Managing
Our Stories
Rev. Mark
Stringer
First Unitarian Church of Des Moines
3/7/09 & 3/8/09
“Nothing in this world is good or bad, but thinking makes it so.”
--William Shakespeare
Intoning the Chime
Call to Gather
We come together today to
remind one another to rest for a moment on the forming edge of our lives, to
resist the headlong tumble into the next moment, until we claim for ourselves
awareness and gratitude. May we know
once again that we are not isolated beings but connected, in mystery and miracle,
to the universe, to this community and to each other.
Chalice Lighting (xxx)
Please join me in a
responsive reading found in your order of service.
Leader: Life
is a gift for which we are grateful.
People: We
gather in community to celebrate the glories and the mysteries of this great
gift.
Leader: So let
us kindle now the flame of our liberal religious heritage.
People: In its glow, may our reason and our passion
lead us to be true to ourselves, true to each other, and true to what we can
together become.
Hymn #126
Come, Thou Fount of Every Blessing
Welcome xxx (Sat) xxx (Sun)
Pulpit Editorial NPR Rob Heater and Mark
Campbell
Doxology
Play Preview John
Lennon and Me UU Children’s Theatr
(Sun) Singing
Children Out
Joys and Concerns
Testimonial Barb Royal
Sharing Our Abundance
Meditation
Silence
Sung Response #8 Mother
Spirit, Father Spirit
Today’s first reading is an excerpt from the
book Crucial Conversations: Tools for
Talking When the Stakes Are High
How many times have you
heard someone say: “He made me mad!”?
How many times have you said it?
For instance, you’re sitting quietly at home watching TV and your
mother-in-law (who lives with you) walks in. She glances around and then starts
picking up the mess you made a few minutes earlier when you whipped up a batch
of nachos. This ticks you off. She’s always smugly stalking around the
house, thinking you’re a slob.
A few minutes later when
your spouse asks you why you’re so upset, you explain, “It’s your mom
again. I was lying here enjoying myself
when she gave me that look, and it really got me going. To be honest, I wish she would quit doing
that. It’s my only day off, I’m relaxing
quietly, and then she walks in and pushes my buttons.”
“Does she push your
buttons?” your spouse asks. “Or do you?”[1]
Our second reading is from
Buddhist teacher Sakyong Mipham
When my friend Jon and I
were running...one day, we came into a valley and saw a big dog. We started strategizing how we were going to
avoid being attacked. Should we
run? We were already running. What about climbing a tree? There wasn’t a tree in sight. As we approached the “dog,” we realized it
was just a large stone. We laughed at
ourselves and kept running. We had
created an object in our minds and then responded to it with fear. We were afraid of our projection, which had
stemmed from ignorance. The minute we
saw our mistake, the fear dissolved. Our
relief came from seeing how things really were.[2]
Special Music an instrumental New
Anarchy String Band
Sermon
It happened again last week. You
think I’d be used to it. After all, in
the seven-plus years I have been your minister, I have heard something similar
more times than I can remember. But,
I’ll admit, no matter how many times it happens, my disappointment is just as
deep as the first time.
The scenario varies somewhat, but the same basic exchange takes
place. In this past week’s version, I
was having a conversation with a member and we wandered into the topic of our
church. “You know, Mark,” the member
said, “there are people in the congregation whose behavior is not very
compatible with our UU principles.”
I figure I already know where this is going, but I ask anyway, “What do
you mean?”
“Well, the principles talk about the free and responsible search for
truth and meaning, but some of our members behave as if their search is more
free and responsible than others’.”
“Yes,” I say. “How have you
experienced this?” I ask.
The member explained that his partner, who once attended our congregation,
has joined a different, shall we say, less-religiously-liberal church. When he has shared this information with
people who have questioned his partner’s whereabouts, on several occasions he
has received responses back like “Oh, I’m sorry” or “How can I help you?” as
though his partner has been pulled into some kind of religious netherworld
rather than freely choosing a religious path more in keeping with the dictates
of her heart and mind. The member
explained to me that these comments have been confusing and disappointing to
him, and I can’t blame him for feeling this way. The apparently condescending approach taken
by some of us toward his partner’s “free and responsible search” is, after all,
at odds with what we often claim to affirm and promote. Fortunately, this member has seemed to be
able to take these conversations in stride…at least for now. However, I know more than a few people who,
after being on the receiving end of similar expressions of implied (or real)
superiority on religious matters, have felt chased from our church. It’s as if these folks say to themselves, Who cares if the principles of this place
match my deeply held perspectives, and the people playing the superiority card
are in the minority? If some of the people here appear to behave in opposition
to these principles, well, then the church must not be what it claims to be,
and so I have no other choice but to disengage…or leave altogether.
You won’t be surprised to learn that I am disappointed when any of us
can be or appear to be superior or condescending at times, especially about
religious beliefs. I rarely get to see
this kind of behavior here myself, but I know it occurs. Still, you may be surprised to know what
disappoints me even more: I am
disappointed that when people are on the receiving end of what they perceive to
be condescending or exclusionary comments or attitudes around here, they treat
them as an end point rather than a starting place. In other words, they fall victim to a
sucker’s choice response of silence or violence.
I learned about the sucker’s choice through attending a two-day workshop
called Crucial Conversations last
year. I have used the material from that
workshop from the pulpit before and am pleased to draw upon it again today, for
I find it to be a useful lens through which to view our behavior in the
challenging situations and conversations of our lives.
The sucker’s choice is when, in the midst of a difficult or
uncomfortable conversation where something of importance is at risk, we believe
our only two options are silence or violence: we think we have no other choice
but to either clam up or to lash out.
The sucker’s choice can arise for us in all the difficult encounters of
our lives—at work, at school, in our families.
When we have encounters with people we find prickly, annoying, or
problem causing, it is difficult to even see there is an option outside of
holding our feelings inside or blowing up, much less to act on it. Just like
you, I am quite familiar with the sucker’s choice, since many are the times
when I have been drawn to one of its two ultimately unhelpful options. In fact,
some of you may recall I’ve preached entire sermons about my own sucker’s
choice moments. Perhaps the most
memorable one being the story when I awkwardly confronted my neighbor for
running a leaf blower before sunrise, only to have him react with his own
choices of silence (by storming away)…and then violence (by calling me a name
sometimes used to describe a jerk and sometimes used to describe a body
part). As familiar as I am with the
sucker’s choice, I must admit my disappointment when I see it appear here, in
our religious community, a place that exists, I think, to encourage us to be
compassionate, engaged and forgiving…to see that working towards dialogue, even
when it gets difficult, is a religious discipline itself, at least as important
as the toleration we expect others to display. You see acting out either side
of the sucker’s choice—silence or violence—effectively eliminates dialogue, and,
in my view at least, keeps us from the possibility of the divine as expressed
through creative interchange. If we can’t have creative interchange around
here, where are we going to have it? So for the remainder of our time together,
I invite you to consider with me some of the reasons we may succumb to the
sucker’s choice…and how we might adapt toward behavior that could keep us from
falling victim to our own inclinations to avoid the very dialogue that
could help us better understand our companions and ourselves, not only inside
this church, but more importantly outside its walls, too.
First, how can we get to the sucker’s choice? The sucker’s choice arises as a result of
emotions. We often think that our
emotions just happen to us as a direct result of what we see or hear. He made me mad. She hurt my feelings. They chased me out of the church. But emotions are not simply bestowed upon
us. We help create them by telling
stories that lead to the emotion, which, in turn, impacts the way we act in response.
What do I mean by “tell a story”?
In short, we assign a meaning to what we have observed: we see and/or hear a behavior, then we
interpret what we have heard and seen by determining a motive for the behavior,
and judging whether or not the motive is good or bad. Our stories, then, are
theories or assumptions we create in our attempts to understand what is going
on. Why
is something happening, how should I
judge what is happening, and what
should I do about it? These “stories”
can be formed over time, as a result of previous encounters and the stories we
have told ourselves before, or they can happen with near-lightning speed, so
fast that we may even question if we have told a story in the first place.
In the leafblower example, the story I had told myself was that my
neighbor was disrespectful and oblivious.
I mean, who runs a leafblower before sunrise? My story was that this guy needed to be
“dealt with” and that doing so forcefully, “letting him have it” so to speak,
was my only hope to get through his thick skull. You can see how this story actually helped
stir up my emotions so that I couldn’t help but blow up at him.
In the example of a conversation with a church member who appears to be
disrespectful or condescending, we may tell ourselves a story that says, If this woman is a Unitarian Universalist,
she should not have these feelings and she should definitely not be expressing
them this way. If she feels this way,
others probably do, too. Maybe my views
of religion are not really acceptable here.
I’d better keep my thoughts to myself.
And maybe I should consider leaving this church all together.
Each of us has stories that accompany the difficult conversations of our
lives…and the emotions and actions that go with them. The stories are always there. Therefore, to become more effective
communicators, people who are better equipped to engage in dialogue that goes
beyond the sucker’s choice of silence or violence—the dialogue that I believe can
be the most holy endeavor of our lives—we would do well to develop the skills
to observe and manage these stories.
Because encounters that lead to the sucker’s choice often come at us
fast and furious, to catch the stories as we are creating them can be very
difficult. We can, however, teach
ourselves to notice when we get into those sucker’s choice moments, and see in
these moments an opportunity to retrace the path that led to them so that we
might choose new directions for ourselves and our relationships.
Working our way backwards, we can gain some clarity on what really
happened. First, we can reflect on our
behavior, how did we act, asking
ourselves, “Did I just clam up or lash out?”
A good way to be honest with ourselves about our actions is to imagine
that we are the subject of a 60 Minutes
story. If our behavior had been filmed
and showed to a national audience, what would people likely think of us? Would they see us resorting to silence or
violence? Looking back at the leafblower
incident, I am humiliated with my behavior.
Anyone objectively seeing me storming out of my house in my bathrobe to
“go after” my neighbor would have to see me acting like a misdirected clown.
Looking back to our hypothetical difficult encounter with a church member, one
that can lead us to clam up, we may have difficulty seeing any behavior worth
changing. But, nonetheless, our
resorting to silence in the encounter should be telling us something, for
silence is an action, an action, that, in the end, can be more
counterproductive than helpful.
Next, examine the emotions
that led us to this. We need to get
precise in determining and describing our emotional state. For example just feeling bad about something
is not as descriptive as feeling humiliated, or disrespected. Expanding our emotional vocabulary will not
only make it easier to understand why we are acted the way did, it will help us
communicate more effectively with others as we pursue more helpful behaviors.
Next we need to ask ourselves, What
is the story I am telling to get me
to these emotions? Are there other ways
to interpret what is happening? Am I
falling into the trap of seeing my stories as facts, forgetting that there are
at minimum three sides to any situation:
my side, the other person’s side, and the truth, which is typically
somewhere in between.
And finally we need to get back to the facts by asking ourselves, Did
what I thought I saw or heard really happen?
Am I assuming drama that wasn’t there?
When I describe to myself what happened, am I using loaded words that
convey judgment, such as “He sneered at me” or “She made a sarcastic
comment.” What do we actually know for
sure to be true? The answer is usually far less than we want to believe.
In the process of retracing our path that led to the sucker’s choice we
can pay particular attention to those moments when we may be telling ourselves
“Clever Stories”.
There are three kinds of clever stories, and they can appear alone or
combination.
Victim Stories: “It’s Not My
Fault”
These are stories in which we overlook the role we have played. We focus on only on our good intentions or
virtues and can portray ourselves as martyrs.
The truth is, sometimes we are victims. Certainly none of us deserve to be criticized
or condescended to for our religious perspectives or those of our partner. But, I wonder, even in this example, how much
are we playing up our own victim-hood.
Is the condescending person’s comment necessarily about us, or is it
more about him/her? By simply accepting
the comment as an attack on us, rather than an invitation to assert our own
truth, are we playing the martyr and missing a chance to grow our own
perspectives and the perspectives of those engaging with us?
Villain Stories: “It’s All Your
Fault”
These are stories in which we assign bad motives to others and
“Exaggerate our own innocence.” We put
too much focus on someone else’s guilt and sometimes use labels for others. For
example, “That dork did such and such…” When we follow these stories, we tell
ourselves we can’t get the results we want because “look who we are dealing
with!” Questions we might ask if we find
ourselves having a difficult conversation with a fellow church member to whom
we want to assign villain status are Why
must we assume that the other person is evil for being what we believe to be
disrespectful? Are we refraining from
offering a counterpoint to their condescending comment because we assume it
will be a wasted effort? How is that
approach going to lead us to greater understanding, much less them?
Helpless Stories: “There’s Nothing Else I Can Do”
These stories embody the assumption that we are powerless to do anything
that might improve the situation and are often a companion to a Villain
story. Again, if we are dealing with a
“villain” our only real choice is to blow up or walk away. What else can be done?
Why tell Clever
Stories?
Sometimes they are true! But more
often, they are a means by which we are refusing our own responsibility for our
circumstances. If the other person isn’t
definitively wrong, then we can’t be definitively right. And it’s no fun to not be right, is it? Even better, the more we play the victim or
demonize others, the easier it is to feel self-righteous and justified in our
own sucker’s choice behavior. We tell
clever stories when we have sold out, when we haven’t done something that we
could have done…when we have refused responsibility for our roles in the
relationships of our lives. We tell
clever stories when our self-justification becomes more important to us than
results. We sometimes believe, for
example, that in a church like ours, people should be above condescending or
arrogant attitudes…and we have a right to hope for that…to a point. But I think we also must acknowledge that no
one has to pass an attitude test to be a member here. We don’t have etiquette police patrolling the
coffee hour, waiting to pounce on every inappropriate comment, though some of
us might like to have that role! And, again, if we can’t work through our
differences in this laboratory of human interaction we call our church, what
hope do we have outside of here? I think
this is the place where we can help each other sand down our rough edges by
being honest, and engaged, and compassionate, even when things get prickly. My friends, that is what religious community
is there to do. It’s how we build a
better world…one relationship at a time.
So when we find ourselves telling a clever story, what can we do? We can create a useful story instead. A useful story is one that leads us away from
options of silence or violence and back into dialogue. How can we do this? We can “tell the rest of the story.” We can fill in the missing details by Turning
victims into actors, villains into humans, and the helpless into the able.
If we are thinking of ourselves as a victim, we can question our own
role in the problem. This step insures
that we are acknowledging our own ability to act…remembering that silence is an
action, too. If we find someone being
disrespectful, pushing our button so to speak, we can take a moment to reflect
on who is really pushing the button. Are
we being overly sensitive? Are we seeing
the comment as an attack rather than as an opportunity for conversation? Are we refusing to find humor in someone
else’s stubborn beliefs on matters that are inherently speculative? This approach asks us to retell the story so
that we are no longer a victim, but an actor and then see what happens.
If we are finding ourselves viewing another person as a villain, we can
ask ourselves the humanizing question: “Why would a reasonable, rational, and
decent person do what this person is doing?”
This question enables us to replace judgment with empathy, and, in turn,
a more compassionate emotional response, which leads to more personal
accountability in our actions. Questions
that I find useful are, “Isn’t it a little early to assume the person is a
villain?” “How are the stories I am
telling keeping me from dialogue?” The
purpose of asking the humanizing question is not to absolve other people from
guilt that they have earned. Asking the
humanizing question keeps us honest and engaged in working on ourselves
before we resort to silence or violence…it keeps us from clamming up or lashing
out.
Ultimately we want to get out of the habit of trying to assign motive to
others and focus instead on ourselves, particularly how we are keeping
ourselves open to the possibility of dialogue…which is, in the end, the only
way we can ever truly determine someone’s true motives, move closer to the
truth, and therefore act more in accordance with reality rather than our
inevitably-biased assumptions.
And finally, when we are finding ourselves claiming helplessness, we can
get ourselves back into dialogue by focusing instead on the ever important
questions: What do I really want…for me, for others, for the relationship? And
what would I do if I really wanted those results?
When we ask ourselves what we really want, not just for ourselves, but
for others, we will likely act more in accordance with our UU principle of
“justice, equity, and compassion in human relations” because we will see our
sisters and brothers as fellow travelers rather than instigators of our
unhappiness.
I know I have offered a lot to think about today. And the fact is, some of us are better
equipped to incorporate these crucial conversation concepts than others
are. But no matter how disadvantaged we
may feel we are in learning to manage our stories, each step that we can take
to improve our ability to pay attention to our choices and the impact they have
on others and ourselves, the more we will approach the beloved community for
which each of us yearns, a community of kindness, goodwill, humor, and
possibility where our actions can more closely align with our principles and
our encounters with others can enable the creative interchange that I believe
could be our greatest hope. May it be
so, in all the relationships of our lives.
Hymn #162 Gonna Lay Down My Sword and Shield
Closing Words (Wayne Arnason)
Take courage friends. The way is often hard, the path is never clear, and the
stakes are very high. Take courage. For
deep down, there is another truth: You
are not alone.
Extinguishing the Flame
Leader: I extinguish the symbolic
flame of this gathering. May we carry its light into the world.
People: Let us go from this place, open to life, expecting
to love, and prepared to serve.
Reprise of Hymn #162