way to remove Resentment from your inner world and replace it with Gratitude. You will be glad you did.

And that’s my sermon.